50 pages • 1 hour read
David EpsteinThe Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Beat by an Underhand Girl: The Gene-Free Model of Expertise”
Chapter 1 begins with a story of female softball pitcher Jennie Finch, who faced off against Major League Baseball’s best male hitters in 2004 and 2005, beating them handily, earning media attention, and intimidating MVP Alex Rodriguez so much he wouldn’t even face her.
Epstein debunks a formerly held theory that said athletes must have genetically quicker reflexes that would result in shorter reaction times than average people, allowing them to perform feats like hitting balls at high speeds. Researcher Janet Starkes invited the “modern sports ‘occlusion’ test” (6), which found that “one key difference between the expert and novice athletes was in the way they had learned to perceive the game, rather than the raw ability to react quickly” (7). The baseball players couldn’t hit Finch’s softball pitch because they weren’t used to “perceiving” the mechanics of a softball pitch.
In the 1940s, psychologist and chess master Adriaan de Groot performed a test on chess players of different abilities and determined that experience was critical to expertise. In 1973, psychologists William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon expanded on de Groot’s experiments and developed their “chunking theory,” which holds that “experts unconsciously group information into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on patterns that they have seen before” (10). Epstein adds, “Where the novice is overwhelmed by new information and randomness, the master sees familiar order and structure that allows him to home in on information that is critical for the decision at hand” (10). Epstein explains that athletes “chunk” information, too: the way a player’s body shifts before he throws a ball, or the movements of a player’s arm before she swings a racket. This allows them to process information automatically. Epstein quotes a cliché, saying, “‘It’s software, not hardware.’ That is, the perceptual sports skills that separate experts from dilettantes are learned, or downloaded” (14).
A 1993 study of classical music students found that expert ability was the result of 10,000 hours of practice in a lifetime. Though psychologist K. Anders Ericsson “never called it a ‘rule” (16), he was the first to describe the ingredients of expertise in terms of 10,000 practice hours—or a “deliberate practice framework” (16). Ericsson went on to suggest that all healthy people contain the genetic material to become experts, and that experts are made through practice. The mainstream media interpretation holds “that 10,000 hours is both necessary and sufficient to make anyone an expert in anything” (17).
Chapter 2 Summary: “A Tale of Two High Jumpers (Or: 10,000 Hours Plus or Minus 10,000 Hours)”
Chapter 2 opens with a profile of Dan McLaughlin, an Oregon man who quit his job in 2009 and launched an effort to become a professional golfer by executing 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. As Epstein says, “No one has ever done such a study” (20), since existing research on the 10,000-hour rule has been performed on people who have already acquired the skill.
A 2007 study of chess players using Elo points, the metric by which players are rated, found that masters averaged close to 10,000 hours of practice, but that the range of hours was vast. Fernand Gobet, one of the researchers, found that “basically some people need to practice eight times more to reach the same level as someone else” (22). Epstein reveals that the violin study from the previous chapter only reported an average of 10,000 hours of practice and didn’t account for range. According to Gobet, “if two practitioners start with slightly different initial conditions, […] it can lead to dramatically different outcomes” (23).
Epstein then profiles two professional high jumpers to demonstrate that starting conditions, and not just practice hours, influence an athlete’s abilities. Stefan Holm is a Swedish high jumper who, inspired by a professional high jumper as a young child and raised by an athlete father, engaged in a lifetime of deliberate practice and highly specialized training, including workouts to stiffen his Achilles tendon, on the path to becoming a world-renowned high jumper and Olympic medal-winner. Holm believes in the 10,000-hour principle.
Epstein contrasts Holm with Donald Thomas, a Bahamian athlete who came to high jumping in college through a dare by a member of Missouri’s Lindenwood University track team. Thomas was recruited to join the team, but he was uncommitted in practice and seemed uninterested in the sport. He refused to wear traditional gear and succeeded on the world stage without mastering the technical aspects of the sport common to every other competitor. He beat Holm in 2007 and frustrated the high jumping establishment with his style and lack of training.
A neuromuscular researcher studying Thomas found that his Achilles tendon, crucial in the execution of a high jump, is long for his size. As Epstein says, “the longer (and stiffer) the Achilles tendon, the more elastic energy it can store when compressed” (32). An athlete can stiffen his/her tendon through training, but evidence now shows that genes involved in collagen production also contribute to a tendon’s stiffness. The two high jumpers’ tendons partially explain the difference in their paths to excellence. Thomas, as it turned out, “debuted on top and has not progressed. He seems to contradict the deliberate practice framework in all directions” (33).
Studies show that “top competitors require far less than 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach elite status” (34). According to something called the “Matthew effect,” those who begin with more attain more. Psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1908 wrote “the larger individual differences increase with equal training, showing a positive correlation with high initial ability with ability to profit by training” (35).
Later, in 1935, psychologist David Weschler found that “the ratio of the smallest to biggest, or best to worst, in just about any measure of humanity, from high jumping to hosiery looping, was between two to one and three to one” (36). Psychologist Phillip Ackerman finds that “where practice decreases individual differences, it never drowns them out entirely” (36). Epstein translates this to mean that skill is based on both innate and acquired ability, “both innate hardware and learned software” (37).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Major League Vision and the Greatest Child Athlete Sample Ever: The Hardware and Software Paradigm”
Chapter 3 opens with a story of how the Los Angeles Dodgers used visual acuity tests on players during spring training to determine who would make the team. Visual acuity is determined by the number of cones in the retina, and that number is determined by genes. On the whole, baseball players have far higher visual acuity than average people: “baseball players have to know before the final two hundred milliseconds of a pitch where to swing, so the earlier they pick up the anticipatory cues the better” (42). However, visual acuity without a specialized understanding of the cues is not as powerful as when the two are combined. As Epstein explains, “visual hardware interacts with the particular sports task at hand” (43), and the faster the ball moves, the more advantageous visual acuity becomes.
A 1978 study of youth tennis players revealed that metrics of “tennis-specific kills acquired through practice” successfully predicted how that child would rank as an adult tennis player (45), but the study also revealed that children who ranked higher in overall athleticism were better at accumulating those tennis-specific skills. Among young soccer players in the Netherlands, studies have found that players who go pro are deliberate practitioners but also that “small variations in physical traits at age twelve delineate the haves and the have-nots” (47). Researcher Marije Elferink-Gemser says, “If you’re really slow, then you cannot catch up, and speed is really hard for them to train” (47).
In 2004, Australia put together an Olympic skeleton team of women who had never trained in the sport but who demonstrated certain athletic abilities acquired in other sports. The team defied expectations of those established in the sport. This “talent transfer” of athletes between a sport in which they’re trained to one in which they’re predicted to succeed gives Australia an edge on the world playing field.
Epstein introduces the idea that the age at which a practitioner’s genes and exposure to environment interact is critical. For chess players, mastery is most likely for players who began playing before age 12. For some sports, however, “early specialization not only is not required to make it to the highest level in many sports, but should perhaps be actively avoided” (51). It’s possible, too, that some young athletes who start out with higher abilities simply don’t have to work as hard as early in their journeys.
Epstein closes by examining the way in which data about practice, and facts about genetic predisposition, are emphasized and de-emphasized in sports psychology and sports culture. Despite the changing trends in discussing genes’ role in athletic expertise, Epstein says that “narratives that shun the contributions of innate talent can have negative side effects in exercise science” (53), and that when sports psychologists de-emphasize genetics to “send a positive social message” (54), the facts don’t change.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Chapter 1 opens with a mystery: How does a female softball pitcher thwart the best male baseball hitters? To explain this phenomenon, Epstein explains formerly held theories of athletic expertise that relied on genetic specialness and then introduces presently held ones that rely on practice. He leaves the world of sports to examine the chess and classical music origins of the 10,000-hour theory and returns to the subject of athletes to include them in this much larger theory about experts, in general, who profit from experience. In a subtle flourish of irony, Epstein contradicts the title of his own book—The Sports Gene—by proposing that practice, not genetics, separates experts from novices.
Chapter 2 dives deeper into the 10,000-hour “rule,” qualifying it as representing an average and not a minimum. The true number of practice hours required for expertise in any given sport varies from person to person and can fall anywhere in a vast range. Epstein uses Holm and Thomas as foils for one another—Holm being a lifelong practitioner, emblematic of the 10,000-hour principle, and Thomas being a paradigm of natural ability, someone with an aversion to practicing. Epstein presents this rule, and the exception to the rule, to crack open the complex topic of athletic excellence, which is not a black-or-white, but rather a black-and-white, phenomenon—a theme he explores throughout the book. Epstein uses surprise and contradiction (i.e. the simultaneous facts that Thomas beat Holm and that Thomas’s ascension was short-lived) to underline the complications in any search for a “rule” about athletic excellence.
In Chapter 3, Epstein revisits the topic of baseball players. In the first chapter, he explains how an expert baseball hitter doesn’t react faster but rather processes information faster than an average person. In the third chapter, Epstein reveals that visual acuity informs how fast and well a hitter can see the cues to process in the first place. One chapter underlines the element of practice; the other emphasizes genetic advantage. Both are true (a thematic message), but Epstein lays out this information in pieces, rather than all at once, so that he doesn’t de-emphasize one factor or over-emphasize another. Genetic advantages play a role in athletes’ abilities, and the higher the ability, the more the advantages make a difference.
The examples of athletes whose all-around ability gives them a greater advantage in a single sport, like the Australian women’s skeleton team, expand on the Matthew effect from Chapter 2—the idea that the rich get richer, while the poor can’t ever quite catch up. Epstein returns to his computer metaphor to model skill acquisition: “physical hardware facilitating the download of sport-specific software” (53). Epstein admits an understanding that data about genetic predisposition has implications on the idea of free will, but he doesn’t shy away from scientific answers—a sentiment that emerges as an important theme in the book.
