He said
There are many variables that affect an athlete's success, but location is just one of them.
Even date of birth has an impact on success, if you subscribe to some of the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. He said that the theory that the best hockey players were born in the first quarter of the year first came about from someone looking at rosters in a program at a junior game. The phenomenon wasn't strictly hockey players. He pointed to other sports as well, like soccer, in which being born in the first four months of the year was a big factor in future success.
This, of course, doesn't mean that if you were born in July or November, don't play hockey because you have no chance of ever being good at it. It just means that the amount of control over how much you succeed is, as it turns out, limited.
Geography is another one of those things we have little control over, though this factor is more malleable, as long as you have the resources to move. We are looking specifically at Mark McMorris, who left the Saskatchewan flatlands to win gold medals for snowboarding in much more mountainous territory.
Location matters, but it's never been so easy to travel to a location that helps rather than hinders. It's become much less important in the last 50 years.
There are always those exceptional people who will succeed no matter what. McMorris is clearly a determined individual. When he sees that gentle bump on the Saskatchewan horizon, he probably really envisions a snow-capped peak.
Maybe for McMorris, living on the flattest spot on the planet didn't matter. For most of us however, if we strapped a snowboard to our feet, we'd just be standing motionlessly in the backyard.
She said
Many of you have probably heard about Mark McMorris and his dual gold medals at the X Games a couple of weeks ago. A prairie boy from Regina went to Aspen, Colorado and won a snowboarding competition. This is especially exciting when one considers how few mountains we have surrounding Regina. And by few, I mean none, though Mission Ridge does a nice job of pretending.
So this begs the question: does where you grow up and train affect your athletic career?
Of course, McMorris isn't the only athlete to be successful outside of his geographic area. Consider that the NHL has teams from California and other warm-climate locations. There are talented swimmers from countries that have no natural unfrozen bodies of water. And there was that Jamaican bobsled team, right? Cool Runnings, or something?
With all this evidence before me, I've decided that location can't affect an athlete's ability. If an athlete has skill, then he/she has skill. No one can say that McMorris isn't talented.
But I think that what must be kept in mind is that a person can have all the natural ability in the world, but without the means to practice and cultivate that skill, being talented is pretty irrelevent.
Hypothetically, a young, aspiring hockey player may dream of making it big some day. But if he can't afford equipment, is unable to make it to a rink and doesn't have a league in which to participate, the likelihood of him becoming the lead point scorer for an NHL team isn't very good.
For McMorris, he had the circumstances, plus the talent, to be successful as a snowboarder. There are probably other young people in Saskatchewan with the same amount of ability, the same amount of raw talent as McMorris, but without some other variable, be it financial or motivational.
