Award-winning athletes may have been late bloomers when it came to developing their skills

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International chess masters, Olympic gold medallists and Nobel prize-winning scientists were rarely child prodigies, a review reveals. Likewise, early childhood successes and intense training programmes have rarely led to top achievement at a global level in the adult world.

The analysis – based on 19 studies involving nearly 35,000 high-performing people – shows that the vast majority of adults who lead worldwide rankings in their field of expertise grew up participating in a broad range of activities, only gradually developing their most proficient skill.

The findings contradict popular beliefs that achieving top international performance levels requires intensive, highly focused training during childhood, says Arne Güllich at RPTU Kaiserslautern in Germany. “If we understand that most world-class performers were not that remarkable or exceptional in their early years, this implies that early exceptional performance is not a prerequisite for long-term, world-class performance.”

Much research has strongly linked the intensity of a child’s training programme in specific activities – like music and athletics – to competitive performance in those activities as teenagers or young adults. But studies in older world-class athletes have shown trends to the contrary. For example, 82 per cent of international-level junior athletes don’t become international-level adult, or senior, athletes, and 72 per cent of international-level seniors didn’t previously achieve the junior international level.

The backgrounds of famous international experts also suggest the link between childhood and adult success isn’t as strong as it might appear. For instance, although composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, chess player Gukesh Dommaraju and mathematician Terence Tao were all child prodigies, composer Ludwig van Beethoven, basketball player Michael Jordan, chess player Viswanathan Anand and scientist Charles Darwin were not.

The studies that Güllich and his colleagues reviewed included analyses of the life histories of Olympic athletes, Nobel laureates in the sciences, world top-10 chess players and the most renowned classical music composers, as well as international leaders in other fields.

Across various specialisms, early high achievers and later world-class performers were largely different people. Indeed, only about 10 per cent of those who excelled as adults were top performers in their youth, and only about 10 per cent of top youth performers went on to excel as adults.