The Best

How Elite Athletes Are Made

A. Mark Williams, Tim Wigmore

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781529304374
• eBook ISBN: 9781529304381
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

"Insightful, thoughtful, and altogether wonderful." DANIEL COYLE, New York Times bestselling author of THE TALENT CODE "This book is a must read." EDDIE JONES, Head Coach, England Rugby "An engrossing guidebook for youth athletes, parents, coaches and perhaps even fantasy-league fans looking for a little insight." The Washington Post THE SECRETS OF SUPERHUMAN PERFORMANCETHE BEST reveals how the most incredible sportspeople in the world get to the top and stay there. It is a unique look at the path to sporting greatness; a story of origins, serendipity, practice, genetics and the psychology of excellence, as well as of sports science and cutting edge technology.Packed with gripping personal stories and exclusive interviews with top athletes including Siya Kolisi, Marcus Rashford, Pete Sampras, Steph Curry, Jamie Carragher, Ian Poulter, Helen Glover, Ada Hegerberg, Elena Delle Donne, Joey Votto and Mike Hussey, it explains how the best athletes develop the extraordinary skills that allow them to perform remarkable feats under extreme pressure.Get inside the minds of champions and understand first-hand what makes them perform during high-octane competition, what they think about in the heat of the moment and what drives them to do what they do.By combining examples from numerous original interviews with top athletes and leading sports science research, THE BEST deconstructs superhuman performance and answers the question on every sports fan's mind: "How did they do that?" "Fascinating and insightful... The Best isn't a one size fits all, it's a highly thought out, well-researched and accessible book that gives recommendations based on context and sport." JOANNE O'RIORDAN, The Irish Times ABOUT THE AUTHORS
A. Mark Williams is an academic and one of the world's leading authorities on expertise and its acquisition in sport. He has published 18 books and written over 500 scientific articles on how people become skilled and achieve success in sport and across other professional domains. He has worked across the globe as a consultant with numerous Olympic and professional sports and has vast experience as a scientist, author and educator, and as an applied sports scientist.Tim Wigmore is the author of Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution, the winner of the Wisden Book of the Year award for 2020. He is a sports writer for The Daily Telegraph, and has also written regularly for The New York Times, The Economist, the New Statesman and ESPNCricinfo. He is a former winner of the Young Cricket Journalist of the Year award and has been shortlisted for the Cricket Writer of the Year award.

PART ONE

Nature, serendipity and the role of chance in making champions

1

We are family

The amazing Ingebrigtsens and why your younger sibling is better at sport than you

‘It is competitive between us in a healthy way. We try to train smart and push each other within the limits. But the psychological rivalry between us is one of the reasons why we are competing for medals every year.’

Filip Ingebrigtsen, one of the three Ingebrigtsen brothers to win gold in the 1500 metres at the European Championships¹

For many parents, it would be an unpalatable test of their allegiances to see their children battle against each other in a public competition. Gjert Ingebrigtsen was used to it; he had spent much of the past 20 years seeing his children race each other. And so, when he settled in to watch the 2018 European Athletics Championships in Berlin, the sight was familiar.

To the rest of the world, though, what they witnessed on the nights of 10 and 11 August was altogether more arresting. In the 1500 metres track race on 10 August, 17-year-old Jakob Ingebrigtsen became the youngest ever athlete to win an event in the European Championships. After he did so, two of his elder brothers, Henrik and Filip, joined him in celebrating on the track at the Olympic Stadium.

In itself, there was nothing unusual about siblings celebrating with the new champion – except that both had just competed against him in the very same race. Filip, who punched the air, had finished only 12th; this was deeply disappointing, for he was the defending champion, after winning gold in the same event two years earlier. Henrik, who draped his arm around Jakob and pointed to him, had come fourth. He, too, knew what winning the 1500 metres gold medal felt like – six years earlier, he had done it himself. Now, all three brothers had won the European title, one of the marque events of the European Championships.¹

Jakob and Henrik were celebrating together again just under 24 hours later at the Olympic Stadium. Jakob, remarkably, had won another gold medal – making him the first man in 84 years to win the 1500 and 5000 metres double at the European Championships, and all before he was old enough to be allowed to drive. As Jakob celebrated while holding the Norwegian flag, next to him was Henrik, who had finished the 5000 metres race just 1.7 seconds behind Jakob, to win the silver medal.

Younger … and better

When his girls Serena and Venus were three and four, Richard Williams hatched a plan: he would give them tennis rackets and train them both, setting them on a path to becoming champions. Even as Venus developed faster in their childhood years, Richard always said that Serena would go on to be the better player.

Richard Williams was right. Both Venus and Serena would become among the finest ever to play the sport. And, as her father had always predicted, Serena would go on to be the best Williams. With 23 singles Grand Slams and 39 Grand Slams in total, she is probably the finest women’s player in history.²

This is the little sibling effect in action: younger siblings tend to outperform their older brothers and sisters. If you have a younger sibling, they are probably better at sport than you are.

On average, elite athletes have 1.04 older siblings, while those who are non-elite have only 0.6 older siblings, according to an analysis of Australian and Canadian athletes across 33 different sports.³ In the study, elite athletes – who had reached senior international competition – and non-elite athletes – who had reached junior national or senior domestic level – on average had the same number of siblings overall. What mattered was whether they were younger or older.

Even when two siblings both reach professional level, the younger one retains salient advantages. In Major League Baseball, younger brothers outperform their older brothers.³ Among pairs of brothers that played Test cricket – the five-day format considered the sport’s pinnacle – younger brothers have had a more successful career twice as often as elder brothers.³ On average, batters who played Test cricket for England between 2004 and 2019 had 1.2 older siblings, compared with 0.4 for county-level batters.³

Jakob is the fifth of the seven Ingebrigtsen siblings. And so he has been able to mimic the training techniques of his brothers Filip and Henrik, who are seven and nine years his senior. Even these two had the benefits of having an elder sibling – Filip is the second of the siblings, with an elder brother who also ran in his youth, while Henrik is the third born.

‘I’ve been a professional runner since I was eight, nine, 10 years old,’ Jakob said after his double triumph in Berlin. ‘I’ve been training, dedicated and following a good structure – the same as my brothers – from an early age.

‘It was a little crazy to get this medal, this is huge. But winning a second title in two days is the result of having done this my whole life.’ From an early age, Jakob trained with his brothers, matching their intervals from the age of 16 or 17.⁴

While Jakob’s victories in Berlin were extraordinary, surpassing his brothers was not. From the age of 15 onwards, Jakob achieved better results than his brothers at the same age in the 800 metres – and, from 16, in the 1500 metres.⁴ Aged 16, he became the youngest ever athlete to break the four-minute mile.

As with the Ingebrigtsen clan, older siblings double as recruiters into a particular sport, with younger siblings often choosing, or being pushed, to play with their older siblings. Remarkably, after the 2019 Rugby World Cup, 46 sets of brothers had played for New Zealand; family ties have underpinned one of the most successful sports teams in history.

A trickle-down effect

‘She would always drag me out to run or to kick balls,’ Ada Hegerberg, the winner of football’s 2018 Ballon d’Or Féminin for the best female player in the world, recalled of her sister Andrine, two years her elder. ‘She was a leading figure for me.’

Ada is the youngest of the three children. ‘If it hadn’t been for my elder brother and older sister, I don’t think I would have achieved what I have. I was a “hang-around” in the beginning, but slowly when I got to eight or nine years of age I was dragged into it and I couldn’t stop playing football. So they had a huge impact.’

First-borns have to wait for their parents to play with them, or their parents to arrange play-dates; those with elder siblings do not. They are born with someone to play with – and if their elder siblings are ferried around to play sport, they will often be taken along with them, increasing their exposure to regular sport at a younger age.

‘Older siblings play an important role in athlete development – they can act as socializing agents, introducing their younger siblings to sport, either through informal play at home, or by parents dragging younger siblings along to their older sibling’s sporting commitments,’ explained Melissa Hopwood, the co-author of the study into Australian and Canadian athletes. ‘The older siblings then act as role models and coaches, teaching their younger siblings the rules and skills of the sport by observation or direct instruction.’

In team sports, younger siblings often play with their elder siblings – just as Ada Hegerberg did. Doing so, Hopwood said, can ‘force the development of more advanced skills at a younger age in order to keep up with their teammates’.

The advantage multiplies in women’s sports. A study of the US national football team – consistently the best country in the world, and the 2019 World Cup winners – found that fewer players in the squad were an only child than the national average. Only 20 per cent of national team players were the eldest sibling, but 74 per cent of players had an older sibling – three-quarters of these older siblings played football. Whether the older siblings were boys or girls made no difference.⁵

In many countries, having at least one elder brother increases a girl’s chances of participating in sport. ‘Older brothers are more likely to be engaged in sport and high levels of informal play, so this may normalize the activity for their younger siblings,’ said Hopwood. ‘For girls with older brothers there is likely going to be a greater physical discrepancy between the two siblings so the girls have to smarten up and toughen up.’ Of the English women’s football squad who reached the semi-final of the 2019 World Cup, 52 per cent had an elder brother, and two-thirds had an elder sibling.⁵

Sibling rivalry

The urge to keep up drives younger siblings. ‘Everyone expects I will win and if I don’t it will be a big disappointment,’ Jakob said in a documentary following the Ingebrigtsen family before his professional career began.⁶ ‘My biggest dream is to be better than Henrik. I think when I am about 20 I will beat him.’ He didn’t even need that long.

Siblings develop different motivations and goals based on their birth order. First-borns develop a preference for mastery goals – those based on self-referenced standards of competence. Second-borns are more likely to prefer performance goals, which are based on other-referenced standards of competence. The contrast suggests that, in general, the goals of second-borns are better-suited to a career in professional sport.⁷ A study comparing three groups of athletes – so-called super-champions, who reached the pinnacle of their sport, champions, and ‘almosts’, who didn’t make it to the top despite promising junior careers – found that a desire to keep up with older siblings was a driving force for many who went on to be leading athletes.⁸

‘You know I was always really very, very, very good,’ recalled Venus Williams, who was born 15 months earlier than Serena. ‘Serena, on the other hand, wasn’t very good at all. She was small, really slim and the racket was way too big for her. Hopeless.’⁹ Serena did not allow herself to be outclassed on the tennis court for long. As their mother recalled, ‘With Serena, everything had to be perfect and she would get frustrated if it wasn’t. She always had to win, no matter if it was a talent show, cards, she had to be the winner.’¹⁰

Some advantages enjoyed by younger siblings derive from how their parents treat them. Parents are notoriously more indulgent of later-born children, letting them go out at a younger age and engage in higher-risk activities.¹¹ Such effects permeate sport, too. Compared to older siblings, younger ones are 40 per cent more likely to play dangerous contact sports than their elder brothers and sisters – so they have more opportunity to make it to the top in these sports.¹¹

In sport, and beyond, younger siblings are more likely to take an unorthodox, less conformist approach, and not feel confined to stick to the rules. First-borns take more conservative career options – earning more money at the start of their careers – and are more supportive of the political status quo. According to analysis done by Frank J. Sulloway,¹¹ later-born children are ‘significantly more likely than firstborns to support radical political changes’. Sulloway has also shown that, remarkably, younger brothers are 10 times more likely than their older brothers to attempt to steal a base in baseball;¹¹ Jackie Robinson, acclaimed as the ‘father of base stealing’, had four elder siblings.

When competing against older siblings – and their friends – in informal games, younger siblings need cunning to make up for their physical disadvantages. Younger siblings often develop ‘superior perceptual-cognitive skills, more creativity and highly refined technical skills’ than older siblings, Hopwood explained.

As they have had less time to practise, and are less physically developed, younger siblings normally lose in family games. The experiences force children to become adept at dealing with failure, harnessing their competitiveness and mental resilience.

‘They would try to intimidate me,’ AB de Villiers, who was later ranked the number-one batsman in the world in both Test and one-day international cricket, recounted of childhood games with his two elder brothers, who were six and nine years older. ‘My brothers were merciless. They were monsters. There were always a lot of tears – usually mine.’¹²

So perhaps Jakob’s records will last only until his younger brother William – born in 2013 – turns professional. ‘We have another brother who is turning five years old, and soon he can join the team,’ said Henrik, after winning the silver medal in the 5000 metres race at the Olympic Stadium. ‘There are no limits for us.’⁴

Learning together

Simply having a sibling at all increases a child’s chances of becoming an elite athlete. Participation rates in sport tend to be higher among children with siblings. Worldwide, elite athletes’ siblings are 2.3 times more likely to play sport regularly;¹³ China’s former one-child policy, then, does not seem conducive to producing champions.

‘We are competitors, brothers and good friends,’ Filip has said. ‘We push each other during training.’¹⁴ As with the Ingebrigtsen brothers, siblings can provide companionship, emotional support and drive.

‘It is competitive between us in a healthy way,’ Filip said in Berlin.¹ ‘We try to train sma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Matthew Syed
• Prologue
• Part One: Nature, serendipity and the role of chance in making champions
• 1 We are family
• 2 Location, location, location
• 3 Timing is everything
• 4 Street spirit
• 5 In search of excellence
• 6 The X factor
• Part Two: Inside the minds of champions
• 7 How to hit a ball in under 0.5 seconds
• 8 Superintelligence
• 9 The art of the con
• 10 The quiet eye
• 11 Southpaw advantage
• 12 The psychology of greatness
• 13 Why athletes choke
• 14 How to lead
• 15 How to win a penalty shoot-out
• Part Three: Training smarter and the science of success
• 16 Practising smarter
• 17 The power of coaching
• 18 The next frontier
• Epilogue
• References
• Copyright