Elite athletes are individuals having achieved excellence
within the context of their sport. There are various
discrepancies regarding the specific criteria
needed to achieve ‘elite’ status. Whereas some studies
define the elite based on their level of play (e.g.,
national or international), others provide standards
such as professionalism, experience, and training time
and/or frequency to delineate elite athletes from their
novice counterparts (Swann, Moran, & Piggott, 2015).
Given that every sport discipline has unique developmental
pathways and competition streams, homogenizing
the elite across sports becomes a very challenging
task.
Despite these differences, Coˆte´, Baker, and
Abernethy (2007) suggest that elite athletes can be
characterized by their longstanding investment and
dedication to a greater level of training and performance.
Swann and colleagues (2015) add that expert
athletes also tend to have a heightened understanding
of sport-specific information and have the ability to
use this knowledge proficiently in order to identify,
recall, and employ the most relevant information
within their sport environment. In addition to a having
the ability to execute a task with great precision, it has
also been suggested that elite athletes show superior
task-performance at the level of perception, anticipation,
and decision making (Yarrow, Brown, &
Krakauer, 2009). While researchers had earlier suggested
that this level of superiority could not be
achieved without numerous years of experience and
hours of deliberate sport specific practice (Ericsson,
Krampe, & Tesch-Ro¨mer, 1993), recent findings add
that innate inter-individual differences (Yarrow et al.,
2009) and deliberate play (i.e., development of early
physical abilities through sport) are also important
contributors in the achievement of expertise.
