The Sports Gene: Inside The Science Of Extraordinary Athletic Performance Quotes
"We all knew an athlete like that in high school. The one who made it look so easy."
"The broad truth is that nature and nurture are so interlaced in any realm of athletic performance that the answer is always: it's both."
"The only way to hit a ball traveling at high speed is to be able to see into the future."
"In order to explain what they saw, Chase and Simon proposed a 'chunking theory' of expertise."
"Experts swiftly move their attention away from irrelevant input and cut to the data that is most important to determining their next move."
"Most important in sports, perceiving order allows elite athletes to extract critical information from the arrangement of players or from subtle changes in an opponent’s body movements in order to make unconscious predictions about what will happen next."
"Without that database, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board."
"That was the most striking part of our results: That basically some people need to practice eight times more to reach the same level as someone else."
"When it comes down to D-Day and it’s my ten-thousandth hour, it’ll be interesting to see whether I’m still shooting seventy-five, or I missed Q-School by one stroke, or if I’m on the Tour."
"Perhaps if there are very small individual differences at the beginning, they make a huge effect."
"It’s a sort of butterfly effect of expertise."
"For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away."
"The importance of picking up ball rotation has been demonstrated in virtual-reality batting studies."
"Superior hardware was speeding the download of tennis-skill software."
"The future pros not only tend to practice more, but they take responsibility for practicing better."
"What we see in the shuttle sprints is that the ones signing a professional contract later are the ones that are on average 0.2 seconds faster when they are younger."
"You need a minimum speed. If you’re really slow, then you cannot catch up, and speed is really hard for them to train."
"The hardware is useless without the software, just as the reverse is true."
"Sport skill acquisition does not happen without both specific genes and a specific environment."
"The brain becomes less broadly flexible but more narrowly efficient."
"Early specialization not only is not required to make it to the highest level in many sports, but should perhaps be actively avoided."
"It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play."
"Their natural talent takes them to that point with less training than their peers."
"Narratives that shun the contributions of innate talent can have negative side effects in exercise science."
"Men pack more muscle fibers into any given space in the body and have 80 percent more muscle mass in their upper body than women."
"The reason we have females separated in sports is because in many sports the best female athletes can’t compete with the best male athletes."
"The genetic advantage of men over women in most sports is so profound that the best solution is to separate them."
"In 2003, as a man, Harper ran Portland’s Helvetia Half-Marathon in 1:23:11. In 2005, as a woman, she ran the same race in 1:34:01."
"You can’t order us like a car in red or blue. Our basic biology is mostly the same, with a little difference."
"Men and women have almost entirely the same genes. But those small genetic differences...induce a cascade of biological consequences."
"I just wanted to be part of a team, any team."
"He just wanted to be part of a team, any team."
"He wasn’t particularly interested in school, so how else could he distinguish himself but with his body?"
"Before the tryout, he asked God to please let him make this team."
"I could not explain what was going on. Neither could anyone else."
"The genome is a recipe book contained in every cell in the human body."
"Scientists hoped that by reading those 23,000 pages they would know everything about how the body is constructed."
"That’s a good question. But I was the only person in my family who was athletic."
"If you suspect that you aren’t responding as well to a particular training stimulus as your training partner, you might be right."
"The air in the Armory Track and Field Center at 168th Street in Manhattan is notoriously stale."
"Each fall during college I would report to school having done the same exact, prescribed light summer training that all the half-milers did."
"It was thirty seconds faster than I had run as a high school junior."
"Wellington’s lifetime of kayak training consisted of a crash-course tutorial the previous month."
"We all have talents. And sometimes those talents are hidden and you have to dare to try something new or you might not know what you’re good at."
"The school fitness test—like the one that set Nancy Tinari on an Olympic path—is not a terribly uncommon venue for the identification of future world-beaters."
"The probability that a person will be highly endowed and highly trainable is the product of those two probabilities. It's not pretty. It's between one in one hundred and one in one thousand."
"Science is far better at looking at an elite athlete and retrospectively suggesting why that individual is succeeding than in finding someone who might succeed before he or she has started practicing."
"An athlete who stops training can within weeks lose more than 15 percent of the VO2max he built up."
"The ultimate combination, of course, would be a person who starts with a highly elevated aerobic capacity and has a rapid training response."
"Muscle requires calories and specifically protein to sustain it, and having massive muscles can be a massive problem for organisms that don't have steady access to the protein necessary to feed the organs."
"Every similar strength-training study has reported a broad spectrum of responsiveness to iron pumping."
"In the NFL, one extra centimeter of height or 6.5 extra pounds on average translates into about $45,000 of extra income."
"In order to match a single year’s salary of the highest-paid athletes, an American man making the country’s median annual income for a full-time job would have to work for five hundred years."
"And while it is obvious that diet and training can dramatically alter an athlete’s build, there are limits. Limits delineated by an individual’s skeleton."
"Like muscle, bone responds to exercise. Even nonathletes tend to have more bone in the arm they write with simply because they use it more, so the bone becomes stronger and capable of supporting more muscle."
"The skeleton you are bequeathed has a lot to do with whether you will ever be able to make the weight required for a particular sport."
"Everyone has a different genotype. Therefore, for optimal development, everyone should have a different environment."
"Heaving sports performance to untouched heights requires both specialized training and specialized bodies to be trained."
"Today, the expanding universe of athletic body types is slowing down."
"There’s something big out there waiting for Dennis Rodman."
"The genetic control of shape is more rigorous than that of size."
"For much of the twentieth century, denizens of industrialized societies were growing taller at a rate of about one centimeter per decade."
"Height is an incredibly narrowly constrained trait among humans."
"At least 15 million letters of the DNA code differ on average between individuals, and the actual length of people’s genomic recipe book can differ by millions of letters as well. It is plenty enough difference to cause all the variation we see in the world."
"Despite our differences, because all humans have common ancestry that is not so distant in the past, we are exceedingly similar, more similar across the entire genome than chimpanzees are to one another."
"If you want to know if your kid is going to be fast, the best genetic test right now is a stopwatch."
"The answer: it depends on the specific physical trait you’re looking at."
"One’s ancestry can be traced through one’s genes, but to go further down the path of Kidd’s thought experiment about African athletes, we must know not only that the genotypes of African people are the most diverse, but whether their phenotypes are also the most diverse."
"Humans tend to be diseased or to die when the genes that code for them are not functioning."
"And it held. Not only did sprinters in general tend not to have two X copies of ACTN3, but the better they were, the less likely it was they were XX."
"You need that piece to complete the puzzle, but you certainly can’t see a meaningful picture without more pieces."
"You absolutely must choose your parents correctly to be a world record holder."
"The coach said, ‘Yep, you’re coming out for the track team.’"
"In what country other than Jamaica could a boy with blinding speed and who stands 6'4" at the age of fifteen, as Bolt did, end up anywhere but on the basketball or volleyball court or the football field?"
"Don’t worry because you’re white. It’s got nothing to do with the color of your skin."
"The concept that physical superiority could somehow be a symptom of intellectual inferiority only developed when physical superiority became associated with African Americans."
"Running economy is the measure of how much oxygen a runner utilizes to run at a given pace."
"Proportionally long legs and thin lower legs contribute separately to good running economy, and they had both."
"Lithe legs help running economy no matter one’s nationality or ethnicity."
"The measurements, show that Tadese does not have particularly long legs—his legs are only slightly proportionally longer than those of elite Spanish runners—but they are considerably narrower."
"Nilotic body type evolved in low latitude environments that are both hot and dry, because the long, thin proportions are better for cooling."
"The linear build is helpful for endurance running, and that Nilotic people tend to have a linear build."
"The genes didn’t go away in Finland, the culture did."
"In these days of computer games, sedentary pursuits, and driving our children to school—it is the ‘hungry’ fighter or the poor peasant who has the endurance background, and the incentive to work on it, who makes the top distance runner."
"After ten years of work, I have to say that this is a socioeconomic phenomenon."
"It struck me that there is no such thing as a casual jogger in Kenya, only those who run for transportation, those who are killing themselves in training, and those who are not running at all."
"They don’t like to run. . . . I think it is because they go to school by car."
"Altitude is known to increase red blood cells in athletes who move from sea level to the mountains, so why, then, aren’t runners coming down from the Andes and the Himalayas and smoking the rest of the world, as the Ethiopians and Kenyans have done?"
"You absolutely must have the right genes. You must choose your parents correctly, but you have thousands of kids running and the cream rises to the top."
"His quiet toughness. His lithe body. His huge aerobic capacity. His rural youth at eight thousand feet, and his childhood of running and walking for transportation."
"And while a naturally narrow body type is crucial to running economy, economy can also be improved."
"The human body is centuries in advance of the physiologist, and can perform an integration of heart, lungs, and muscles which is too complex for the scientist to analyze."
"Genetic studies usually look for differences among members of an ethnic group, and usually say little about differences between ethnic groups."
"We will have to look other places for insight."
"Their gifts must be coupled with herculean will."
"The aluminum sign for Comeback Kennel is nailed haphazardly to an evergreen tree."
"The gravel driveway is packed hard from the cold and steep enough to make entry without an SUV precarious."
"In both 2007 and ’08, Mackey won the thousand-mile Yukon Quest, and then, just weeks later, the world’s other thousand-miler: the Iditarod."
"Eminent mushers have had to withdraw from the Iditarod when their dogs simply lie down in the snow and refuse to go another step."
"They have to have the innate desire to pull [the sled] . . . and you will find varying degrees of that in different dogs."