> By the time you are looking at nationals, all the non-talent people have been filtered out. Everyone now has the correct body type. They all have near-perfect

> By the time you are looking at nationals, all the non-talent people have been filtered out. Everyone now has the correct body type. They all have near-perfect reflexes. And yet there are still enormous differences in how talented people are within this already extremely highly selected pool. Differences so huge that all the money in the world, and all the coaching, grit, determination and hard work can’t buy elite level athletic success. Michael Phelps is the son of a middle school principal and a state trooper and he holds 28 Olympic gold medals. I’m sure his family made enormous sacrifices to help him train but there were if not thousands, at least hundreds, of children with families with more money chasing the same swimming dream. Success in sports is a competition of extraordinary people against other extraordinary people, and the best make them look mundane in their talents. You can no more buy the athletic skills of Lionel Messi or Usain Bolt than you can the academic ones of Terence Tao. All of those people worked and trained very hard to get where they are but none of them came from the very wealthiest classes. They’re just the extreme right tail of a distribution of talent.