On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:52:48 -0700 (PDT), LMC Society
<aegisigea@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080824_olympics.htm
>
>
>Olympics 2008: Biological Questions And Answers
>By Steve Sailer
>
>Why did Jamaicans, led by triple world record-setter Usain "Lightning"
>Bolt, dominate the 100 and 200 meter sprints in the 2008 Olympics?
>
>This question can be answered at two very different levels: the
>superficial and the fundamental.
>
>The former, the horserace type of question—i.e., Why did the Jamaicans
>surge ahead of the Americans between 2004 and 2008?—is the more
>interesting one to most people. They want to know which Thoroughbred
>to bet on in the next race, not why Thoroughbreds are faster than
>Clydesdales.
>
>In contrast, more fundamental questions about matters that don't
>change rapidly—e.g., Why have people related to Usain Bolt
>genealogically, men of West African descent, made up all 56 qualifiers
>for the finals of the 100 meter dash in the last seven consecutive
>Olympics?—are not terribly welcome.
>
>It's not just that the answers tend to imply profoundly unsettling
>things about humanity. But also … how do you make money off them?
>
>For example, consider the climactic event of the 2008 Olympics, the
>men's marathon. If it had been won by, say, an African-American named
>D'Shawn, there would already be literary and movie agents winging
>their way to Beijing to try to sign him up for an inspiring
>autobiography, television movie, and motivational speaking tour about
>how he had "shattered stereotypes" that men of West African descent
>are better suited for the 100m than the marathon. Stereotype
>Shattering is big business in the modern world.
>
>Unfortunately for would-be promoters, the 2008 marathon medals were
>actually earned by a Kenyan, a Moroccan, and an Ethiopian, boringly
>reaffirming all the stereotypes about who is best at distance
>running.
>
>Nobody in America was wowed that a 5'-4" and 112 pound Kenyan won the
>marathon. (Actually, it was the first time a Kenyan was victorious in
>the Olympic marathon. The top Kenyan marathoners, no fools, focus more
>on the spring and fall marathons, such as the Boston and New York,
>which pay winners in money rather than in medals.)
>
>Yet, it's precisely this ho-hum several-decade-long stability in the
>racial heritage of the winners of the various men's running events
>that makes the demographics of running a topic of fundamental
>interest.
>
>Running is certainly among the most primordial and universal of
>s****ts. It's the one about which we can most accurately say: We
>evolved to do this. We are more likely to be descended from humans who
>outsprinted charging predators or outjogged wounded prey than from
>those who did not.
>
>Of course, other s****ts—whether the pole vault, rhythmic gymnastics,
>or BMX bike-racing—all make use of evolved skills. But the connection
>is more indirect. The s****ts closest in naturalness to track and field
>(which the rest of the world tellingly calls "athletics") are the
>fighting s****ts—boxing, wrestling, judo and the like. But they are all
>hedged in with complex rules to keep the competitors from doing too
>much damage to each other. In contrast, in running, the gun goes off—
>and the first one across the finish line wins.
>
>This very lack of complexity makes running less than fascinating as a
>spectator s****t—except at the quadrennial Olympics when the weight of
>history and the four year wait until the next Olympics bears so
>heavily on the competitors' shoulders.
>
>Fans who keep up with track and field in-between Summer Games tend to
>be statistics-loving nerds. This has kept the s****t relatively popular
>in Europe, where the main spectator s****t, soccer, was traditionally
>almost bereft of statistical interest.
>
>Here in the U.S., though, baseball absorbs more of the attention of
>the numbers-obsessed fraction of the public.
>
>Nonetheless, it's time to think about the fundamentals of running
>success.
>
>During much of the 20th Century, the backgrounds of the best runners
>were constantly changing, making it hard to draw inferences about
>natural talent. The first Olympics were dominated by Chariots of Fire-
>style English schoolboys and their American cousins. Then emerged
>Finnish "scientific runners" such as Paavo Nurmi, followed by long-
>legged African-American and studious Japanese sprinters, and so
>forth.
>
>In the last quarter of a century, however, we seem to have reached an
>equilibrium point. The racial patterns have stabilized. Each distance
>having its dominant ethnicities.
>
>I've created tables of the 200 fastest times by racial background for
>each of the major distances from 100 meters to the marathon (42,000
>meters). My calculations aren't perfect, but I spent a lot of time
>looking at pictures of runners to ascertain their race. For example,
>the great Cuban 400m and 800m gold medalist at the 1972 and 1976
>Games, Alberto Juantorena, wore his hair in the 'fro style popular at
>the time. These days, however, the balding Juantorena looks quite
>white.
>
>The results are most informative. For example, here is a graph showing
>performances by West African runners and their black cousins in the
>New World.
>
>Blacks of West African descent utterly dominate the 100 meter dash,
>accounting for all but one of the 200 quickest marks in history.
>They're almost as dominant at 200m, not quite as overwhelming at 400m,
>and only modestly competitive at 800m. They aren't world class at any
>longer lengths, although a black Brazilian did once run a fast
>marathon in the 1990s. (Brazilian blacks appear to average more East
>African ancestry than American and West Indian blacks.)
>
>In contrast, this graph shows the strengths of the three African
>distance running powerhouses. The Kenyans (green line) are not
>competitive in the short sprints but occasionally show up in the 400.
>They are tremendously strong from 800m through the marathon.
>
>The Kenyans' northern neighbors, the Ethiopians (red line), don't
>emerge until 3000 meters (I've averaged the 3000m steeplechase and the
>3000m flat race). They peak at 5000 and 10000 meters.
>
>The northwest Africans (from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) aren't
>competitive below 800m. Their most famous runners specialized in the
>1500 but they are competitive at all the longer distances.
>
>Both the black-skinned Kenyan and brown-skinned Ethiopian runners come
>overwhelmingly from highland ****tions of their countries, where
>evolving an efficient use of the limited oxygen is crucial.
>
>Moreover, the "running tribe" of Kenya, the Kalenjin, had a history of
>cattle rustling on foot, sending young men to steal neighbors' cows
>and stampede them home. The slower ones got spears in their backs,
>while the faster ones got multiple wives.
>
>Ethiopia tends to produce superstar runners with long careers, such as
>Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, while Kenya burns through
>countless speedy farmboys.
>
>The differences between East Africans and West Africans are often
>overemphasized. While the former tend to have more aerobic capacity
>and slow twitch muscle fibers and the latter more musculature and more
>fast twitch fibers, black Africans tend to share the body structure
>most efficient for running. As O.J. Simpson, who once shared a world
>record in the sprint relay with his USC track teammates, explained in
>1977:
>
>"We are built a little differently, built for speed—skinny calves,
>long legs, high ***** are all characteristics of blacks."
>
>The Northwest Africans, such as 2004 Olympic hero Hicham El-Guerrouj,
>in contrast, are primarily olive-skinned Caucasians. Many Berbers and
>Arabs live in the tall Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, but it's not
>clear whether their runners are predominantly highlanders. El-
>Guerrouj, for instance, grew up on the Mediterranean. More research
>into northwest African runners is needed.
>
>People of European descent (blue line) appear to be about equally
>strong at all distances, but do relatively best at the lengths where
>West Africans and East Africans aren't as specialized: 400 to 1500 and
>again at the marathon.
>
>East Asians are noticeable only in the marathon, although there have
>been several good-but-not-great Japanese sprinters. In the 100,
>Japanese have comprised four of the 64 semifinalists over the last
>four Olympics, and they account for one of the top 200 times at 200
>meters.
>
>Not shown on these graph are all the regions with negligible
>representation. In particular, South Asia is a black hole for s****ts
>other than cricket.
>
>It's true that each culture has its peculiar favorite length—Americans
>in the 400, Kenyans in the 3000m steeplechase, and Maghrebians in the
>1500.
>
>Still, hereditary differences are the simplest explanation for why
>track-crazy countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco can't buy a
>sprinter, while Jamaica can't produce a competitive miler. Runners and
>coaches always have an incentive to explore longer and shorter
>distances.
>
>The relation****p between amount of effort and amount of success in
>running is usually assumed to be high, but the relation****p is
>complicated. Sprinting requires less exercise to be world class than
>just about any other s****t. In preparation for winning four gold
>medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Carl Lewis worked out eight
>hours per week.
>
>The money in sprinting isn't as big as in football, but, then, you
>don't get knocked down by trained professionals either.
>
>Distance running is much harder, of course, but it's not at all clear
>that white people suddenly got lazy when the East Africans emerged.
>
>Consider who runs cross country in American high schools. I looked up
>the 185 boys who had recorded the 300 fastest times in high school
>cross country running (5000 meters distance) in America in 2006. Here,
>roughly, are the demographics weighted by number of times in the top
>300:
>
> Non-Hispanic White 82%
> East African 9%
> Spanish Surname 5%
> Black American 2%
> American Indian 1%
> East Asian 0.7%
> South Asian 0.3%
>
>Clearly, the East Africans are wildly over-represented (just as they
>are on Olympic medal stands), since they must be well under 1% of the
>US population. They are as common as all other minorities combined!
>
>If you subtract the East Africans out, you get whites at 90%, whereas
>they make up less than 60% of the teenagers in America today. That's
>rather interesting for what it might say about willingness to put in
>enormous amounts of effort. (Cross country requires minimal cost,
>other than shoes, so it's wide open to the less affluent.)
>
>An anonymous commenter on my blog explained:
>
>"Distance running is mostly a smart kid s****t at the high school
>level. It doesn't require a lot of hand-eye coordination, but rewards
>determination and self-discipline and gets you the varsity letter that
>makes you look well-rounded to college admissions boards. And for
>bright kids with mile a minute brains, the repetitive, exhausting
>nature of distance running helps calm the mind and helps these kids
>get a little centering in their lives."
>
>Similarly, in the U.S., marathon running is an upscale hobby. It's #27
>on the list of Stuff White People Like. The number of Americans
>fini****ng a marathon keeps going up yearly, although the average time
>of finishers has slowed dramatically as the white population ages.
>
>Nevertheless, running is in decline as a spectator s****t in the U.S.
>outside Oregon.
>
>One problem is that doping—most notably, with steroids: artificial
>male hormones—was long a more visible problem in track than in, say,
>baseball. This is in part because running is more one-dimensional of a
>s****t than baseball.
>
>It's also because track cracked down harder on dopers. In September
>1988, two athletes heavily juiced on steroids set famous records. At
>the Seoul Olympics, Ben Johnson won the 100 meter dash in 9.79
>seconds. Stateside, Jose Canseco became the first baseball player to
>hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases in one season.
>
>Johnson's medal and record was stripped from him two days later. But
>baseball didn't get around to drug testing until this decade, after
>muscleheads like Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds had made a joke of the
>record book.
>
>Runners continued doping, of course, but a new milestone in punishment
>was reached recently when sprinter Marion Jones, the American heroine
>of the 2000 Sydney Games, was sent to prison for lying to federal
>agents about her use of performance-enhancing drugs.
>
>Samuel Johnson observed, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a
>fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Similarly, the
>current imprisonment of the celebrated Jones has likely concentrated
>the minds of American Olympians wonderfully.
>
>And, in answer to the superficial question about why Jamaicans
>outsprinted Americans in 2008, American fear of getting caught
>probably accounts more than anything else for the performance of
>American sprinters in Beijing relative to their West Indian rivals.
>
>The Jamaicans and their even smaller neighbors such as Trinidad and
>the Bahamas have long been contenders, but seldom gold medalists. The
>lengthy career of the regal sprinter Merlene Ottey, "the Bronze
>Queen", epitomizes the regional tradition: she garnered eight Olympic
>medals, none of them gold.
>
>The Jamaicans argue that the new American drug testing and sanction
>system has finally leveled the playing field. Americans counter by
>asserting that now the Jamaicans are more doped than the Americans.
>
>Nobody knows for sure.
>
>For example, the American sprinter most unlikely to be on steroids,
>the gazelle-like Allyson Felix, finished second in the 200 meters to a
>Jamaican lady with arms twice the diameter of hers.
>
>On the other hand, Usain Bolt, while certainly muscular, doesn't
>appear to be more massively over-developed in his upper body than his
>rivals, the way Ben Johnson suddenly became in the mid-1980s. For
>contrast, here's a picture from 2004 of the American 200m gold
>medalist Shawn Crawford.
>
>Considering how awesome Bolt was last week, it seems plausible to
>assume that if all performance enhancing drugs vanished tomorrow, Bolt
>would still be the fastest man on Earth.
>
>Ironically, doping among sprinters appears to be an arms race (or a
>biceps race) that only marginally changes who wins, at least among
>men.
>
>Thus, the old East German Communist chemical-industrial complex
>churned out female record setters by the dozens but couldn't
>manufacture a world class male sprinter. The benefits of a given
>amount of steroids are much greater for women than men because men
>average vastly higher levels of natural testosterone. Thus, male
>runners need suspiciously large, Ben Johnson-sized doses to make huge
>improvements, while women can bulk-up significantly on smaller, less-
>easily detected amounts.
>
>So, in men's running, doping doesn't much change the big picture.
>
>Let's return to the fundamental question: why Jamaica produces such
>fast sprinters.
>
>An article in Science by Constance Holden, Peering Under the Hood of
>Africa's Runners, reviewed the state of the art in scientific research
>on racial differences in running as of 2004.
>
>In 2006, however, Dr. William Aiken, president of the Jamaica
>Urological Society, offered in the Jamaica Gleaner a reductionist
>theory that has the potential to explain many racial differences
>beyond sprinting:
>
>"I wish to propose a hypothesis that addresses not only the aspect of
>Jamaica's raw athletic talent, but also encomp***** an explanation of
>seemingly diverse phenomena as our high incidence of prostate cancer
>(one study found it to be by far the highest in the world at 304 /
>100,000 men / year), our high crime rate (murder capital of the world
>status earlier this year), our high road traffic accident and fatality
>rate, and our alleged high levels of promiscuity.
>
>"What do these seemingly disparate phenomena, characteristic of
>Jamaican life, have in common? On close examination these phenomena
>are manifestations of high levels of aggressiveness and drive, high
>libidos, highly efficient muscles from persons of lean body mass and
>black ethnicity.
>
>"On closer scrutiny all of these phenomena are either related to high
>circulating levels of testosterone or alternatively to high levels of
>responsiveness of testosterone receptors to circulating testosterone.
>It has already been shown that the testosterone receptors of blacks
>are different genetically to those of whites and this difference
>confers increased responsiveness to testosterone."[The athletic
>prowess of Jamaicans, November 22, 2006]
>
>Occam's Razor suggests that Aiken's theory should be considered
>carefully.
For more on this matter "google" Jon Entine's "The Last Taboo".
ted
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