Athlete Development Research
Related content
The Performance Pathway Team undertakes cutting edge research to advance and challenge current thinking in the field of developing excellence in elite sport. Some of the interesting questions we are working on include:
- Have you ever wondered why some athletes like Steve Redgrave go on to be serial gold medal winners and why some don't?
- Why was Rebecca Romero so successful in a boat (rowing) and then on a bike within as little as two years?
- Does the size of Tom Daley’s hands really make him a good diver and have clean entries into the water?
- Do you really need to have completed 10,000 hours of practice before being able to go onto win an Olympic medal?
- Is it possible to look at hormonal markers of training and predict who will be Olympians of the future?
- Is there a relationship between the number of competitions undertaken during an athlete’s development years and performance success? Do gold medal winning athletes compete more or less and what age?
Some of the projects undertaken by the UK Talent Team include:
- Analysis of the UK Talent Teams seven National identification campaign outcomes with particular focus on birth place effects (are there hotbeds of sporting talent in the UK? Are you more or less likely to be a successful athlete if you grow up in a small town or large city?)
- Investigation into the use of saliva screening methods for hormonal profiling during talent identification programmes
- Is trainability a stronger marker for senior international winning success?
- In-depth analysis of ‘Best from Rest’ what factors make Serial Gold Medallists different from their ‘nearly’ peer? Retrospective interviews are conducted to look into the performance trajectories of elite athletes
- Creating different testing scenarios to - accelerate learning and decision making responses within skill and combat athletes; creating the world’s fastest learners, ultimately compressing the time taken to reach the podium