The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

Epstein’s title for this book is a tongue-and-cheek acknowledgment of a social narrative around a perfect “sports gene,” despite the scientific truth that there isn’t one. Instead, there are many genes—more than are understood, and more than can be tested with the sample size of elite athletes alive on the planet—and myriad environmental factors that make a search for a single gene futile. Though the sports and exercise markets may demand simple genetic answers, science refuses to give them.

Epstein understands that scientific inquiry has a social impact, but he perpetually emphasizes that science doesn’t care what society thinks. In the chapter “Major League Vision and the Greatest Child Athlete Sample Ever,” Epstein compiles several stories of athletes with ideal body types for a given sport who learn that sport late, or switch sports, and have success. He then cites professional golfer Tiger Woods, who started playing as a child and around whom a narrative has arisen about the 10,000-hour “rule.” This mythologizing of Woods’s lifelong training, Epstein argues, leaves out the fact of Woods’s uncanny ability to balance on his father’s palm at the age other infants were trying to stand. Epstein goes a step further, saying, “Narratives that shun the contributions of innate talent can have negative side effects in exercise science” (53). Although sports psychologists may wish to suppress or elevate a certain message about innate talent, Epstein says, “Either way, the social message has no bearing on scientific truth” (54).

In “The Talent of Trainability,” Epstein describes a social narrative that involved his own talent and the talent of a college track-and-field teammate. Scott, Epstein says, “would come into the season in relatively good shape and improve slowly and modestly, making it easy to brand him as a big talent who didn’t capitalize on his formidable gifts” (88). Scott suffered from this narrative, bailing on a race, for example, before finishing because of mental pressure. Epstein points to genetic research that shows how some athletes, even if they have a high baseline talent, are low responders to training. Others, as Epstein believes he is, are high responders. Unlike his teammate, Epstein was lauded for overcoming obstacles, when really he may have been acting out a simple expression of his genetic sequence. As Epstein describes it:

This is a story that plays out on every track in America—similar boys and girls miraculously become less similar despite training similarly […] In the absence of any biological explanation for these stories, we find other narratives to explain them, narratives that are not without consequences (86).

Epstein is not naive about the way even scientific data can be misconstrued into damaging racial narratives, specifically around race, but he advocates for truth-telling and scientific inquiry in spite of these risks. He even directly comments on scientists who shy away from seemingly taboo subjects. He says in “The Vitruvian NBA Player” that researchers from Duke and Howard universities who studied “the issue of body types as it pertains to ancestry and spork performance […] did a backbend to avoid racial stereotyping. ‘Our study does not advance the notion of race,’ they wrote” (141). The term “backbend” illustrates an exaggerated effort to deliver results in a certain way. Epstein says:

[…] it would be blind and silly to ignore the importance of access to equipment and coaching, but this is a book about genetics and athleticism, and it would be just as blind to ignore the conspicuously thorough dominance of people with particular geographic ancestry in certain sports that are globally contested and have few barriers to entry. Namely, of course, that the athletes who are the fleetest of foot, in both short and long distances, are black (141).