In order to become an elite athlete, you need a mix of genetics and hard work because having both will put you way ahead of where you would be with only one. While this may not have been the answer I was looking for, I was warned in the introduction of, The Sports Gene, that this would be the outcome. However, I thought there had to be more to it. I continued to read Epstein’s book hoping that I would find some secret that would suddenly make me a faster runner. Even though this did not happen, I was still curious what kind of genes elite athletes had and how that connected to an advantage in athletics. This topic interested me so much because of my background in running and swimming. I wanted to know why certain people were faster than me. Even better, why some girls were so much faster than me, even if I put in the hard work.

My summer reading book, The Sports Gene, really got me going in the topic. It was also one of the biggest helps for this entire project. I was able to get all the information I needed about the genetics of an athlete from this one source. I think I even enjoyed researching this topic better than I would have sports psychology (which I originally wanted to do). However, I still ran into some obstacles while trying to find the answer to my overall question. I originally had this great idea of finding the height, weight, VO2 max, foot size, and all these other measurements of elite athletes, but that was pretty much impossible to find. Athletes who were competing many years ago did not have the same kind of information online that athletes like Michael Phelps have today. If you search for Michael Phelps you can find pretty much any body measurement you need. This was impossible to find for an athlete like Roger Bannister. This was one of the biggest setbacks that I faced during my research. Sometimes I could find good information, and other times I could not find anything at all. Even though this did set me back quite a bit, I believe I got enough information to start to answer my question and to spark my interest in this topic.

As I said before, I really enjoyed my summer reading book. One of the things I found most interesting was the separation of boys and girls genetically and how that sets us apart in sports. It seems like every genetic advantage goes towards males. Which leads me to the question, why do women even compete in sports? Our bodies were not meant for it, so why do we bother? If I were to have the opportunity to do another project like this, I believe that this is a topic that would raise some very interesting questions.

What I researched for this topic is barely a scratch in the surface of the genetics of elite athletes. I left out a lot of the information that I had found in order to make this a much more condensed paper. However, I have personally still gained from all of the time I spent researching and the great information that I did find. Which I believe to be enough to come up with the conclusion that becoming an elite athlete must come from hard work and dedication as well as genetic advantages.