Medalling in LA

Musings on the difference between 'very good' and 'great'

I’ve been a decent athlete in my time - my much younger time, for sure… Although I was a strength athlete (discus, shot putt), and linebacker at university, I was pretty good at most things that took less than 22 seconds… However, it never seemed very special - I was always surrounded by people who seemed better (I say ‘seemed’ but there is a lot of objectivity in it when you are coming second to someone in a 200m race…).

I was surprised to find (last week) that my 100m time, of 11 seconds dead (at the age of 20), was actually pretty remarkable for the general population, and would have been equally unusual for an NFL linebacker…

I began to ruminate on the parallels between drug development and training for an Olympic medal. Let’s say you decided that you had to win one, even a bronze medal, in 2028, in LA.

Let’s equate ‘you’ to a molecule in early phase. Literally every event in LA is open to you - you’ve time to prepare, train, qualify. Likewise, as a molecule, every market is open. In both cases, we’ll establish pretty quickly which ones are unavailable to you, based on your attributes, your talent, the team around you and more.

Where you as a molecule and you looking at the Olympics tend to diverge is that you’ll probably do a very wide ranging opportunity assessment - you might quickly dismiss floor gymnastics if you’re 6’5”, but shooting, archery, slalom canoe?

The thing of it is, in both drug development, being good enough to qualify and being good enough to win are two very different things - that top 0.1% of sprinters includes an awful lot of people, and the curve upwards rises steeply. The same is true for, say, anti-inflammatories too - being good enough to work in RA in a phase II study still leaves open a lot of questions (duration of effect, tolerability, etc.) that stand between market entry and market success.

So, questions remain open: how soon do you pick, and what would confirmation of your choice look like. If you are one of the best footballers in your country at the age of 18, what are your chances of being one of the best in your country just 5 years later? Apparently only 10-15%, based on real world evidence… (About the same as drugs entering phase II…)

What evidence would you need, in 2025, that you were on course for a medal in 10m Air Pistol in 2028? Is it the same kind of evidence that you’d need in the 100m running race? One might expect that you’d have a much greater chance of improvement in one than the other. But, that proxy question remains relevant - your best information might rightly predict and place you in the top 1%, 0.1%, but how about the top 0.001%?

We are lucky that school and school years allow for a wide exploration of talents and aptitudes - and a built in system in most cases for development to find out before any choices are made, if we’re lucky. However, we’re also clear that it is almost impossible to predict - knowing you’re good, even very good, is important, but what happens from then is critical - greatness is much more than very-good-ness…