track and field is largely irrelevant. Chess is pretty irrelevant, no matter how much i love it. avant-garde Novels are also irrelevant.
What i mean is that a huge majority of gifted athletes will not be going into track and field. The best athletes aren't pro runners. I'm not saying that there aren't great runners who are athletes, just that soccer, and basketball will be taking a lot of the talent away from track.
Same is true of chess. Best gameplayers are not deciding to go into chess. It is a very minor game, like rugby. I would even think that Poker has more strategic talent than Chess does.
I am curious to see what you base this on. Sounds like a lot of hand-wavy speculation to me. If you would have talked about Americans going for American Football in college rather than say, Olympic Weightlifting, that would be a different thing.
When exactly does someone like a Carlsen (Norway) or Anand (India), as "gameplayers", choose to go into a different game than chess?
As an example, I used to play chess when I was younger. Plenty of people later took up things like poker and starcraft, and a few became quite successful at it. These people were generally not the best chess players, instead they were more likely to be average / slightly above average (for being serious club players) in chess.
you choose to go into it when you see that you have a lot of talent in it and you enjoy playing it more than other games and it interests you. you have time to try out many games. Some will choose chess, others will choose Go. Chess was THE game during the cold war. if you were smart and you loved games, then you played chess. a lot.
What i mean is that a huge majority of gifted athletes will not be going into track and field. The best athletes aren't pro runners. I'm not saying that there aren't great runners who are athletes, just that soccer, and basketball will be taking a lot of the talent away from track.
Same is true of chess. Best gameplayers are not deciding to go into chess. It is a very minor game, like rugby. I would even think that Poker has more strategic talent than Chess does.