The Jamaican sprinting success comes down to one coach and one athletic club. Stephen Francis and MVP Track & Field Club have taken unknown athletes and made them the world's best. Nobody was a star before they came to MVP. The key to the success is the ability to spot potential when it does not manifest in current high performance.
Bad judgment about people's potential is often caused by "high performance blindness" -- the idea that current high performance automatically equals high potential. But the crux of talent identification can be boiled down into one sentence: "What you see is not what you get." To spot real potential you must be able to look beyond what you see right now. As Stephen Francis puts it:
"Identifying potential is not about looking for what you see. It's about looking for what you could see".
God that video is ridiculous. A bunch of crap so that guy can sell more books. MVP trains on grass AND a really nice track. Also, really... Jamaican sprinting success comes down to one coach and one club? I wonder what Glen Mills and Racers would have to say about that. They are only responsible for um... sweeping the 200m and going 1-2 in the 100m in London... Not to mention that since the 1970s and the days of Donald Quarrie and Merlene Ottey the Jamaicans have a history of continued success in the sprints and when you factor in the size of the country a really astounding pattern of dominance on the world level.....
Pretty much whenever you hear that success comes down to "THIS ONE KEY NON-INTUITIVE THING"..... there will be someone trying to sell you that secret key ingredient... Not surprisingly, the narrator is a motivational speaker who wrote a popular book on what makes people successful with the ridiculous title of "Leader DNA". His next round will be a bunch of crap about the secrets to athletics. People love to believe their is some large secret to success apart from hard work, talent, and resources.
Genetics certainly comes down to it no doubt. However, there are parts of the video that I agree with. Go to any junior development program throughout the world and they'll focus on the best athletes at that age judged upon their times or their height at the time. I seen it growing up in basketball. Guys that weren't even that good and were tall only coz they had hit puberty a few years before everybody else. You could see they had facial hair and were solidly built already and they were still only 12 and 13. 5 years later they're tweeners when their whole life since U10 they've been touted as Australia's next best Centre. The trouble with these programs is that they regurgitate the same players year after year so if you're not in the state team by U12 by U18 it's still going to be pretty much the same team as it was in U12 because coaches have already invested so much time and resources into these players they don't want to let them go. By the time these players are in state league they've given up on basketball or they are out playing D2 or D3.
Of the guys I know from my state that are playing professional basketball atm none of them were in a state team except Yan who played state since U16s as a bench player. 2 of the starters of the state team every year in that cohort from U10 to state league don't even play basketball anymore. In contrast you've got a guy like Adam Doyle who couldn't even play in D1 in juniors let alone a state team, yet now he's a development player in the NBL. With guys like Adam who persist with the sport sometimes it pays off but a lot of the time it won't, and the players end up quitting basketball and playing footy or just quitting sports altogether.
Usain Bolt is a freak. He could coach himself and he'd still be a world class athlete. I got a lot more respect for coaches like Charlie Francis and Stephen Francis who take guys like Ben Johnson and Asafa Powell from being mediocre sprinters to world class athletes. In terms of Jamaican sprint success it also comes down to culture. Track is their number 1 sport so their are a lot more opportunities for talent to be exposed. Even cricket is big in Jamaica and that's initially what Usain Bolt wanted to be- a cricket player. However, he wasn't that good at it and his coach obviously saw his raw speed so pointed him in the direction of track. Who knows if Usain was a great cricketer when he was younger maybe he wouldn't of even pursued sprinting. Personally I think USA has a lot more sprinting talent than Jamaica does it just doesn't get expressed because people there are playing other sports or are too busy being gangsters. West African countries like Sierra Leone, Mali, Liberia, and Senegal are going to be the next big talents in sprinting once they overcome poverty and civil wars in their countries. I think the point about the track and resources was also one about making the most of what you've got. Those West African countries I just mentioned have populations less than 10 million but all have National Records in the 10.0s and 10.1s. Imagine if the majority of their populations weren't living a struggle to survive, soccer wasn't their national sport, and they also had the access to physios, doctors, sport scientists and exercise physiologists etc.
