ABILITY FOR ATHLETICS: IDENTIFICATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF TALENT

In identification and improvement of talent for athletics, training practice is hindered by considerable errors of estimation. Sports sciences must wrestle with the problem of lack of an established theory to guide the search for talented people. Nevertheless, a theoretically and practically effective system was used in the former German Democratic Republic for 15 years. The existing elements of this system were integrated with pedagogical experience and other data from the literature in an attempt to outline a system to be used in athletics in the search for talented performers. In this novel concept the main means of identification of athletic talent is competition itself, the main indicator is competitive performance, and the most important stimulator of interest in a discipline is success in competition. Competitive performances, however, can be of prognostic value only if they are evaluated together with the factors of trainability, biological age, training age and psychobiological, physiological, anthropometrical and social characteristics.