Sporty parents are only part of the puzzle when it comes to making an Olympic champion
PROF GILES YEO (@GilesYeo)Giles Yeo is a professor at the University of Cambridge researching food intake, genetics and obesity. He is also a broadcaster and author. His latest book is Why Calories Don’t Count (£10.99, Orion) DISCOVER MORE
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During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, I was on a family hiking holiday in Yorkshire. In the evenings, after a meal and a couple of drinks in the pub, we would sit down to watch the coverage of the day’s events. My favourite was track cycling.
If you’ve never watched a bunch of athletes, all of whom have thighs that are thicker than a supermodel’s waist, racing around a polished wooden track at ridiculous speeds, on bikes that only have one gear and no brakes, I can highly recommend it. It’s a sport that the UK excels at.
We even have our own ‘golden couple’ of track cycling, Jason Kenny and Laura Trott, who, at the time, were engaged to be married. Sir Jason and Dame Laura Kenny, who were knighted in 2022, have an unbelievable 12 Olympic gold medals between them.
On this particular evening, Laura had already completed her events and was cheering Jason on to winning his third and final Rio gold. As the crowd, and we in our small Yorkshire hotel room, roared Jason across the finish line, Laura tweeted: “Arghhhh!!!!!! I love him to bits! Our kids have to get some of these genes right?!”
Naturally, this piqued the interest of the geneticist in me. What are those odds? Will their offspring be sporting superstars, or will they be watching future Olympic Games on the sofa with the rest of us?
Laura has good reason to be hopeful. The chances of her and Jason’s combined genes producing children who are not only very athletic, but potential Olympians are a lot higher than for the rest of us.
It’s the same as fast bowler Stuart Broad having a better chance of becoming a star cricketer because his father Chris batted for England. Or British middleweight boxing champion Chris Eubank Jr being more likely to become a top boxer than his friends, due to his father’s skill in the ring. Or long-distance runner Eilish McColgan thanking her Olympic medallist-mother Liz for her athleticism. Likewise, any of Laura and Jason’s children (they have two now) will have a huge genetic head start.
But, while there are some human traits (such as those that control hair colour, lactose intoler
