Stefan Holm was told he was too short to be a high jumper. But by the time he won Sweden a gold medal in the 2004 Olympics, he had honed himself into the perfect projectile. It was the result of a 15-year obsession: his whole life had been pulled into alignment with this goal. If he wanted to stop on page 225 of a book, he would push himself to page 240, in order to train his mind to overshoot. “It’s all about your 10,000,” he told David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene. There had been jumpers who had beaten him when he was young, and where were they now?
But in 2007, entering the world championships in Japan as the favourite, he faced an unknown opponent: Donald Thomas, from the Bahamas. Thomas had begun jumping just eight months previously, on a whim after a bet, and admitted he found the high jump “kind of boring”. He had slacked off training – his form was all over the place – and his coach couldn’t even persuade him to wear the right kind of shoes. But he had one big advantage: an achilles tendon that could store just a bit more elastic energy than everyone else’s. That year, Thomas sprang awkwardly over the bar to victory.
Listen to Olympians talk, and you’ll mostly hear parables that echo part one of this story – tales of iron discipline, of overcoming initial setbacks. When asked to explain his success, Michael Phelps does not dwell on his lucky genes: his flipper-like feet or astonishing 6ft, 7in wingspan. Instead, he says things like, “if you think about doing the unthinkable, you can”; or “the more you use your imagination, the faster you go”. And here is Usain Bolt, on the secret of his victory: “Easy is not an option. No days off. Never quit.” But scientists say Bolt has been shaped as if by the gods into the perfect sprinter.
Elite sports are more than usually given to the valorisation of hard work and willpower. After all, the jobs of zillions of coaches and sports psychologists – not to mention the second careers of Olympians, translating gold medal glory into “life lessons” for the masses – depend on the notion.
But the worship of work has spread far beyond sports: it is a growing part of the culture at large. It can be traced, I think, to the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in 2008, which popularised the “10,000-hour rule”, the idea that hard work is not only necessary but sufficient for success. This caught the public imagination, and became embedded in training programmes for groups as disparate as violinists and hedge fund traders. The principle that everyone should be driving themselves headlong into the ground has proliferated, too, in today’s booming self-help sector, which merges with business advice online. YouTube is full of CEOs telling people to get up at 4am and dispense with a social life.
But the Olympics is also the arena in which the hard-work supremacy myth is most routinely smashed. Talent matters too. Nearly 60% of professional baseball players are born with superior depth perception. Eero Mäntyranta – who won seven Olympic medals in cross-country skiing – had a genetic mutation that gave him extra red blood cells. Studies of athletes find that the top competitors improve more quickly with smaller amounts of practice than ordinary folks. This extends to other fields, too. Make a bunch of kids log thousands of hours of chess, and only a few of them will be any good by the end. The amount of practice needed to become a top violinist varies hugely between individuals. Hard work is important, sure, but not everyone can grind their way to the top. This is the real lesson of the Olympics.
Does it sound like a depressing one? Perhaps it is. The idea that talent is just bestowed on people, unearned, at birth, can seem very unmeritocratic. Individualist cultures are after all brought up on the idea that they can dream a life into being. There is inspiration to the thought that anyone can make it if they just put in the hours. But it is also, I think, a rather unhealthy principle on which to found a society.
For one thing, it leads us directly to a stifling hothouse culture. If hard work and achievement are joined by a straight line, why ever pause for a rest? You think of today’s exam-battered schoolchildren, their leisure hours crammed with improving activities – an anxious lot, who increasingly complain of mental health issues. You think, too, of those who believe the business-bro podcasters, and attempt to transform their lives by living like hyperactive hermits. You wonder for how many it simply doesn’t work. There is some bias, after all, in the claim that luck played no part in your success.
In his biography, Phelps recalls a snowy day from his childhood. He asked to go sledding, and remembers his mother saying: “Oh, are you going to go to the world championships this summer or are you going to break your arm now?” He didn’t go. There must have been many potential Phelpses who spent their childhoods the same way, and never got near the Olympics. Is this what we want for ourselves?
The hard work myth needs busting for another reason, too. It precludes the chance a champion could emerge a little later in life, from a group that wasn’t obsessively coached from birth by resource-rich parents. This, too, is a lesson of the Olympics. Talent matters, and it can come from anywhere.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
