Who's the odd one out of these four: Is it the footballer Wayne Rooney, The cricketer Andrew Flintoff, The Olympic Gold medal heptathlete Denise Lewis? Or the Conservative MP and legendary launching Nicholas Soames.

It is, of course, Nicholas Soames, because all of the others were born between September and December.

New research, this is the serious bit, shows that children born in the latter part of the academic year, that's from June to August are less likely to become elite athletes. It's simply because they are smaller than others in their school year who have been picked to join teams and academies. Richard Watson reports.

Yes!

I think I was one of the lucky ones. I very quickly was picked for the football team, the basketball team, and obviously when the cross-country season started in the middle of the winter, I found I was pretty good at it. er, possibly because I was a bit taller, a bit stronger, a bit quicker and than a lot of my pals, and I think that then I guess for me, cemented my love of sport straight away. And I wanted to be involved.

6 times gold medalist and former world record-holder, Steve Cram, the man who went on to break 3 world records in 19 days, one of Britain's most successful ever athletes, has always suspected of being born in October gave him a big advantage.

I think I with, er, you know I was fairly tall because that helped me, with my running certainly helped me with getting on the basketball team and football. And I might have been lucky in little bit in skill, to be honest, but you know, I was physically developed enough to stand out at the age of 11 or 12. And ,and I think that's, what teachers tend to look for. Don't they? At that age, that they are looking for the ones, who just look a little bit more developed, a bit quicker, a bit stronger, they get them in the team.

The report from a new think-tank headed by Steve Cram, has correlated performance against age. It says that 67 percent of the football association's youth academy were born between September and November, while just 2 percent were born between Junes to August. In athletics, 65 percent of top teenage performers were born in the autumn term, while 8 percent were born in the summer. And the team noted that a 14-year-old boy born in September will be on average 7 centimeters taller and 5.7 kilograms heavier than a boy born in August.

I think the research that is actually quite startling in terms of the strength of the evidence. You know, The high percentages of people who do go onto a successful career is born in literally 3, 4 months of the year.

This is one of the government's flagship sports colleges, Landon School, just a couple of miles from the 2012 Olympic Site in London. Across the country, close to a billion pounds has been invested in school sport over the past 4 years. The proportion of the children doing more than 2 hours of P.E. a week has increased from 25 to over 80 percent. But there's still a concern that an early focus on teen selection is teaching failure based on nothing more than physical strength linked to date of birth.

What we are very concerned about is that children all dropping out of sport and recreational exercises because they are being overlooked. And we know that there are more and more people in the country who are becoming obese, we want people to enjoy healthy and active lives. And if we can give them every opportunity taking part in sport at school level and not be overlooked, we very firmly believe that they would then go on; maybe not to represent the country but to exercise regularly throughout their lifestyles. So it's about winning more medals but it's also crucially about improving the level of participation in sport across the whole society.

The sports asserted here in Landon School are probably second to none. But if this academic research due to be published tomorrow is correct, that implies that even in schools like this, more could be done to help children who were born in the early part of the year. But the key question is in pouty terms, what could or should be done about it?