WHAT IS TALENT?

What is talent

Many times people have asked me what are the signs or criteria of a player with talent, and you should think that I would be able to tell but I’m not and I also think nobody can. Talent is created by a chain of events that is for a large part coincidental doing things, meeting people, being there at the right place at the right time.

In my long cariere has a full time badminton coach I have only seen two players where you could say that they were really special talents, that was Carmilla Martin and Victor Axelsen. There are more players in the World who will qualified beside this two Danish players but I did not know them has youth players and therefore I can not tell. With Carmilla we could already see when she was very young that she would be a great and special player, and she also developed as expected from talented youth player to World champion. And so did Victor Axselsen. They are only two players in the very long list of super good badminton players from Denmark, but most of the others were not gifted with the same very offices talent that showed with Carmilla and Victor.

15 years ago a group of Danish coaches was asked to point out Danish youth players who they thought would be in the top of the World in the next 10 to 15 years. None of this top coaches made the right predictions, here we are talking about some of the best coaches in the World in a country where there is a tradition of having World class players and they could not tell who was going to make it has a talent.

A very good friend of mine the former German National coach Holger Hasse, told me one time that he was always looking for the X factor in talent, something that made the player special. In his eyes the player with talent had a twist somewhere or somehow, many players are good so you need to have something beside this “normal talent” to make you great. To have talent and knowing it can be the biggest problem that a player can have, talent makes you lazy. It is very seldom that you see talented players who are also working very hard, they trust in their talent to much. And just has well you see many players making it to the top because they always lost to the top players in their youth all the time. They had to find ways to get better to beat the talent players and they learned to fight and never give up even if they lose all the time, this is something talented player never had to do so they also did not learn to deal with this. 

Talented players are stopped in there development because they have this talent, on a very early age they are picked out to perform for the National federations expecting to win. You don’t learn so much from winning so while the less talented players lost many of there games they had a lot of things to work on/with and there by where developing. The Danish Badminton Federation did something that I thought was special compared with most other federations. They let the young Victor play in some very good tournaments and he did very well and then you would not see him for sometime  working behind the scenes on developing his game. This is the right way to help young talent to develop it is an investment and not only harvesting. 

We get many players in our academy who are not seen has talents but they all have this X-factor in one way or the other. It is great to have players like that because they have everything in them to become a good player and if there is a top player inside you we will get it out if you have talent or not.