What Decides Your Athletic Career?—Reflection from Our Study of GP.Mur-Associated Sports Talents during the COVID-19 Pandemic Era

Abstract

This opinion article discusses the factors that attract children and teens to athletic careers. The most important attribute for the making of athletes is polished sports talent, followed by psychological, environmental, and incentive factors. Our laboratory studies a red blood cell (RBC) type called GP.Mur, which is rare in most parts of the world besides Southeast Asia. Intriguingly, the prevalence of the GP.Mur blood type is relatively high among Taiwanese elite athletes. The highest frequency of the GP.Mur blood type worldwide is found among Taiwan’s Ami people (88–95% from hospital blood bank surveys in the 1980s). Though the Ami constitute only 0.6–0.8% of the Taiwanese population, from records of national track-and-field games in the past century, 10–60% of the medalists were Ami. Biologically, GP.Mur expression supports blood CO2 metabolism, which may have implications for athleticism. As many of our study subjects are elite college athletes with the GP.Mur blood type, we contemplated their upbringings and career dilemmas, especially during the difficult COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond individual sports talent, the pandemic particularly tests personal characteristics and socioeconomic support for becoming an athlete.

Special Issue: Sport Psychology Interventions for Athletes’ Performance and Well-Being

“…This Special Issue of the “International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health “aims to create a constructive discussion on up-to-date scientific data in this area”. In addition to an intriguing opinion piece in which Hsu and Tseng [ 4 ] claim that the most important attribute for the making of athletes is polished sports talent, followed by psychological, environmental, and incentive factors, we summarize in the following paragraphs the articles which have been published thus far in this Special Issue entitled, “Sport Psychology Interventions for Athletes’ Performance and Well-Being”.…”