ABSTRACT

In sport, significant resources are dedicated to the development of large groups of athletes in the hope of producing elite performers. This chapter has largely focused on formal talent identification programmes but there is little documentation stating the specific detail of support services given to the athletes to help them succeed with the transfer to another sport. These would include World-class coaching and sports science and medicine support as part of a carefully planned training and competition programme, with the major goal of achieving selection and success for upcoming competitions. The use of talent transfer is becoming increasingly common within high performance sport to help support medal-winning potential. An integral element of talent transfer is that excellence in a sport is not idiosyncratic to a standard set of skills or physical attributes; it can be achieved in individual or unique ways through different combinations of skills, attributes and capacities.