Genetics Deals the Hand, Environment Plays It.

I read a line recently and it’s offered me a fresh take on watching sports unfold this summer: genetics deals the hand, environment plays it. It’s been rattling around my head all through the Tour de France, Roth, Wimbledon, the soccer World Cup and even the mountain bike World Cup here in Andorra.

Every athlete at this sort of level has won the genetic lottery. All of them. You don’t make a World Tour roster with an ordinary engine. Admitting that is harder than it sounds - I’ve caught myself doing it and watched plenty of others do the same: we downplay the talent because it feels like it takes something away from the hard work. It doesn’t. Both things are true at once.

And talent doesn’t come in one size or shape. Tadej Pogacar’s engine is bigger than almost anyone’s - that’s simply a different hand than the rest of the peloton was dealt, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. But an engine can also mean recovering faster than the guy next to you, handling heat, absorbing training load, or a nervous system that stays calm at 180 beats. The lottery has many prizes, and everyone at this level has won a few of them.

I’ll leave the tennis and football analysis to people who know what they’re talking about and stick to my area of expertise: endurance sport. Because nowhere is the hand-versus-table question more visible than in a sport where everyone can see the numbers.

The hand matters, but I’d say it is the least interesting part of the game, because it’s the only part with no decisions in it. The decisions are where everything happens.

Wherever we look we’ll see athletes with near-identical numbers having completely different careers. One squad turns a group of very good athletes into something that looks inevitable. Another takes the same calibre of talent and produces tense press conferences, mysterious mid-season coaching changes and two training partners quietly racing each other for a result nobody will remember by September. Same cards. Very different poker.

The difference is rarely the engine. It’s everything around the engine: who’s trusted, who’s protected, who gets told the truth at the right volume and who only hears it from the media. Some environments multiply talent. Others feed on it. And the athletes inside can’t always tell which one they’re in until they leave or build their own.

Roth a couple of weeks ago was the other side of the same coin. An environment working in an athlete’s favour, all at once, on one day. A world record doesn’t happen on engine alone. It takes a fast course, a quarter of a million people lining the roads and a team around Sam that believes deeply and still cares for the human more than the result. The hand was world class, no question. But for a long time the table has been too - and that’s what records are actually made of.

I’ve watched and lived through many environments. The biggest engines I ever raced against didn’t all have the biggest careers - and at the time it was a mystery why. The ones who made it weren’t the ones with the best numbers. They were the ones surrounding themselves with the best people for them. Most people blame the cards. Wrong genetics, wrong body type, too old, started too late - and conveniently, the cards can’t be changed, so nothing has to be done.

But almost nobody is actually limited by their genetics. They’re limited by the table. Training alone at 6am with nobody to chase. A group chat that celebrates skipping the session. A kitchen stocked like a petrol station. A body that gets whatever hours the job and the family didn’t want - which, to be fair, is sometimes just called life, and life is allowed to win a few rounds.

The environment is the part you can pick. The club or group that pushes you. The training partner who’ll be standing outside at the agreed time, because your discipline will fail you long before your embarrassment does. It’s seldom the gadgets that play the hand better.

So watch the rest of the summer with that lens. Stop seeing engines and start seeing environments - who’s thriving because of their setup, who’s surviving despite of it. Then look at your own week and ask the same question. To use the analogy one last time: you can’t reshuffle the deck. But I’ve witnessed many folding perfectly playable hands.

Keep playing,

Jan.