The Morning ... According to Us

Genetic tests to tell you what Little Timmy will excel in athletically.

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"Why, he could be the next Joey Chestnut!"

Some people probably shouldn't be parents. People who attack pee wee football refs or opposing pee wee players. People who go at one another with aluminum baseball bats at a t-ball game. Both people in this photo. It's this sort of parent, living through a child's sporting life to the extent of participation, that science must now deal with. Because the over-involved sports dad just found a new competitive edge for his offspring: Genetic tests that reveal your toddler's dominant sport in the future.

For $149, a company called Atlas Sports Genetics will swab the inside of your three year old's cheek, collecting DNA that is then tested for the ACTN3 gene. This gene reveals the sort of muscle fiber little Timmy has: fast-twitch for explosive sports; slow- for endurance; or some combination thereof. Atlas readily acknowledges the limitations of its tests, but thinks they can help place kids in the sports in which they'll succeed.

Scientists disagree. No one gene can predict athletic performance, nor can genes alone predict it. Athletic ability is, of course, a balance between genetic makeup and a child's environment. But not every researcher believes in such symmetry.

We live in the age of the genome. Since the first was mapped in 2003, geneticists have been able to show predispositions to, um, everything. You can find ways to fight diabetes. A researcher at Harvard, George Church, will even sequence your entire genome and tell you, in essence, what you will die of. But it's Church's other project that has implications for the crazy sports parents.

It's called the Personal Genome Project, and it's 100,000 participants willing to post their medical records and DNA sequence on the Web. Any researcher can then sift through the data for links between genes and traits. It's open-sourced genomics, and though the project does not have explicit athletic aims, it presents an opportunity for all sports researchers to expand our understanding of what genetically makes an elite athlete elite. And once you know that, well, you can test for it with far greater precision than Atlas Sports Genetics currently boasts. This is but the dawn of the crazy sports dad.

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