engleski

Turning a talent into a top athlete: a scientific approach and dilemas

Purpose: In today’s professional sport the importance in recognising early talent in athletes represents a high predictive value from the aspect of making athletic achievements. It could be said that talent is the basic precondition, the first prerequisite or a good foundation, for an athlete to reach their full athletic potential. Methods: The identification of an athletic talent is the first step towards creating a top athlete, and today there exist various methods for its recognition. Despite the fact that these methods and diagnostic procedures are highly developed, there still exists the possibility of making a large error during the mentioned process. Results: By analysing recent scientific research, it has been concluded that the assessment of talent based on genetically defined factors - the performative quality of motor movement, or on the basis of various diagnostic procedures for assessing basic or specific motor abilities - in practice often makes for an insufficient amount of information necessary for quality assessment of whether an athlete is destined for success in a particular sports game or discipline. Conclusion: What can be said with certainty is that the factors of excellence of an athlete include the athletes themselves, i.e. their basic and specific motor abilities ; knowledge and competences, skills and habits, health, personal strategies in problem-solving, personality traits, and their emotional condition ; in addition, they include social environment, family, school, the sport club-federation, and practice. It is precisely this latter quality - practice - as well as the involved professional staff, which many authors highlight as being an extremely important factor in the development of a talented athlete towards becoming a top athlete. It often happens, however, that certain athletes remain ‘emerging’ talents, precisely because of the influence of different environmental factors that have a negative impact on the athlete's development and maturation.

sport ; athlete ; talent ; identification ; development

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