Sports-Related Genomic Predictors Are Associated with Athlete Status in Chinese Sprint/Power Athletes

<b>Objectives:</b> The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between variant loci significantly associated with sports-related traits in the GWAS Catalog database and sprint/power athlete status, as well as to explore the polygenic profile of elite athletes. <b>Methods:</b> Next-generation sequencing and microarray technology were used to genotype samples from 211 elite athletes who had achieved success in national or international competitions in power-based sports and from 522 non-athletes, who were healthy university students with no history of professional sports training. Variant loci collected from databases were extracted after imputation. Subsequently, 80% of the samples were randomly selected as the training set, and the remaining 20% as the validation set. <b>Results:</b> Association analysis of variant loci was conducted in the training set, and individual Total Genotype Score (TGS) were calculated using genotype dosage and lnOR, followed by the establishment of a logistic model, with predictive performance evaluated in the validation set. Association analysis was performed on 2075 variant loci, and after removing linked loci (r² > 0.2), 118 Tag SNPs (<i>p</i> ≤ 0.05) were identified. A logistic model built using 30 Tag SNPs (<i>p</i> ≤ 0.01) showed better performance in the validation set (AUC = 0.707). <b>Conclusions:</b> Our study identified 30 new genetic molecular markers and demonstrated that elite sprint/power athlete status is polygenic.