I was reading somewhere that gains from plyometrics and olympic lifts are minimal if you cannot bench press your body weight and squat 1.5 bodyweight, is there any truth to this?
Sprinting is a plyometric activity and if you do not learn the olympic lifts (note I said learn, not necessarily base your program around it) before you are very strong, it can be hard to learn them once you are at higher strength levels (from anecdotal accounts). It is not really true, although those are good things to have and proper GPP is needed before the most intense lifting/plyos/sprinting is done.
This has been discussed before, if you search for it you’ll find more than you wanted.