> what assurance do you have that those differences are explained biologically/genetically rather than resulting from different mental representations of the sport and training process?

Dude, don't do this. "Mental representations" have nothing to do with how fast we can run or how high we can jump.

You are basing this assertion on what, precisely? Attention, posture, pattern memory and state-estimation all strongly impact every level of athletic performance. This has been studied extensively. If I had a better term to describe these aspects of neural organization I would use it. I like mental representation because a coach on the ground can impact development of an athlete by providing a picture of what to focus on during performance, and this representative picture directly improves the signal to noise ratio for the athlete.

This is absurd. Physical attributes.. size, strength, fast-twitch muscle, jumping ability, endurance, sprinting power and speed, these all have massive genetic differences amongst people. You can look up on 23andme they even display genetic markers for sprinting ability.

The "table stakes" for being an elite athlete in many sports are so far beyond what you can just mentally train yourself to achieve by will. Plenty of amateur athletes have mental focus and work ethic, and train religiously, but this doesn't push them anywhere near elite performance levels.

I don't know what you're arguing against, exactly. If you take two athletes with similar physical qualities, and one receives appropriate training while the other does not, the former will outcompete the latter. I'm assuming that everyone in the far right tail of elite performance has the biological advantages you mentioned.

Let's simplify the model to two distributions to make it easier to see: well-trained vs. poorly-trained individuals, where the variance of each distribution is largely accounted for by physical differences. So long as these two distributions overlap, it is a mathematical certainty that some poorly-trained individuals will outperform some well-trained individuals, due to physical and genetic markers. So far so good.

I'm suggesting that there are several overlapping distributions, and that it's impossible to know with certainty whether you've lost to someone due to their physical advantage or their superior cognitive approach & training - if you are only considering the two of you in isolation. The question must be asked of populations, not of individuals.

Anyone who has experienced breaking through plateaus after a decade of training knows this is true. Whatever seem absurd to you must be due to some other miscommunication. I specifically exempted the top elite performers from consideration because in that restricted case my argument no longer holds. I thought that was clear.

Given that humanity has been competing in athletics events for thousands of years and that athletic event optimization is a massive industry (including state actors) if there was a learnable mental approach you'd assume they'd have found it by now (and everyone would be using it). Moreover I'd argue the ability to relatively quickly come up with a mental model that the rest of humanity is unable to replicate would itself be a form of innate talent.

Have you read about the Fosbury Flop? This is an example of changing the model in order to push the boundaries of what was considered possible. Also, I agree that there is likely a talent component to establishing the best models for training - but it's also a skill. Imparting these models is what world class coaches do, after all.

You are totally right that well-exploited sports have established models that are probably optimal, especially at the elite level.

I find these circumstances boring, personally. My interest lies in learning unfamiliar or complex tasks for which no optimal model is known, and also in maximizing the rate of skill acquisition by iterating on the model generation in an abstract way.