Sake White

I was trying to google the bios of the two skaters featured in my Ice Figure post. Here is what I came up with.

Salé was three years old when she first tried skating on a rink near her house. She wore double-bladed skates to help her balance. By age five, her mother had enrolled her in both figure skating and gymnastics classes, but by age seven, Salé had decided to focus on skating.

For Pelletier, the choice was between figure skating and hockey. Like Jamie, David had learned to skate at an early age, as did his two brothers. At age 15, believing he may not make Canada’s hockey elite, David focused on figure skating. It was somewhat of an uphill battle, in small-town Quebec, where most boys his age were handling the stick and puck. Fortunately, for the rest of the world, he persevered.

There is a recurring argument that keeps coming up, in which other people believe that talent is inborn while I take the position that it is developed through work. The relationship between thw two variables, genetic inborn potential and improvements through work and diligence, is pretty tricky to understand. For one thing, it is quite obvious that if you start young in any subject in which you seek to master, such as music or figure skating, you will be able to unlock more of your potential than say someone that starts at 20 or 30 or some such. People look at this and say that the ones that succede grandly had talent. Meaning, they had inborn traits that allowed them to excell beyond others. But why is that true when scientifically you can’t take Jamie or David, change their past so that they start on figure skating later, and use that experiment to find out the truth? And for one thing, when people start young on mastering such things as figure skating, that in itself is a motivation and diligence issue, born of hard work. Yet inborn genetic traits may just give a person such as David or Jamie that edge in competition over their peers, motivating them to continue with the skill sets.

This brings me to that soccer study some folks did in a chess magazine. The study concluded that soccer professionals had a very interesting age distribution, consistent with situations in which children are at the upper age bracket in their grade level. Meaning, the kids who got to the professional ranks were older and thus bigger and more developed than their peers, so when they played soccer this promoted the older kids to specialize in soccer.

All this of course concerns the subject of how does innate talent and skills acquired in life, interconnect with each other. Using a simple logic routine, we can see that only those people with dedication have made it to the top, whereas there are presumably plenty of folks with the talent that never developed it. Who knows what a person might have become with a different early set of motivations in life. This shifts us to the second level of the argument, which is the subject of skill. Meaning, why can’t people, with enough time and dedication, master the skills that you see 20 year old Gold Medalists acquire.

The answer is simple. Old age slows you down. The older you get, the lower your potential for physical action becomes. This is not true for all skill fields, but it is true for figure skating and professional sports; which are popular subjects to argue about concerning innate talent vs dutiful skills.

By chess studies, it takes about 10 years to truly master a field. Or a job so to speak. Whether chess, carpenting, brain surgery, or any other profession for that matter. 10 years of diligent and applied hard work and learning. If a person starts young, then not only will they acquire those 10 years before the onset of physical deterioration, but because they are young they can train and improve their bodies/genetic structures. Children are adaptable, not only mentally concerning the quickness to which they pick up new things but also physically because they are developing and growing. You lock in a specific pattern of growth and endurance early on, and that will carry through to adulthood. This is a sort of semi-genetic inborn trait. A trait that you acquire not by being born with it, but by working hard at it while you are young. It doesn’t work if you work hard at it when you are 30, because your growth cycle has already ended. The time of opportunity has left. So it is similar to genetics in that it is a one time deal. Either you have it or you don’t.

Certain other fields like chess or body building actually gets better as you grow older. Fitness, if maintained with diligence, deteriorates rather slowly. The same for the mind of Grandmaster chess players. The decay is so slow ,that they can actually make some gains and improvements over the time of their career so to speak. But of course, starting early is better than starting later.

Let’s go into the hypothetical fields. Meaning, the what if scenarios. What if there is medical technology available to allow a person to stay perpetually young at a 20ish level of performance. Then if a person in his 150th birthday decides to master figure skating, how long would it be before he could accomplish it against competitors that started off while they were 5 years old? This is assuming the 150 year old continues his new professional with discipline and dedication. Without the biological limitations, what is really true about humanity and excellence? Can hard work and mental discipline truly equal the best of the best in the new generation, without the limitations of our human biological condition?

As you can see, this changes the human conditioning tables around a bit. We know what is or is not humanly possible, but the question of why we are the way we are can’t really be answered by science. Not yet anyways and perhaps not ever. The question of why does human beings excell at certain fields over others, is a philosophical question. And it will be even when medical technology cures aging.

You can also check our the duo’s website here.

For those interested in a little romance, you can probably see a few clues concerning Jamie and David’s relationship in the video I posted at the Ice Figure and the Amazing Grace threads. Did you see that wink? How about her hand gliding down his face?

They married in 2005. Trust is not an issue with this couple, people. Not when you are required to trust your husband’s strength and endurance, in order to stay up in the air and not hit the ground at high speeds.

Clarification: I am not refering to the technique David used on Jamie, but rather a higher speed technique that involves holding the woman’s feet and twirling her… yes that one.