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Sunday, Jul 5, 2009
It's obvious that blacks dominate certain sports while whites dominate others. Why can't we talk openly about the genetics of athletic excellence?
Sep 23, 2000 | It's Kenya's national sport, the passion of the masses. Little boys dream that one day, they might soak up the cheers of the adoring fans that regularly crowd the stands at the National Stadium in Nairobi. The best players are national icons. The selection process to spot the great stars begins at a very young age. Coaches backed by federal outlays comb the countryside to find the next generation of potential athletes. The most promising of the lot are sent to special schools and provided extra coaching. It's not an exaggeration to call Kenya's national sport a kind of national religion.
According to conventional and socially acceptable wisdom, this is a familiar story -- the sure cultural explanation for the phenomenal success of Kenyan distance runners. There's only one problem: The national sport, the hero worship, the adoring fans, the social channeling -- that all speaks to Kenya's enduring love affair with not running, but soccer. Despite the enormous success of Kenyan runners in the past 15 years, running remains a relative afterthought in this soccer-crazed nation.
Unfortunately, Kenyans are among the world's worst soccer players. They are just terrible. Despite an elaborate school system and the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of the country's sparse sports resources, Kenya, the most populous and affluent country in East Africa, is regularly trounced by far smaller countries in West Africa. In fact, there is no such thing as an East African soccer powerhouse. The same thing is true of sprinting. Kenya has tried desperately over the past decade to replicate its wondrous success in distance running at the sprints, to no avail. The best Kenyan time ever in the 100 meters -- 10.28 seconds -- ranks somewhere near 5,000th on the all-time list.
What's going on here? And for that matter, why is it that every running record, from the 100 meters to the marathon, is held by an athlete of African ancestry? Is it racist and a white obsession to be curious about such phenomena?
In America, the convenient explanation for the tepid performance of whites in running, basketball and, increasingly, football is that blacks just work harder at them, because of cultural expectations and in part to escape sometimes desperate poverty. That's dubious and I believe racist. Do cultural factors matter? Of course: There are no Texans, white, black or Latin, starring in the National Hockey League. But there is little more than speculation in support of assertions that the racial disparities we see in sports success are "determined," as many sociologists claim, by social factors alone.
Frankly, such claims that blacks succeed for cultural reasons diminishes the reality that sports achievement is all about individual accomplishment -- fire in the belly. It's hard work, courage and serendipity that separate champions from the rest of the elite sports men and women.
Consider Michael Jordan, who grew up in the security of a two-parent home in comfortable circumstances. Or Grant Hill, son of a Yale-educated father and a Wellesley-graduate mother. Or one of the world's top sprinters, Donovan Bailey, who was certainly not motivated by a desperate need to escape destitution: He already owned his own house and a Porsche, and traded life as a successful stockbroker to pursue his dream of Olympic gold. More and more top black athletes are from the middle class.
And just look at the athletes winning medals in the Sydney Olympics. Why is the success of blacks and other minorities such as Aboriginal Australians explained away by cultural channeling? Sports success is too complex a phenomenon to be tidily settled by such facile sociology. How do we explain the success of the majority of athletes, of all nations and ancestral heritage, who lived in comfortable circumstances? The classic argument that blacks succeed in sports to escape poverty is less and less plausible and more and more racist every day.
Genes may not determine who are the world's best runners, but they do circumscribe possibility. Kenyans and other East Africans have an innate capacity, not an innate ability, to thrive in distance running; individual effort and courage separate the pretenders from the stars. Success in sports is a biosocial phenomenon.
