For sporting greats, knowing when to quit is the hardest challenge of all

Nadal in training for Wimbledon EPA

When the men’s seedings for Wimbledon were published, they contained something that was both telling and inevitable. Rafael Nadal, winner of the tournament in 2008 and 2010, was ranked just 10th. No one could doubt that the Spaniard is one of the most formidable players ever to have held a tennis racquet. His 14 grand-slam wins stand second equal with Pete Sampras in the all-time men’s rankings behind Roger Federer’s 17. But at the age of just 29, the growing sense is that his best years are behind him.

To draw an analogy with another sport, it reminds me of the famous quote from the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that".

Burnley days: Clark Carlisle Anna Gowthorpe/PA

How true his words have been for many who have tried to walk away from the game. Take the sad case of Clarke Carlisle, the former Blackpool and Burnley defender, who finished playing in 2013 and went on to chair the Professional Footballers’ Association. The following December, suffering from depression, he attempted to take his own life by stepping out in front of a lorry.

Carlisle is far from alone. Many high-profile sportspeople face profound psychological struggles at the conclusion of their careers. Retirement comes much earlier than in other professions, where not so long ago people didn’t retire at all. In most sports, even relatively late retirements such as footballer Sir Stanley Matthews at 50 and cricketer Brian Close at 55 are of a bygone age. Nowadays it is rare for the “oldies” in any sport to play in the same draw as the best in the world.

Gravity catches up

The longevity of a player’s career is largely determined by the physical demands of the sport, of course. Rugby players can lengthen their career by carefully limiting the number of games played each season. But for most by the time they reach their mid–30s, the repeated collisions have taken their toll. They are likely to be being outperformed by younger players, who inevitably recover more quickly.

Endurance sports such as running and rowing demand such heavy training that early retirement is a wise long-term health decision. More than 25 years of training have left marathon-runner Paula Radcliffe with a chronic foot injury, for example. Each mile for Paula is around 450 foot strikes – and during heavy training periods she runs more than 100 miles a week for months on end. She will carry that injury for the rest of her life.

Regardless of whether you are forced out by injury, however, retirement from sport is rarely simple. There are no clear statistics on what proportion of players make the choice to end their career, but in all cases the implications are the same – to withdraw from an activity which has given day-to-day life meaning and structure from childhood is incredibly difficult.

Not surprisingly, the early research linked retirement from sport with the emotional grieving process experienced by people who have received a terminal diagnosis. It argued that you could apply the famous Kübler-Ross stages of grief from 1969 in the same way: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. This has been criticised by many researchers and applied practitioners, but they do help us to understand the emotional complexity of the experience.

For many, the big hurdles to overcome are psycho-social – the extent to which the performer viewed themselves as a performer, the loss of their “sporting identity”, the structure the sport gave them and the social contact with people with whom they have shared a very significant part of their emotional lives. Such people often feel irreplaceable, at least in the short term. And to make all this worse, by withdrawing from regular training, players are not getting their neurochemical “fix” of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin. The world seems a bleaker, less exciting and more stressful place as a result.

When to go

The public spectacle of players coping with the end of their careers can be painful. Putting his personal life to one side, watching Tiger Woods’ current struggle undermines the memories of when he dominated the world of golf. His body has been battered into submission and he needs to stop.

There are always a lot of retirements after a major game – partly becuase goals have been achieved, but also because there is a “pause” to reflect on how much commitment and sacrifice is required for the next peak. There is often a sense of relief that it’s over. The question I pose to athletes at this stage is, are you ready for this? To approach that I begin with a simple decisional balance of the push factors and the pull. This can be extremely revealing as it clarifies the performer’s motives in their mind and how much commitment is required.

Shankly retiring 1974 PA

This is exactly the sort of thought process that Rafael Nadal should begin. His knees have been his Achilles heel for almost a decade now. He has to take regular time out for treatment. Despite his recent victory on the grass at the Mercedes Cup in Germany, he is on borrowed time. Retirement at 29 having achieved everything he set out to achieve is certainly not a failure. The same could be said of Roger Federer, who is ranked second for the tournament a few weeks short of his 34th birthday. If he announced that Wimbledon 2015 was his final appearance, the crowds would flock to salute his achievement and wish him well as he began the next chapter of his life.

And so back to Bill Shankly, a man who, to the surprise of no-one, coped very poorly with retirement. In the years after he stepped down from Liverpool in 1974 at the age of 60, he regularly turned up to watch his team train through the fence of the Melwood ground. This is a stark reminder that for many, retirement from a sporting role needs to look beyond sport. The worst thing that you can have is a daily reminder that you are no longer doing what you did best.

Miniaturisation will lead to 'smart spaces' and blur the line between on and offline

A computer-on-a-stick is the start, but they'll get smaller and smarter yet. Lenovo

Lenovo, the Chinese firm that has bought up IBM’s cast off PC business, has announced a miniaturised computer not much larger than a smartphone, which can be connected to any screen via an HDMI connection.

Advances in electronic components manufacturing processes and integration have resulted in large-scale miniaturisation of computer systems. This has enabled the latest system-in-package and system-on-a-chip approaches, where the processor and other necessary functionality usually provided by many microchips can be incorporated into a single silicon chip package.

Lenovo’s Ideacenter Stick 300 runs Windows 8 or Linux, is powered by a micro-USB connector and comes fitted with a new Intel Bay Trail CPU, 2GB RAM, 32GB flash storage, an SD card reader, Wi-Fi – even speakers.

Lenovo isn’t the first to shrink the PC down to pocket size. Intel’s Compute Stick is another dongle-sized computer with similar specs released this year.

Intel’s Compute Stick is another effort to shrink the PC to pocket size. Intel

The Raspberry Pi, now upgraded to its second major release, was probably the first to provide the functionality of a desktop or laptop computer in a credit card sized electronic board. Over five million Raspberry Pi computers have been sold since launch in 2012.

Google has used its stripped-down Chrome OS based on its Chrome browser to reduce a Chromebook (Chrome OS-powered laptop) down to the Chromebit. While the Chromebit is no larger than a USB memory stick, it’s markedly less powerful than Intel’s offering, as it is powered by the Rockchip RK3288, an ARM processor, which makes it comparable in power to a smartphone.

Google’s Chromebit, in more colours than black. Katie Roberts-Hoffman/Google

There are other stick-sized, computers running low-power ARM processors capable of running Android, such as Cotton Candy or Google Chromecast. These plug into a digital television to play video directly to the TV or from internet streaming services such as Netflix – but not much else.

The appeal of small

Computers this small are attractive for many organisations, such as schools and universities who need to equip functional computer laboratories at minimum cost while taking up as little space as possible. Low power devices also consumer less power which keeps costs down.

A typical desktop computer uses about 65-250 watts (plus 20-40 watts for an LCD monitor) – considerably higher than a typical PC-on-a-stick at about 10 watts. There are obvious business uses, such as digital signage and advertising when connected to screens or projectors.

This new round of computer miniaturisation marks a third wave of computerisation. First there were room-sized computers, shared between many users – the mainframe era. These time-sharing systems gradually disappeared as computers were miniaturised, replaced by the one computer per user of the personal computer or PC era. Today one person could have many computers, whether recognisable as desktop and latop PCs or smartphones or compute sticks, but which are accessible everywhere and anywhere. Known as ubiquitous or pervasive computing, this is the third wave in computing.

A smart, mobile future

As all computing devices grow smaller, the aim is that they are more connected and more integrated into our environment. The computing technology fades into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceptible to users. It is an emerging discipline that brings computing to our living environments, makes those environments sensitive to us and have them adapt to the user’s needs. By enriching an environment with appropriate interconnected computing devices, the environment would be able to sense changes and support decisions that benefit its users.

There is a growing interest in these smart spaces using miniaturised computing technologies to support our daily lives more effectively. For example, smart offices, classrooms, and homes that allow computers to monitor and control what is happening in the environment.

Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Nest are a start in this direction, providing the hardware and software to allow home automation. A smart home that monitors temperature and movement could allow elderly to remain self-sufficient and independent in their own home, for example, and voice activated devices could help everyday tasks such as ordering the shopping. A smart office could remind staff of information such as meeting reminders. It could turn the lights on and off, or control heating and cooling efficiently. A smart hospital ward will monitor patients and warn doctors and nurses of any potential problem or human errors.

The Smart Anything Everywhere vision of the European Commission drives research and development in this area. The evolution and disruptive innovation across the field of computing, from the Internet of Things, smart cities and smart spaces down to nano-electronics – the applications and benefits of greater miniaturisation of computers are endless.

Europol tasked with online search-and-destroy mission to combat Islamic State

Terrorism has moved online, and policing must follow. ISIS by GongTo\Shutterstock.com

Europol has set up a Europe-wide unit to search and remove social media accounts run by or linked to the terrorist group Islamic State (IS) in an effort to tackle the growing threat of unopposed jihadi propaganda online.

The specialist team will be modelled on the UK’s Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, (CTIRU), a joint Scotland Yard and Home Office unit, and will aim to take down IS-affiliated sites within two hours while providing information to other counter-terrorist investigators.

IS has so far demonstrated its effective use of social media for propaganda. IS members living across northern Syria and north-western Iraq use their personal social media accounts to spread their message worldwide, and this decentralised approach has proven hard to tackle.

It is estimated that more than 25,000 foreign fighters have joined the group in this region, their daily messages reaching a global audience in various languages. These social media accounts have been used to recruit foreign fighters, encourage women to travel to the region to become jihadi brides and to encourage families from around the world to join IS.

It’s this growing number of citizens flowing into Syria and Iraq that has led Europol’s Director, Rob Wainwright, to warn of the problems faced by European police forces trying to monitor terrorists' online communications. Tackling the propaganda is made more difficult by the fact that suspects in Syria and Iraq are effectively out of reach.

Use of the more hidden, harder-to-reach areas of the web – the dark web – and encrypted communications make it harder still. Wainwright has added his voice to others in law enforcement that have warned tech firms to consider the impact of sophisticated encryption on law enforcement.

On Twitter alone, Wainwright believes IS has up to 50,000 accounts, tweeting up to 100,000 messages a day. A study by Brookings University researchers claimed the number of accounts as high as 90,000.

Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group has also highlighted the difficulty intelligence agencies and police face monitoring social media and encrypted electronic communications. IS circumvents the blocking of their accounts through using multiple back-up accounts, urging followers to follow up to six accounts tweeting the same message. Katz believes that IS on Twitter is a real threat, a launch pad for recruitment or encouragement for lone wolf attacks, and to send dangerous messages to every corner of the world.

Social media is a major source of recruitment propganda. flags by Steve Allen/shutterstock.com

Europe’s response

This issue of the use of the internet to facilitate radicalisation and terrorism was recognised by the Council of the European Union in March 2015, from which has emerged the Europol Internet Referral Unit, tasked with co-ordinating and sharing information about terrorist and extremist online content.

This builds on Europol’s Check the Web initiative from 2007. But while this had success in child abuse and human trafficking investigations early on its existence, it has had limited success tackling terrorism, especially since the Snowden revelations in 2013 – so has struggled to counter IS. This may reflect the difficulty investigators face in securing co-operation from telecoms providers and ISPs in order to access details of suspected terrorists. Telecoms firms adopt attitudes that often reflect the concerns of their customers over privacy.

Such concerns about the growth of a surveillance society and the need to protect individual’s right to privacy grown since the revelations from documents released by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, which have revealed that the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ conducted surveillance beyond their lawful powers.

An advantage of Europol taking the lead in monitoring IS is that privacy and data protection rights are deeply embedded in EU law. This will apply to Europol too since it became a legal EU body under the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. This provides an important chain of accountability with direct scrutiny by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) possible.

Only recently the ECJ has shown how it is prepared to be ruthless in protecting privacy and data protection rights, in a case in which it found the 2006 EU Directive on data protection itself invalid. The ECJ held that legislation must lay down clear and precise rules governing the scope and application of surveillance as well as imposing minimum safeguards to prevent misuse of data.

This would also apply to the Europol’s terrorist monitoring unit, and with the right safeguards in place Europol is likely to find it easier to win the co-operation of telecoms firms and ISPs, which in turn will make it a more effective unit. Of course this is still a difficult task, but it’s a step in the right direction.

How the parrot got its chat (and its dance moves)

Who's a clever boy then? D Coetzee/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Many animals – including seals, dolphins and bats – are able to communicate vocally. However, parrots are among a select few that can spontaneously imitate members of another species. A study has now pinpointed the region in the brain that may be allowing this to happen – the region that is also involved in controlling movement. The finding could perhaps also explain the fact that parrots, just like humans, can talk and dance.

We know that birds that can sing, including parrots, have distinct centres in their brain supporting vocalisations, called the “cores”. But, exclusively in parrots, around these there are outer rings, or “shells”. Surrounding this is a third region supporting movement. This is an older pathway that is shared by vertebrates. To find out more about what the unique shell system actually does, the research team analysed the expression of genes in these pathways in nine different species of parrot. They focused on ten genes that we know to be more active in the song regions of birds' brains compared to other parts of the brain.

They found that parrots, when compared to other birds, have a complex pattern of specialised gene expression in all three parts of its brain. That means that most of the vocal learning that is specific to parrots, such as imitation, must be taking place in the shell region and the part of the brain that controls movements. This is surprising, as previous work had assumed that only the dedicated core system would be involved in vocal learning and that the shells had nothing to do with talking.

My own research has shown that it is the connections between brain regions controlling cognitive and motor skills that support language in humans.

The researchers also examined songbirds and hummingbirds and found that the shell regions were indeed unique to the parrots. However, they said future research would have to clarify the exact mechanisms involved in imitating.

Imitation game

That this shell system is observed in so many species of parrot – including in Keas, the most ancient species known – suggests that the vocalisation abilities evolved around 29m years ago. For comparison, that is more or less the time when humans' ancestors are believed to have branched off from other primates.

The researchers hypothesise that this shell structure evolved after the core system for singing in birds was duplicated in the brain, with the shell centre developing new functions such as mimicking. So studying the shell structure in parrots could help us identify other mysterious duplications that could have led to certain brain functions in humans.

Might be hard to believe but parrots have a lot going on upstairs. Courtesy of Jonathan E. Lee, Duke University

Only parrots, humans and certain types of songbird can mimic other species. The fact that species as different as birds and humans share this behaviour is a clear example of “convergent evolution,” in which two species independently evolve structures supporting similar behaviours.

Imitation requires significant brain power and complex, specialised processes. For example, acoustic information must be represented, its organisation decoded and finally the sound reproduced. The complex specialisation of the core, shell and motor systems in parrots support these processes for imitation, enabling these species to couple auditory information from the environment with the finely grained behaviours necessary to produce them. There is currently no evidence suggesting that parrots have any special kind of articulators for producing spoken language. Rather, their brains seem to be doing the extra work.

Let’s dance

Interestingly, the authors also note that humans and parrots belong to another select set of animals – those that synchronise body movements to the rhythms of beats while listening to music. That is, unlike almost every other animal in the world, parrots and humans spontaneously dance (strangely enough, that group also includes elephants which have also demonstrated an ability to move along with music).

In parrots, such dancing is associated with the non-vocal motor regions surrounding the shell – which supports the possibility of a general capacity for learning regularities in the sounds they hear and coupling them with behaviour.

The study is a big step forward in our effort to understand what makes parrots so different from other birds. Indeed, the researchers themselves say they were surprised that the brain structures they discovered had gone unrecognised for so long.

How computers are learning to make human software work more efficiently

Need a computer doctor? Dial 100110011001 agsandrew

Computer scientists have a history of borrowing ideas from nature, such as evolution. When it comes to optimising computer programs, a very interesting evolutionary-based approach has emerged over the past five or six years that could bring incalculable benefits to industry and eventually consumers. We call it genetic improvement.

Genetic improvement involves writing an automated “programmer” who manipulates the source code of a piece of software through trial and error with a view to making it work more efficiently. This might include swapping lines of code around, deleting lines and inserting new ones – very much like a human programmer. Each manipulation is then tested against some quality measure to determine if the new version of the code is an improvement over the old version. It is about taking large software systems and altering them slightly to achieve better results.

The benefits

These interventions can bring a variety of benefits in the realm of what programmers describe as the functional properties of a piece of software. They might improve how fast a program runs, for instance, or remove bugs. They can also be used to help transplant old software to new hardware.  

The potential does stop there. Because genetic improvement operates on source code, it can also improve the so-called non-functional properties. These include all the features that are not concerned purely with just the input-output behaviour of programs, such as the amount of bandwidth or energy that the software consumes. These are often particularly tricky for a human programmer to deal with, given the already challenging problem of building correctly functioning software in the first place.

We have seen a few examples of genetic improvement beginning to be recognised in recent years – albeit still within universities for the moment. A good early one dates from 2009, where such an automated “programmer” built by the University of New Mexico and University of Virginia fixed 55 out of 105 bugs in various different kinds of software, ranging from a media player to a Tetris game. For this it won $5,000 (£3,173) and a Gold Humie Award, which is awarded for achievements produced by genetic and evolutionary computation.

In the past year, UCL in London has overseen two research projects that have demonstrated the field’s potential (full disclosure: both have involved co-author William Langdon). The first involved a genetic-improvement program that could take a large complex piece of software with more than 50,000 lines of code and speed up its functionality by 70 times.

The second carried out the first automated wholesale transplant of one piece of software into a larger one by taking a linguistic translator called Babel and inserting it into an instant-messaging system called Pidgin.

Nature and computers

To understand the scale of the opportunity, you have to appreciate that software is a unique engineering material. In other areas of engineering, such as electrical and mechanical engineering, you might build a computational model before you build the final product, since it allows you to push your understanding and test a particular design. On the other hand, software is its own model. A computational model of software is still a computer program. It is a true representation of the final product, which maximises your ability to optimise it with an automated programmer.

Thank you, Mr Darwin Everett Historical

As we mentioned at the beginning, there is a rich tradition of computer scientists borrowing ideas from nature. Nature inspired genetic algorithms, for example, which crunch through the millions of possible answers to a real-life problem with many variables to come up with the best one. Examples include anything from devising a wholesale road distribution network to fine-tuning the design of an engine.

Though the evolution metaphor has become something of a millstone in this context, as discussed here, genetic algorithms have had a number of successes producing results which are either comparable with human programs or even better.

Evolution also inspired genetic programming, which attempts to build programs from scratch using small sets of instructions. It is limited, however. One of its many criticisms is that it cannot even evolve the sort of program that would typically be expected of a first-year undergraduate, and will not therefore scale up to the huge software systems that are the backbone of large multinationals.

This makes genetic improvement a particularly interesting deviation from this discipline. Instead of trying to rewrite the whole program from scratch, it succeeds by making small numbers of tiny changes. It doesn’t even have to confine itself to genetic improvement as such. The Babel/Pidgin example showed that it can extend to transplanting a piece of software into a program in a similar way to how surgeons transplant body organs from donors to recipients. This is a reminder that the overall goal is automated software engineering. Whatever nature can teach us when it comes to developing this fascinating new field, we should grab it with both hands.

Ancient mini-monster head mystery solved – here's how we did it

Facing front Danielle Dufault, Author provided

Since its first fossils were found more than 100 years ago, Hallucigenia has perplexed palaeontologists. Looking like a cross between a hockey stick and a pincushion, the 1cm to 5cm long creature was named to reflect its surreal and “dream-like” appearance. It was first described on its side, then upside down walking on its long spines, and finally inverted to walk on what we now believe were its legs. Even then, scientists have been unable to agree which end of the animal is the head and which is the tail.

My colleague Jean-Bernard Caron and I became interested in Hallucigenia when we found that electron microscopes could reveal new details of its fossilised spines and claws. This helped us establish the creature’s place in the tree of life by working out its evolutionary relatives. Given the dozens of specimens collected by Royal Ontario Museum teams from the Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park, Canada, we thought we might finally have a chance to understand this oddball animal.

Prior to our study, a large balloon-shaped orb at one end of the specimen had been interpreted as an amorphous head. We soon established that this wasn’t part of the body at all, but a dark stain representing decay fluids or gut contents that oozed out of the rear end of the animal as it was buried.

To find its head, we had to turn to the other end of the animal. Because the animals fossilised in the Burgess Shale died as they were trapped in a mudslide, their ends are often buried at a different angle to the rest of the body. Caron painstakingly chipped away at the rock to uncover the hair-wide head. Wondering whether the newly-exposed fossils might display eyes, I put them in the electron microscope. When I zoomed to what we hoped was the head, I was astonished to find not just a pair of eyes, but also a toothy grin smiling back at me.

This smile represented a ring of teeth in the mouth, which probably flexed in and out to suck in food. We also found another set of teeth lining Hallucigenia’s throat, which presumably stopped the food slipping back out of the mouth. This configuration of teeth reminded us of the arrangement in a group of moulting cuticular worms, the cycloneuralians, which include penis worms, roundworms, mud dragons and other bizarre microscopic creatures.

The holotype of Hallucigenia, as originally interpreted: with a balloon-shaped head and walking on its spines Jean-Bernard Caron

These animals have a ring of spines around their mouth and a tooth-lined gut that many can turn inside-out to ensnare prey. But Hallucigenia is not a cycloneuralian – it belongs to a group called the panarthropods, which includes the arthropods and the velvet worms. Based on a comprehensive analysis, we determined that arthropods and velvet worms once bore comparably complicated mouth parts, which were lost in the course of evolution.

Electron microscope image of Hallucigenia’s head, showing the eyes and two sets of teeth Martin Smith / Jean-Bernard Caron

This is exciting because it tells us something profound about the common ancestor of cycloneuralians and panarthropods – that is, all moulting animals. At first blushIs this: On first inspection?, the animals have almost nothing in common aside from the fact that they moult and some shared features in their DNA. If each group has independently evolved its own body plan, one might imagine that the common ancestor of the whole group was tremendously simple. Instead, we are now able to show that the common ancestor of moulting animals was a complex worm with teeth organised around its mouth and down its throat.

A fossil of Hallucigenia from the Burgess Shale (ROM 61315), reconstructed the right way up, with its head to the right Jean-Bernard Caron

The discovery of nerve tissue in other Burgess Shale animals is influencing our understanding of early animal evolution. Could new fossils reveal Hallucigenia’s brain? And Hallucigenia’s diet remains a matter of speculation – what food was the animal ingesting through its newly-discovered mouth?

I’ve always loved Hallucigenia for being such an unusual and surprising beast. Each time we uncover one of its secrets it seems to makes us think again about something we thought we knew. I only wonder what surprises Hallucigenia will reveal next.

Born to win: top athletes don't share a single talent gene, but hundreds of them

Andy Murray triumph at Queen's on June 20 EPA

When this year’s Wimbledon tennis championship begins on June 29, British hopes will again be pinned on Andy Murray. Only time will tell if he can kick on from his Queen’s Club victory and win the UK’s premier tennis tournament for a second time.

But why is he so good at the sport? Is it his training regime? Is it the care and attention that he pays to his diet? Is it the team that advises him on training, technique and strategy for each match? Did he do his 10,000 hours training as a child?

The answer is almost certainly yes to all of the above, yet none of it is enough. Genetic predisposition also plays a massive part in Murray’s talents. Some have wondered whether this might be governed by a single talent gene, but the past couple of decades have taught us that the truth is much more complicated – and still only partly known to us.

Sporting talent tends to run in families: Andy Murray’s brother Jamie is also a Wimbledon champion; their mother Judy is a top tennis coach and former professional player and their grandfather was a professional footballer for Stirling Albion and Cowdenbeath.

Mixed doubles

Like all families, the Murrays share some of their genes – and their example is consistent with the scientific research. In 2007, for instance, British researchers compared 700 pairs of twins and were able to show that as much as 66% of the differences in our sporting abilities could be explained by our genetic differences. In other words, the sum total of training, diet and all other interventions accounts for less than genetics when it comes to determining sporting talent.

But there is not just one gene for sporting talent. We are all humans, so we all carry the same roughly 20,000 genes. What you do find is different versions of some of those genes in different people within the global population. Genome sequencing projects such as 1,000 Genomes have shown that we are about 99% similar, or almost identical. But the human genome is very large – 3bn letters or bases long. Combine that with our 1% difference and there are actually about 38m bases at which we can differ, resulting in multiple versions of most genes.

DNA sequences behind the human genome glo.tto

Since the first report of variation in the ACE gene relating to sporting ability came out 17 years ago, we have implicated over 200 more genes to date. These genes are related to sporting performance through a variety of mechanisms, perhaps through involvement in muscle structure or the body’s ability to use oxygen. But each of them has only a small influence – and when we combine them, we can’t explain anywhere near 66% of the differences between us.

This suggests that many more genes are involved. But how many exactly, and is that all it takes? Recent research has identified nearly 700 genetic variants that are involved in determining height, for instance, although more remain undiscovered – and it is likely that a similar number will be involved in sporting ability. If so, an average person would effectively have around 350 “talented” versions and around 350 “untalented” versions. Some people would have slightly more “talented” versions, making them slightly different from average – perhaps helping them get into club or county teams. A smaller number still would have quite a few more “talented” versions, making them more extreme, perhaps helping get them into international teams.

The trouble with tests

How then should we identify the next Andy Murray? Should we turn to internet-based tests of genetic sporting potential to guide our children on whether to bother trying? Aside from the ethical concerns this raises, it is certainly not worth it at the moment. All of the tests that I am aware of test only a few of the genes known to relate to sport and, of course, we have not identified all the genes involved anyway. So these tests can explain only a small portion of the differences in our abilities – and the information may be misleading. The best way to identify sporting talent in children is still to ask them to play sport.

Similarly, many existing athletes who are not quite winning medals become involved in talent-transfer programmes where they are physiologically tested to identify a sport to which they may be more suited. These athletes are often approached by genetic-testing companies who offer to identify their sporting predisposition. But these tests lack predictive power for exactly the same reasons as the ones for children.

Myself and others in the research community are involved in producing a position statement on these kinds of tests, which will shortly be published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. It will be endorsed by Kamiel Maasse, a former international distance runner and the holder of the Dutch record for the marathon, now representing the Dutch Olympic Committee – who already warn their athletes not to be taken in by these offers.

In summary, there is no “talent” gene, but many “talent” versions of many genes which collectively help determine sporting talent. While we now understand a great deal about the genetic predisposition to sporting talent, there is more left undiscovered and genetic testing to identify future talent remains science fiction. Genes alone will not take you all the way – this is where the training, nutrition, psychology, strategy and technique all come in. All are necessary; none are sufficient.

There is also a level at which mass participation matters. If the genetically most gifted tennis player in Britain never picks up a racquet, if they are spending their time playing video games or watching television, we won’t see the next Andy Murray. If every school child plays tennis, on the other hand, then investing money in those who win junior club competitions will almost certainly include those with the most favourable genetics. If too few play, there will be the risk of merely investing in the best of those that played. But that’s where one other crucial factor comes in when looking for those with real genetic talent: such people are rare, so you need to be lucky too.