Elite athletes gain an edge by developing unconventional skills outside their sport. Zlatan Ibrahimović's taekwondo training gave him leg speed and scoring ability that separated him from other strikers. Trying to out-perform everyone at the same skills is less effective than building unique ones.
All of the best athletes cheat by developing abilities that the others in the sport are not developing. You see Zlatan, one of the most famous ever soccer players, huge taekwondo background, practice, moving his legs as fast as he could, scored goals that probably no other player could ever have scored, and still, like most players, are not addressing this at all. Try and do the same thing everyone else is doing and do it better than everybody else is more difficult than to do things that others aren't doing and to get yourself a competitive advantage.
