UPDATE on this issue from Wayne Goldsmith:
Thank Diving Examiner Tom Trapp for the link.
Anyone who claims “There is no such thing as talent” is wrong.
There are some excellent comments on this post, by the way. Ono paraphrases Michael Shermer, Founding Publisher of Skeptic Magazine, in saying that success in a combination of talent, hard work and luck.
Olympic Champion Kyle Shewfelt was not the most talented guy who ever walked into his gym, for example. (That was Bardana.) But he put in plenty more than 10,000hrs, was very talented … and also was the right kind of athlete to win the 2004 Floor title. He happened to have a short back handspring at the exact time it was essential to do 4 tumbling skills in series without going out of bounds. He happened to be an artistic gymnast in a quadrennial when that rewarded.
Good timing.
______ original post from June 30th:
Coach Howard posted the best summary I’ve seen on the theory that many people can become expert at something if they put in 10,000 hours of focused training.
Coach Howard credits K. Anders Ericsson for popularizing the concept, but I first saw it in the 1985 book Developing Talent in Young People by Dr. Benjamin Bloom. (A must read for every coach.)
That all said, I don’t really believe it.
The 10,000hrs correlates with excellence, but correlation isn’t causation.
If I had trained 10,000hrs, I still wouldn’t have made the NBA.
You need both talent and training. Nature and nurture.
Gymnastics Coaching.com 