Training History, Deliberate Practice and Elite Sports Performance: An Analysis in Response to Tucker and Collins Review—What Makes Champions?

With the recent advances in genome-wide mapping studies and the emerging findings on the relation between athletes’ training histories and their performance, this should be a time for integrating these two bodies of knowledge for a more complete understanding of the complex development of elite performance. 1 In their recent article, Tucker and Collins 2 criticised a popularised but simplistic view of our work circulated on the internet, which suggests that anyone who has accumulated sufficient number of hours of practice in a given domain will automatically become an expert and a champion. Unfortunately they incorrectly attributed this view to me and my colleagues and criticised our research on deliberate practice.