In "The Sports Gene" by author David Epstein, there are countless examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us.
They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.
For example, Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7' 3.25"--practically a world-class height. The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. How did he do it? He was blessed, among other things, with unusually long legs and a strikingly long Achilles tendon--ten and a quarter inches in length--which acted as a kind of spring, catapulting him high into the air when he planted his foot for a jump.
What we are watching when we watch elite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages.
Epstein tells us that baseball players have, as a group, remarkable eyesight. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum test close to four hundred major and minor league baseball players over four years and found an average visual acuity of about 20/13; that is, the typical professional baseball player can see at twenty feet what the rest of us can see at thirteen feet.
The ability to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.
Eyesight can be improved--in some cases dramatically--through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. But when it comes to drugs, Major League Baseball--like most sports--draws the line.
Source: Man and Superman article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker magazine, September 9, 2013
David Epstein: The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance