Winter Olympic Games: Explaining the talent identification scheme and the success of athletes in obtaining the gold medal

UK Sport’s Talent Identification Days are designed to attract people with natural athletic ability and sporting talent, find out their key strengths, and match them with a sport they may have never tried or even heard of before.

Analysis on Talent Identification Day includes a series of tests to measure strength, endurance, speed and agility.

Anyone aged 17 or over can apply online, and athletes who leave a sport in the early stages of their career are often invited to see if there is something else that might suit them.

Examiners also assess each athlete’s personality, scoring their ability to regulate emotions, control their performance under pressure, and understand and respond to reactions.

Although applications are open to anyone, final selection of sport still requires a high level of natural ability.

“The talent identification process is an opportunity for us to find athletes a little later in the journey than you might normally join a programme,” says Dr Kate Baker, Director of Performance and People at UK Sport.

“If you’re not very fast, or you’re not able to build fast-twitch muscles quickly, you probably won’t be able to achieve that in the skeletal system.

“Then we have sports like cross-country skiing, which require extraordinary aerobic capacity. So if you’re someone who likes to run long distances and can go on forever, that’s the type of sport you might want to look into.”