Athletics is quite possibly the most ancient sport in the Olympic programme. It is a collection of sporting events that involve running, jumping, throwing and walking and it has been documented since the ancient Olympics. Athletics is in fact one of the only five sports that have been contested at every summer Olympic Games since 1896 with a current programme of 24 events contested in the Olympic programme. National and continental and World events are also contested at various age groups (youth and junior categories) as well as youth Olympic Games since their inception in 2010. In this sport, young athletes compete in groups according to their birth year with specific age ranges for each category. They compete with peers up until the junior level before entering senior competitions (albeit recently some under-23 competitions were created to facilitate transition from junior to senior). Various approaches have been used to detect, confirm and develop talent in the sport of athletics, however many are still strongly biased towards competition results, which is a typical issue in CGS (centimetres, grams and seconds) sport. Talent by definition is "…an individual whose athletic performances are superior to his peer group and is capable of reaching or has achieved consisting performances at top level1". Therefore, by proxy, individuals winning at youth or junior level in athletics competitions are often identified or referred to as "talents". While this may be semantically correct, the true manifestation of sporting talent occurs when elite level performance is reached at adult level and therefore, any assessment of transition from potential talent to champion should occur with the long-term view of identifying successful adult performers. Running, jumping and throwing are the skills affected to a large extent by physical traits, influenced by genetic factors 2-4 and developed through life with training. Furthermore, the physical abilities underpinning performance in running/jumping/throwing events evolve and are affected by growth and maturation from childhood to adolescence to adulthood 5-8. For this reason, predicting adult performances at a very young age is challenging and might not be the most appropriate approach. Also, since training and competition exposure combined with injury occurrence affect the development of talent and affect the chances of its manifesting at adult age, it is necessary to understand how we can assess athletic progression of what can be realistic expectations for the young athlete. Such an approach would reduce the risks of identifying early maturers as potential adult talents, would reduce the risk of deselecting potential high performers at later stages in life and could contribute to the development of more appropriate expectations and evaluations of athletic development programmes.
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