Chapter 8 focuses on the importance of sport development in high performance sport. The chapter will present sport development processes and practices as the basis and backbone of athlete development in high performance sport (HPS). HPS is the top end of sport development and encapsulates any athlete that competes at an international and national level. The chapter will examine who (what sporting organisations and other stakeholders) is involved in the various stages of athlete development including the attraction, retention and nurturing process, in what ways (roles) and with what outcomes/pathways. Elite athletes are those who compete at the Olympic Games and various World Championships or play professional sports such as cricket, football and rugby. According to Dr Phil Jauncey, a sports psychologist with the Australian baseball team and the Queensland Bulls Cricket team, the current number of elite athletes in the USA is somewhere between 12 and 15 thousand and these athletes participate at the elite level for an average of between 3 and 5 years depending on the sport. Given that the population of the US is about 300 million, this means that the percentage of the US population that comprises elite athletes is less than 0.005%. If that is the case, how do these athletes defy the odds and make it to the top? Is success dependent on a mix of nature and nurture, and being at the right place at the right time? Or is success in elite sport a systematic process involving more than genetics, upbringing and luck? This chapter discusses the significance of sport development in the development of athletes. Sport development is an indispensable contributor to athletes' initial attraction to their sport and it is essential to the retention of these athletes in the sport system, to their transition to higher levels of competition, and to the nurturing of their long term performances and international success. Sport development is explained as being a management process and not solely a product of biological, psychological and physical attributes.