Uzbekistan's Plan to Genetically Groom Olympic Athletes Isn't Going to Work

In a few years, we'll look back at the Sochi Olympics as the last one where being chosen as an Olympic athlete was something involving lots of athleticism, a bit of luck, and, yes, sometimes a bit of politics. Because at least one country, Uzbekistan, has announced that they’re going to start genetically screening children in order to groom them as Olympic athletes.

Or maybe we won’t, because their plan probably isn’t going to work, and experts say Uzbekistan’s time and energy is being misplaced.

Rustam Muhamedov, director of Uzbekistan’s Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry announced that he and the country’s National Olympic Committee have started a program for “sports selection at the molecular genetic level.”

"Developed countries throughout the world like the United States, China, and European countries are researching the human genome and have discovered genes that define a propensity for specific sports," Muhamedov told the state-owned Pravda vostoka newspaper. "We want to use these methods in order to help select our future champions."

The program is set to start early next year and will be used to select soccer players, swimmers, and rowers for potential future Olympic teams.

According to a report in Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, Muhamedov will take blood samples from children as young as 10 years old and will analyze a set of 50 genes that he says are most important to athleticism. According to the report, the results of that blood test will be used to tell parents “what sports they are best suited for.”

The idea of national Olympic camps is nothing new—there have been plenty of stories about the Figure Skating Federation of Russia (or, earlier, the USSR) grooming athletes from the time they can walk and China has caught lots of heat for having as many as 15,000 government-funded sports schools to help train Olympic athletes.

Genetics of sports has long been something that magazines, fans, and sports talk radio have spent plenty of time talking about (and sometimes getting scared about). Genetics and athlete selection or modification has largely remained the stuff of futuristic fantasy.

The idea is that, one day, we’ll be able to genetically enhance athletes so they’re stronger, faster, bigger, less prone to injury. Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein took a massive look at “sports genes” back in 2010, and later turned the article into a book on the subject, The Sports Gene. Other sports magazines have been trying to assemble the perfect athlete based on superstar marriages (Nomar Garciaparra and Mia Ham was a particularly popular one a decade ago, as was Steffi Graf and Andre Aggassi). And then there’s the fact that many sports families—the Mannings, the Griffeys, the Bondses—seem to be born with something extra.

But for now, it’s unclear—and unlikely—that genetic testing is going to be any better at predicting who’s cut out to be an athlete than, say, watching children play a sport and picking out the best ones. Epstein told me that there’s much more to selecting an athlete than looking at his or her genes.

“The biggest reason it doesn’t make a lot of sense is you want to know about an athlete’s physiology, which is the result of a lot of genes and their environment, which can be much better tested directly rather than indirectly,” he said. “Why look at just genes when the real thing you want can be directly tested?”

That means it’s better to, say, watch a child play soccer rather than test his blood to see if he might be good at playing soccer.

It’s true that countries are getting much better at predicting who might make a world-class athlete, but direct genetic testing has little to do with it. Epstein says that three of the last four Summer Olympics host countries—the United Kingdom, Australia, and China—all did some sort of athlete selection based on science.

“So much is known about what it takes to succeed in different sports, and athletes in different sports are getting more and more different, that countries are starting to shuffle athletes between sports,” he said.

In China, for instance, they might line up children and have them hold their arms above their heads to select who might be a future champion diver.

“If their elbow joints didn’t meet above their heads, they realized they wouldn’t enter the water smoothly and send them off to another sport,” Epstein said. “It is, in one sense, a form of genetic testing.”

But there’s more to selecting a champion athlete than merely picking the best child athletes and choosing to train them. If you do that, he says, you’ll miss out on late bloomers. The best child athletes are often the ones who are further along developmentally, not the ones who will grow up to be the best athletes.

“In the Netherlands, they’ll track growth velocity and see where a kid is along in puberty to make sure they don’t get screened out. They’ll take a kid who is skilled but small, who a coach might say filter them out,” he said. “Well, now they’re keeping them and that’s one of the reasons they’re a small country that reached the last World Cup final.”

There are, however, some useful uses of genetic testing—if you’re willing to cast aside some moral dilemmas. The easiest and best-understood forms of genetic testing test just one gene that controls for a certain trait. That’s why we’re good at predicting genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis. But there are some traits controlled by just one gene that are of note to athletes. One causes a mutation that allows the body to create many more blood cells, and the other allows for explosive muscle growth. Genetic testing and selection could be done to “create” babies who are predisposed to being good athletes.

“Athleticism is related to large networks and is prohibitively complex for what we have now,” Epstein said. “I think they are sort of misunderstanding how this works.”

What Uzbekistan is doing could work, but it probably won’t.