Natural talent or hard work – what makes a champion?

But instead of basking in Olympic glory he crashed out against a player he was capable of beating and what should have been a career-defining moment ended in humiliation. Syed, now an award-winning sports writer for The Times, recounts the story in his book Bounce – How Champions Are Made, in which he uncovers the hidden logic of success and what makes everyone from Tiger Woods to Picasso, the greatest in their field. His fascinating and well-researched book looks at everything from neuroscience and psychology, to economics and superstition. He dispels, too, the notion that talent is God-given, suggesting that the key to success lies in hard work, training and self-belief.

It was his painful experience in Sydney that first prompted his study into what makes a champion. "I choked horribly at the Sydney Olympics, I was just hit by a sudden bout of nerves and since then I've been fascinated with neuroscience and the reasons why some people choke under severe pressure," says Syed.

He lists great sporting stars such as Greg Norman, Jimmy White and Jana Novotna as examples of those with a tendency to choke, while others like Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Usain Bolt are able to thrive under pressure. He says it's not a question of talent, pointing out that Norman and White were routinely called the most gifted players of their generation. So what makes people crack under pressure? Syed uses a simple example to illustrate his point. "If you're chatting to a girl that you don't fancy then you're very charming and funny because it doesn't really matter if she likes you or not. But if you meet somebody who you could imagine yourself marrying, suddenly you're tongue-tied and nervous."

All sport, whether it is football or table tennis, involves developing skills to the point where they become second nature. But Syed says that the pressure of a big match can have a paralysing affect not because of a lack of focus, but too much. One way of dealing with this is to teach yourself that it doesn't really matter. So to use six-times world snooker champion Steve Davis's phrase – you learn the art of "playing as if it means nothing when it means everything".

Most of us probably assume that great sportsmen and women are born, not made. Maradona himself once said he was born with "football skill in my feet". But Syed explains there is more to it than this and uses his own background as an example. He was brought up in Reading, hardly recognised as a sporting mecca, yet one street in his hometown produced more table tennis champions than the rest of Britain put together.

"Had some genetic mutation spread throughout the local vicinity without touching the surrounding roads or villages? Of course not," he

says. "What we had that was unique was an outstanding coach and the opportunity to practise whenever we wanted because the club we belonged to was open 24 hours a day, which gave us an advantage."

Sporting greatness is not only about talent, it is about determination, hard work and daring to believe that anything is possible. It is this belief in the seemingly impossible, Syed contends, that inspired Lance Armstrong to beat cancer and win the Tour de France seven times, and Jesse Owens to win four gold medals in front of an enraged Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Similarly, when Muhammad Ali entered the ring to face George Foreman in what became known as "the rumble in the jungle", not even his own camp thought he stood much of a chance, which made his triumph even more astonishing.

Syed achieves that rare feat of being able to make complex scientific ideas accessible to the average reader. At the same time, he is unafraid of tackling contentious topics such as drugs use in sport and the politically sensitive notion that black people are better athletes than white people.

"There is a commonly held idea that black runners are faster than

whites and the unconscious assumption is that this is down to genetics."

But it's also a flawed one, he says. "Most people think that Africa dominates long-distance running, but it's actually a small region of Kenya in the Great Rift Valley, where the Nandi tribe live, that is responsible for producing most of its top runners.

"This is because they live at high altitude and as children they have to run astronomical distances to and from school," he says.

There are, of course, some sports where genes do play an important role. "This matters in basketball where you have to be the right height and no amount of practice is going to make you grow any taller." But

he says the idea that humanity can be divided into different groups based on sharply defined genetic boundaries is without foundation.

Which brings us back to the crux of Syed's argument, that the key to success is not talent, but determination and hard work. "If you're pushed into sport by your parents then you tend to burn out. The motivation to succeed has to come from within and this in turn drives you to practise. Roger Federer isn't the best tennis player because he has the most talent, it's because he has the best timing and perceptual awareness."

This is borne out by other sporting stars. Tiger Woods, for instance, had clocked up 10,000 hours of dedicated practice by his mid-teens, while Venus and Serena Williams showed a similar, almost fanatical, devotion to playing tennis.

David Beckham is another example. Whatever you may think of the Beckham brand, there's no doubt that the time he spent practically "living" in his local park paved the way for his glittering career. Without it he would never have been a professional footballer, never mind play for Real Madrid and England. Beckham himself has said that practice is his secret. "I have always believed that if you want to achieve anything special in life, you have to work, work, and then work some more."

It's a maxim that extends beyond sporting boundaries. Mozart is often cited as the classic example of a child prodigy, but it has been estimated that he did around 3,500 hours of music practice before his sixth birthday. Which suggests that rather than being zapped with special powers he simply started out on his path to excellence at an exceptionally young age. Syed says it's a similar story with another artistic genius – Picasso.

"If you look at Picasso's greatest creative works, they started out as sketches, they didn't emerge out of nowhere. There's no such thing as 'mystical creativity', it comes from years and years of practice."

Syed believes we need to move away from the idea that talent is the be-all and end-all. "If you fail early on in life, you might think it's because you don't have enough talent, rather than seeing failure as an opportunity to adapt and grow and that's the mindset we need to try to encourage."

n Bounce, by Matthew Syed, is published by Fourth Estate, priced 12.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co. uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.