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It is a myth though, regardless of whether you, personally, believe it to be or not. It's based almost entirely on a very old study, conducted in a very limited environment, cited by Fred Brooks in “The Mythical Man Month” and then taken further and further out of context. As Jacob points out in his talk, we don’t really have any compelling reason to believe we know how to measure programming productivity, so we don’t have good data. In the absence of good data, we have to assume that the null hypothesis is that programming is like literally every other skill out there. And, no, there are not ”10x atheletes”, we know what the skill distribution is for atheletes, there is a tremendous amount of publicly available statistical data available on athletes, and, again, as Jacob points out in his talk, their skills fall on a normal distribution just like every other kind of skill out there.

So, there are outliers, which is what I think you mean by "10x atheletes", but those outliers are just that: outliers. And we do not have good metrics for determining who they are in the software industry, currently.