The Best
How Elite Athletes Are Made
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Narrated by:
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Matthew Syed
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Stuart Nurse
About this listen
The secrets of superhuman performance.
The inside track on how champions are made, written by one of the world's top sports scientists and an award-winning sports journalist.
Never have the best sportspeople seemed so far removed from the rest of us, their prowess so unfathomable. So how are these extraordinary athletes made?
The Best reveals how the most incredible sportspeople in the world get to the top and stay there. It is a unique look at the path to sporting greatness; a story of origins, serendipity, practice, genetics and the psychology of excellence, as well as of sports science and cutting edge technology.
Packed with gripping personal stories and exclusive interviews with top athletes including Siya Kolisi, Marcus Rashford, Pete Sampras, Steph Curry, Jamie Carragher, Ian Poulter, Helen Glover, Ada Hegerberg, Elena Delle Donne, Joey Votto and Mike Hussey, it explains how the best athletes develop the extraordinary skills that allow them to perform remarkable feats under extreme pressure.
Get inside the minds of champions and understand first-hand what makes them perform during high-octane competition, what they think about in the heat of the moment and what drives them to do what they do.
By combining examples from numerous original interviews with top athletes and leading sports science research, The Best deconstructs superhuman performance and answers the question on every sports fan's mind: How did they do that?
©2020 Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore (P)2020 Hodder & Stoughton LimitedCritic reviews
"Insightful, thoughtful and altogether wonderful." (Daniel Coyle, New York Times best-selling author of The Talent Code)
"This book is a must read." (Eddie Jones, Head Coach, England Rugby)
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