‘World-class athletes are genetically very unusual’

Professor Nir Eynon, a geneticist at the Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, believes that elite athletes are blessed with very unusual genes.

“There are very few people in the world who can match these athletes, and we don’t understand why,” Professor Eynon told CW. “I have no scientific proof of this, but I think that elite athletes have very rare and unique variants that make them who they are, just like people who have rare diseases. A gene variant is something you either have or you don’t, there is nothing you can do about it.”

The problem, though, is finding these genetic variants. With only a few 100 world-class athletes for each sporting discipline, it’s impossible to create large enough studies to analyse the data. What’s more, it is very difficult for sports geneticists to secure adequate funding.

“It’s hard to determine, from the sample sizes we have, which are the relevant variants,” Eynon continues. “If we wanted to find out, for example, what genetic sequences are different in Usain Bolt to the rest of the Jamaican population, we would have to analyse a huge number of people.”