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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In Kenya, the cultural argument for the country's lackluster sprinting and soccer success amounts to an assertion that aspiring sprinters and soccer players don't train hard enough to keep up with their African brethren on the west side of the continent. That's sheer nonsense. Kenyan training regimens, in all sports, are legendary.
No amount of political correctness can obscure the reality that a large part of Kenyans' mediocre record in soccer and sprinting comes down to genetics: They just don't have the body or physiology for those sports. They are ectomorphs, short and slender, with huge natural lung capacity and a preponderance of slow twitch muscles, the energy system for endurance sports. It's a perfect biomechanical package for distance running, but a disaster for sports that require anaerobic bursts of speed -- like sprinting and soccer.
Kenya, with but 28 million people, is the world epicenter in distance running, which only became widely popular in the late 1980s. Today, Kenyans hold more than one-third of the top times in middle- and long-distance races. Including top performances by other East Africans (most from Ethiopia), that domination swells to almost 50 percent. The Kalenjins of the Great Rift Valley adjacent to Lake Victoria, a loosely named population of 1.5 million people, win almost 40 percent of major international distance events. One tiny district, the Nandi, with only 500,000 people -- one-twelve-thousandth of Earth's population -- sweeps an unfathomable 20 percent, marking it as the greatest concentration of raw athletic talent in the history of sports.
At the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Kenya shocked the running world when its top male runners won the 800 meters, the 1,500 meters and the 5,000 meters, plus the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Based on population percentages alone, the likelihood of such a performance is one in 1.6 billion. The more recent figures are even more staggering. At the World Cross Country Championships in 1998, arguably the most competitive running event in the world, each country was limited to six entries. The Kenyans finished No. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7; the No. 3 finisher was from Kenya's East African neighbor, Ethiopia.
Why does the claim that sports success is biosocially based get some people so nervous? After all, it's conventional science that different body types have evolved in response to differing environmental conditions in different regions of the world.
The elephant in the living room, of course, is "race." Fascination about black physicality and black anger about being caricatured as lesser human beings have been part of the unspoken side of the American dialogue on race for hundreds of years. The fear is that some might conclude that if blacks are faster on average, they must, as part of zero-sum reasoning, be weaker mentally. But that's a conclusion not supported by science.
Race is a term soaked in much folkloric nonsense. The concept of race is somewhat akin to a sloppy Joe masquerading as a hamburger. It's a pretty messy concept, sometimes referred to as "fuzzy sets" or extended families. Although racial labels are helpful terms, and I use them in my book, "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It," they can leave misconceptions. Many traits are correlated, such as dark skin color and the presence of the sickle cell gene. But such links are not absolute. Blacks who have evolved in cooler climates are no more likely to contract sickle cell than are nonblacks. Although many blacks are lactose intolerant, a result of the utter lack of milk-producing animals in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the Masai, with their tradition of cow and goat herding, are perfectly able to digest milk products.
"Race," as we popularly talk about it, carries enough racist baggage as to be problematic at best. It leads to simplistic generalizations that link vague concepts such as "intelligence," "violence" and "sexual aggressiveness" to populations grouped by skin color. That's why top geneticists, such as Stanford's Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, while basing their research on a recognition of populationwide genetic differences, eschew the term "race."
