The search, diagnosis and promotion of talents is in many sports disciplines one of the most important tasks of training science. On one side the scientific approaches of the research on talent are focussed on the heredity and developmental stability of different endogenious anatomical and physiological components, that effect future success in sport. On the other side these studies are added by investigations, which analyse the influence of contextual variables on the long term development of sport performance. Such exogenious variables are e. g. the support systems in the environment of the ath-letes and the quantity and quality of training load. In this concept of talent research two transitions from a narrow to a wide approach and from a static to a dynamic approach took place (see figure 1). In our study on the development of performance in sports talents we investigated the swimmers of the Elite Sports School in Magdeburg/Germany. Our findings led to three criteria, that are useful to identify talents in swimming: The performance of the young swimmers in competition, which has to be under-stood as a gross indicator of the swimmers actual and overall ability. The degree of utilization of different basic abilities, e.g. motor coordination, body constitution, and others on a certain level of performance. The speed of development of the performance, that is the rates of gains in perfor-mance from year to year within the long run of the training process.
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