Success Talent Potential: The hour of the winner

How do extraordinary achievements arise? And what skills are real winners and winners? Sport is a good example.

Is the ability to conquer innate?

I got the chance to compete against Kenyans in college and wondered if stamina genes had made the trip from East Africa. At the same time, I noticed that five teammates who trained with each other day by day, step by step, nonetheless developed into five completely different runners. How could that be?

After ending my college running career, I went to college to study science and later wrote for Sports Illustrated. A search took me beyond the equator and the arctic circle and brought me in Contact with world champions and Olympic champions, but also with animals and People, whose rare gene mutations or extraordinary physical characteristics have a drastic impact on the physical Performance have. Along the way, I learned that personality traits that I believed to be a matter of will, such as motivation to train, are actually largely genetic, while other supposedly innate traits, such as the lightning-fast reactions of a baseball or cricket batsman, may not be inherited at all .

How to explain ability without genes

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Let's start with an example right away. The American LeagueTeam was far behind, and batsman Mike Piazza was just starting for the National League team. So the secret weapon was brought into the field. Jennie Finch strolled past a phalanx of the world's best batter onto the sunlit infield. Her flax-colored hair shone in the clear desert light. For twenty-four years, the Pepsi All-Star softball game had been attended only by major league baseball players. The crowd was buzzing with excitement as the national softball team's 1,85-meter tall top pitcher reached pitcher mound and put her fingers around the ball.

It was a mild day in Cathedral City, California; The local replica of the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field, one of the original American sports cathedrals, was filled with 21-degree warm air. The Quote three-fourths the size of the original, down to the ivy-covered walls. Even the brick homes of the Chicago neighborhood were present there in the desert at the foot of the Santa Rosa Mountains, in original, almost life-size printed photographs. Finch, who was set to win a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics in a matter of months, was originally only invited to join the American League's coaching staff.

The baseball secret weapon

That changed when the American League stars fell 9-1 behind in the fifth inning. No sooner had Finch arrived on the mound than the defensive players made themselves comfortable behind her. Yankees infielder Aaron Boone took off his glove and lay down, using second base as a pillow. Texas Rangers' Hank Blalock took the opportunity for a sip of water. After all, they had seen Finch pitch during punch training.

As part of the pre-game celebrations, a number of major league stars had tested their skills against Finch's underhand grenades. Finch's casts come from a distance of 13 meters and reach speeds of approximately 110 km/h. The ball takes about the same time to home plate as a 150 km/h fastball from a regular pitcher's hill 18 meters away. True, such a fastball is fast, but also routine for pro baseball players. In addition, a softball is larger and should therefore be easier to hit.

People with unimagined abilities

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Still, Finch sent the balls whizzing past the bewildered men with every windmill swing of her arm. When Albert Pujols, the greatest batter of a generation, faced Finch in warm-up practice, the other star players gaped around him. Finch nervously straightened her ponytail. A wide smile crossed her face. Joy flowed through her, but also the concern that Pujols could return her throw with a line drive. A silver chain dangled across his broad chest, and his forearms were as wide as that Head of the racket. "Well then," said Pujols quietly, signaling his readiness. Finch staggered backwards, then forwards, whipping his throwing arm in a wide arc. First she fired off a high pitch. Pujols staggered back, startled at the sight. Fin chuckled.

She followed up with another fastball, this time going high and inside. Pujols spun defensively and turned his head away. Behind him, his colleagues laughed out loud. Pujols stepped out of his position, composed himself and resumed his place. He shuffled his feet until he for sure stood and stared at Finch. The next pitch went down the middle. Pujols threw a mighty swing at him, but the ball sailed past the racquet and the crowd cheered. The next throw was wide and Pujols let it fly past. With the next one, Finch struck again while Pujols hit empty air. For the remaining pitch, Pujols moved all the way back into the batter's box and ducked low. Finch swung back, then forward, and fired. Pujols hit wide. He turned away and joined his giggling comrades. Then he stopped, confused. Pujols turned back to Finch, doffed his cap in front of her, and continued on his way. "I never want to experience anything like that again," he later swore.

So the defenders behind Finch had good reasons to make themselves comfortable on the field as soon as they came on: they knew there would be no hits. As with the warm-up, Finch beat the two batter she was up against. Piazza swung past three dead straight throws. Brian Giles, a San Diego Padres outfielder, missed the third strike so badly that his swing drew him into a pirouette. Subsequently, Finch limited herself again to her role as an honorary coach. But this shouldn't be the last time she would humiliate Major Leaguer.

Better than the best

In 2004 and 2005, Finch appeared as a regular on a baseball show on Fox television. In the clips, she traveled to major league training camps and let the best baseball players in the Welt look like bunglers. “Girls hit balls like that?” wondered Seattle Mariners outfielder Mike Cameron after missing a pitch by a handbreadth. After seven-time best player Barry Bonds spotted Finch at the Major League All-Star Game, he pushed his way through reporters to engage them in some trash talk.

"So, Barry, when do I get up to the best?" Asked Finch. "Whenever you want," Bonds replied confidently. “You messed with all the dwarfs ... Now you have to face the best. You look good and you can do it, you can't turn away a man who looks good and who can do it, ”said Bonds, hitting and intimidating her at the same time. Then he advised her to bring a protective net if she dared to approach him, because "you will need that ... I will meet you". "Only one person has got my ball so far," Finch replied. "Get range?" Asked Bonds with a laugh. “If the ball comes over the plate, I'll come over, believe that. Then I'll answer it, but how. ”“ My people will get in touch with your people and we'll fix something, ”Finch said. “Oh, that's already agreed! Just give me a call, girl, ”Bonds said. »I like to take challenges personally ... We broadcast the whole thing on national television. I want the world to see that everyone sees it. "

Girls balls only?

So Finch went to a meeting with Bonds - this time without fans and reporters - and his mocking tone quickly faded. Bonds saw pitch after pitch whiz by and insisted the cameras not pick him up. Finch shot one pitch after the other past Bonds and his teammates present declared them all to be strikes. "It counts as a ball!" Bonds whined, to which one of his comrades replied, "Barry, there are twelve referees." It wasn't until Finch announced how she was going to throw the ball that he caught a ridiculous foul ball that rolled a few yards and stayed there.

Bonds pleaded with Finch, "Go on, throw another one." She did - and threw past him. Subsequently, when Finch met Alex Rodriguez, the reigning Player of the Season, Rodriguez looked over her shoulder as she warmed up with a catcher from his team. The catcher screwed up three of the first five throws. When Rodriguez saw this, to Finch's disappointment, he simply refused to enter the batter's box. He leaned over to her and whispered to her: "I am not made a monkey."

The secret of success: The response time is not

For four decades, scientists have been trying to get an idea of ​​how top athletes can hit fast objects. An intuitive explanation would be that the Albert Pujolses and Roger Federers of the world are genetically gifted with faster reflexes and therefore have more time to respond to the ball. However, that's not true.

If you test people for their "simple reaction time"—how quickly they can press a button in response to a light signal—most of them, whether they're teachers, lawyers, or professional athletes, need about 200 milliseconds, or one-fifth of a second. A fifth of a second is roughly the minimum time that one Information It takes time to travel from the retina at the back of the human eye through numerous synapses – the gaps between nerve cells that each take a few milliseconds to cross – to the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, and from there Brain to be transmitted as a signal to the spinal cord, from where the muscles are set in motion. All of this happens in the blink of an eye. (In glaring light, it takes as little as 150 milliseconds for the Eyes be pinched shut.)

But as fast as a reaction time of 200 milliseconds is, it is far too slow in view of 160 km / h throws and 200 km / h tennis serves. In the 75 milliseconds that the sensory cells in the retina need to perceive a baseball in their field of vision and to determine its trajectory and speed for transmission to the brain, a typical professional baseball fastball covers around three meters.

When the crystal ball is blocked

The entire flight of baseball from the Hand from the pitcher to the plate takes only 400 milliseconds. And because half of that time is spent just triggering muscle action, shortly after the ball leaves the pitcher's hand and long before it's even halfway to the plate, a major league batter must decidewhere to swing the racquet. The window in which the ball is within range of the bat and can even be hit is 5 milliseconds, and because the angle from which the batter sees the ball changes so quickly near the plate, the advice is to throw the ball to keep your eye on the ball literally impossible to follow.

The human eye simply isn't fast enough to follow the ball all the way through. A batter might as well close his eyes when the ball is halfway to home plate. Given the throwing speed and our biological limitations, it's actually a miracle that anyone hits any balls at all. Still, Albert Pujols and his fellow All-Stars recognize and handle 160-thing fastballs and to earn so even their rolls. Then why do they turn into amateurs when confronted with 100 km/h lame softballs? The reason is that the only way to hit a ball at such high speed is to hit the Future and when a baseball batter faces a softball pitcher, he cannot see his crystal ball.

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