International Experience and Scientific Exploration of Talent Transfer in Sports

Talent identification and development (TID) is an important factor of the success of international elite sport. Huge investment of manpower, material, and financial resources have been made by countries of world accordingly with the purpose of enhancing the efficacy of elite athlete development. The traditional TID, which is based on the deliberate practice theory, advocates early identification, early specialization, and early success. However, retrospective and longitude studies based on many countries and sports demonstrate that the traditional TID would not guarantee the senior success. Meanwhile, the increasing success cases indicate the senior successful athletes are characterized by early diversification and late specialization. Some athletes even achieved rapid success through transferring to a new sport. Therefore, the countries, which experienced decrease in Olympic performance and/or held a vision of extraordinary success as the Olympic hosting country, learned the experience from previous informal talent transfer, and tried to launch formal and structured talent transfer. Talent transfer is defined as a formal detection and development process, which aims to rapidly develop international level athletes (either participants or medalists) by detecting athletes of certain performance level and with the genetic capabilities and/or training experience needed by the new sport, from other sports to a new sport, and providing policy, training, scientific, education, life support for them. Under the circumstance of elite sport reform and challenge of Olympic preparation, China could rapidly develop elite athletes through talent transfer, and take the chance of talent transfer to improve the current TID system. Systematization and science is warranted during the talent transfer in China since recent years.