Talent Comes in All Shapes and Sizes

Most people, when they hear the word talent, picture a physical thing. The engine, the lungs, the build that makes you look like you were assembled in a lab for a specific sport.

Nino Schurter - ten world titles, full Olympic medal set, arguably the greatest mountain biker who ever lived - said pressure was always a gift rather than a weight. Even as a kid. Didn’t need to learn it. Just one of those things.

And then, almost as an aside, he mentioned his actual mental toolkit. A few tricks shown to him once by a coach during his junior national team days. Visualization, mostly. Race walk-throughs. He’s used them ever since - across 23 years and every major race of his career.

That’s it. A handful of tricks, probably explained in an afternoon, carrying a 23-year career.

I had to learn mine. Whether pressure feels like a threat or a privilege can flip the entire outcome - I know that from experience rather than instinct. The research supports it too: pressure tolerance responds to training in a way that raw physiology simply doesn’t. You can’t significantly move your VO2 max. You absolutely can move how you read a high-stakes moment.

The question of whether champions are born is the wrong question. Talent in sport is far more multidimensional than we tend to admit. Some of it is physical, some of it learned, some of it stumbled upon at exactly the right moment.

Nino’s episode is up.

Jan.