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Why do we throw away two thirds of our talent?
Elite performance at it's most basic is about getting the most talented individuals and providing them with the best, training, support and preparation. Lets look at the first premise that you are going to get the most talented individuals. Firstly you have to get them involved in your sport, in our case skiing. This discussion could get quite long so I'm going to narrow this down to the male population, and children. Children because it's very difficult to train an adult sufficiently in a new technical sport. Male because that's what I've got the research on, this is not being sexist merely pragmatic. Adult talent ID would work in Freestyle aerials where you switch divers, gymnasts and trampolinists to the sport as they have trained the most important skills of this discipline in their former sports.
In Alpine skiing this would not work as the skill set is pretty much unique. Of course you can switch Alpine to Ski Cross and Moguls but that's a different issue. So for Alpine we need to take young children and train them.
Which ones?
Skiing is competing with every other sport in the UK for participants, presuming there are no barriers to entry such as cost or availability of slopes let's look at the available pool of athletes and some other sports. Malcolm Gladwell in his book 'Outliers' summarises the research wonderfully. When you look at mass participation sports there is a bias in the month of birth. Research on elite Canadian Hockey players shows that nearly all were born in January.
Why?
Eligibility to play in each age group starts on the 1st of January. Age differences of months in children make a massive difference physically. Those born earlier in the year have an advantage in strength and speed, this makes them stand out. They tend to get picked to squads and 1st teams and then receive more and better coaching and therefore tend to be better than those not so fortunate " it's a classic feedback loop. The other kids don't stand a chance.
What about football, I've heard plenty of anecdotal evidence of bias in premiership footballers. So lets look at a football team. Not quite premiership but my Team Sheffield United. What about the English players in the squad " when were they born? The following numbers signify the month: 12, 11, 12, 11, 01, 09, 12, 05, 09, 10, 11, 09, 10, 02, 01, 02, 11, 06, 05. Out of the nineteen players three in September, two in October, four born in November, three in December, two in January, two in February, two in May and one in June. None of the players were born in March, April, July or August. Sixteen players born in the six months September to February, three in the rest of the year. Definitely a trend going on here. The youngest you will get in any school year is born in August under this system they have little chance compared to someone born in September of becoming an elite sportsmen in the mass sports.
What about skiing? A simple search of active GBR skiers shows no immediate trend so there's a good distribution of birthdates from all months of the year, but what about the World Cup and Europa Cup Squads? Noel Baxter (July), Finlay Mickel (Dec), Andy Noble (March), Alan Baxter (Dec), Jan Kochalski (Jan), Ed Drake (Jan), Dougie Crawford (Feb) and Dave Ryding (Dec). See any pattern? The one person not born in Dec through March is Noel Baxter. This may be because he was so good the fact that he wouldn't have had the same strength as his contemporaries born earlier in the year or the fact that his brother would have been selected for Scotland and GBR whilst he was still quite young may be more important. There may have been some leverage there in access to coaching that helped him overcome his month of birth.
The same trend applies to the top 30 in the World though Austria seems slightly out of the step with the rest. However the athletes are still grouped together over set months.
Lets stand back and consider the above, enough research has been carried out to show that this is correct. As we are competing against mass participation sports we tend to have a smaller pool of athletes to select from. There are few artificial slopes compared to football pitches, parents have to drive children to training and many miles for competitions " parents need to be involved and want their kids to succeed. Additionally it's not a cheap sport, to achieve an elite level you have to train on snow, the parents need to have sufficient wealth to pay for that. Every factor makes the pool grow smaller. Without carrying out any research other than looking at Dates of birth of our National Squad skiers it seems skiing is making the same mistakes as the mass participation sports.
Somehow the system is again selecting skiers who have an advantage because of the month they were born in. This is crazy, we don't have enough athletes to do this, we need to identify the best, the most talented, the most skilful from the whole year. Who we seem to be selecting are the best, most talented, the most skilful from Dec through March, a third of the year. Noel Baxter is an outlier, he is probably an example of what happens when someone born in summer is given a chance, given the same level of elite training or support. We need to find a way to identify all the talented athletes, all the Noel Baxters, not just those that have an edge on size and strength while young, because almost certainly that advantage will disappear when they are adults. Under the current system it's too late and those skiers are lost and essentially so are we. |
