All roads lead to Rome? Talent narratives of elite athletes, musicians, and mathematicians

ABSTRACT

Public accounts about world-class athletes, musicians, and mathematicians often include notions of the highly talented child that then develops into a successful performer in a more or less straightforward manner. However, a large corpus of scientific literature indicates that talent development trajectories are highly diverse and idiosyncratic. Analysing the experiences of the high-achieving individuals themselves might add an additional perspective to our understanding of how talent develops over time. In this regard, the stories that individuals tell about their talent development can provide in-depth accounts of their experiences but also of individual and societal beliefs about talent and its development. The current study intends to examine the talent development stories of athletes, musicians, and mathematicians. Cross-domain talent research might help to culturally contextualise developmental processes. In this regard, our aims are twofold. First, we aim to examine how high-achieving individuals story their talent development pathways. Second, we aim to identify cultural ideas about talent in the individual stories. In total, we interviewed ten elite athletes, ten professional musicians, and ten elite mathematicians. We employed a thematic narrative analysis and a structural narrative analysis. We identified five types of talent narratives on developmental pathways: searching for the spotlight, straightforward career, overcoming obstacles, riding the waves, and applying effort. These types of narratives were observable across performance domains. Despite the idiosyncratic nature of developmental pathways, athletes, musicians, and mathematicians appeared to be impacted by similar sociocultural narratives about talent and its development when constructing their personal talent development stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Talent development
• narrative
• elite sports
• talent
• music
• mathematics
• developmental pathway

Acknowledgments

We gratefully thank the participants for sharing their stories and experiences. We also want to thank those gatekeepers who facilitated contact to our participants. A special note of thanks also goes to our student assistants Vanessa Haug, Anna Brandauer, and Hanna Kuttler for their help with transcribing the interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jannika M. John

Jannika M. John is a Postdoc at the Institute of Sports Science in Tübingen. In her current research, she focuses on developmental pathways of gifted individuals in the domains of music, sports, and mathematics from a biographical perspective. She is particularly interested in mixed-method research and the advancement of theory in the field of talent development. Other research interests include positive youth and life skill development through sports and biopsychosocial aspects of health in high performance contexts.

Ansgar Thiel

Ansgar Thiel holds a Professorial Chair for Sport Sociology at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. Ansgar Thiel studied sports science, psychology, and psychogerontology. He completed his PhD and habilitation in sport sociology. With regard to talent development and giftedness research, Ansgar Thiel’s research interests comprise: Biopsychosocial health in elite sports, talent development, and developmental changes in elite sports.