Fast Track or Short Cut?

Impatience is a very common trait in high performance sport. Mostly because people involved in HP sport like winning, and not many of the teams or athletes who are competing actually get to do that. Coaches are impatient, fans are impatient, parents are impatient, sponsors are impatient, and funding bodies are impatient. Probably the people with the most patience in sport are involved in training developmental athletes. These people generally have a keen understanding that things take time. I remember once being in a meeting where a developmental coach was asked which 4 of his 8 athletes were the most likely to succeed. The point being that by focussing on 4 instead of 8 the coach would be able to provide more attention and therefore fast-track their success. This point of view is very common, and problematic in a number of ways: How do we know that having only 4 athletes would actually be more likely to achieve success than 8 athletes? Really, what evidence do we have? How