BU Research Blog

Here at BU, in work led by Professor Tim Rees, we developed what Dr Simon Timson, Director of Performance for City Football Group, described as “the primary piece of empirical research that underpins talent identification, selection, confirmation, and development practice across Olympic, Paralympic and professional sport domains in the UK”. This work underpinned preparations for the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2021 Games, and still permeates talent development programmes worldwide today. The research underpinned one of UoA24’s Impact Case Studies for REF 2021: “The development of athletic talent: Driving policy change in national sporting organisations.”

The first article from this project, published OA in the prestigious Sports Medicine, just reached 600 Google Scholar citations, with over 70,000 downloads. If you’re interested in a whirlwind tour of all we know about athletic talent development—despite being published in 2016—this is still a reasonably comprehensive overview.

Alongside working with UK Sport, the nation’s high-performance sports agency, this was part of a wider collaboration with colleagues at Bangor University, University College London, University of Kaiserslautern, University of Queensland, and Queens University.

Reference.

Rees, T., Hardy, L., Güllich, A., Abernethy, B., Côté J., Woodman, T., Montgomery, H., Laing, S., & Warr, C. (2016). The Great British medalists project: A review of current knowledge into the development of the world’s best sporting talent. Sports Medicine, 46(8), 1041-1058. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0476-2 OA Link