The Talent Code

The Talent Code

In the summer of 2006, a journalist named Daniel Coyle flew to Moscow to watch eight-year-olds play tennis. Not to watch them compete -- there were no tournaments, no rankings, no trophies for the smallest players at Spartak Tennis Club. The coach who ran the program, a seventy-year-old woman named Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, had decided decades earlier that young children should not play matches at all for the first three years of their training. No competition. No scoreboard. Just practice. Coyle found her in a cramped indoor facility on the edge of the city, watching a small girl struggle through a forehand rally, stopping her every few strokes to correct the angle of her wrist. The court was modest -- worn green paint, a sagging net, fluorescent lighting that buzzed faintly overhead. None of it looked like a factory for champions. And yet Preobrazhenskaya had been doing this since 1962, and her former students included Anna Kournikova and Marat Safin. In a country with roughly the same population as the United States, this single club had produced an astonishing fraction of the world's top professional players.

Coyle had not come to Russia to write about tennis. He had come chasing a question that had been bothering him for years: where does talent come from, and why does so much of it seem to cluster in strange, unlikely places? Why would a single tennis club in a mid-sized Moscow suburb produce more elite players than entire nations? Why would a small island in the Caribbean produce more major-league baseball players per capita than virtually anywhere on earth? Why would a village in South Korea have more top-ranked female golfers than most developed countries combined? These were not random statistical anomalies. They were patterns, and patterns have causes.