On Thursday, the researchers at King's College London said that the length of a girl's ring finger could determine her future sporting potential.

The findings, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, show that women with ring fingers longer than their index fingers are good at running and associated sports such as soccer and tennis which involves running.

The researchers measured the hands of 607 female twins aged 25-79 from the UK and compared then with the women's lifetime sporting achievements.

It is a fact that women's ring finger have short or same length as that of the index finger, while in men the ring finger is generally longer.

According to the report, the detection of sporting ability by examining the ratio between the index and ring fingers "could help identify talented individuals at a pre-competitive stage."

Professor Tim Spector from the Twins Research Unit at King's College told Reuters that the reasons for the findings were unclear and he was initially skeptical about the link to sporting ability.

"Previous studies have suggested the change in finger length was due to changes in testosterone levels in the womb," he said.

But it was found in a separate study of twins that finger length was mainly inherited, possibly explaining the reason why sporting parents often have sporting children.

"We found that finger length was 70 percent heritable with little influence of the womb environment," he said.

"This suggests that genes are the main factor and that finger length is a marker of your genes."