I was talking with a co-worker of mine the other day about his experiences in the Coast Guard during the Vietnam war and this subject came up. He said that one of the things they made you do in basic training was to tread water for some long length of time. It was pretty difficult he said. He also mentioned that the few African-Americans who were in basic training with him had a particularly hard time with this. The explanation that was given to him was that people of African descent tend to have a heavier bone structure than people of European descent, so it was so much more difficult for them to stay afloat when treading water. He didn’t know if this was true, but he said that the drill instructers (bastards, and probably racists) would let the black recruits sink and then wait until the last minute to pull them out, they seemed to expect it.
I was wondering whether there is any truth to this? Is this conventional wisdom among people who know about swimming? If it is, is there an actual basis in fact?
To my knowledge you don’t see very many Olympic swimmers who are black. This could very well be for other reasons, I know, but I suppose it also could also have something to do with a difference in bouyancy.
This question has come up before. The consensus has been that the physiology explanation is bunk. In fact, it is contradictory to some of the other physiological theories presented as to why blacks excel at other sports.
However, there are plenty of cultural explantaions about why some groups of blacks do not gravitate towards swimming. Being from the rural South, I grew up understanding that swimming just wasn’t a cultural tradition among the roughly 50% of people that were black in our area. This gets passed down the generations as a foreign concept or even a mild fear to black children. Also, blacks in my area tended to be very poor and didn’t have the money for swimming lessons or access to swimming pools or beach vacations. Muddy river, pond, and swamp water with alligators is a very good free alternative.
This also seems to be true in urban areas, where blacks would tend to have access only to city and community pools. When I worked at a summer camp many years ago, it seemed as if many of the urban black campers had little swimming experience.
Heh. I live across the street from Van Cortlandt Park, which has a huge pool, and you can see all the happy African-American kids you want jumping into it as soon as it opens, along with everybody else. In fact, “poorer” neighborhoods often have more public recreational opportunities than other ones due to the fact that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries civic-minded New Yorkers blanketed the neighborhoods with recreational centers. I would also suppose that pools in the South (and probably all too often in the North) used to be segregated and black kids just wouldn’t grow up having the chance to swim as often.
That said, I do remember the swimming classes at the Y in the 70s being disproportionately white; Italian and Jewish kids mostly, but plenty of us Irish kids too. NYC schools have almost no pools left; the few that existed are mostly closed, and the poorer the neighborhood, the more likely it’s closed. (Not that I went to a school with one until college myself). In high school, all the teams were pretty mixed but I can’t deny that, given a choice between the basketball and swimming teams, you did get more black kids in one than the other (Asian kids played Ultimate Frisbee )
Don’t know why, exactly, except I don’t know about that bone density thing. I would guess if you have more body fat you’d float easier, and perhaps since black men from the 1940s-60s were more concentrated in manual labor they’d have less? </half-assed theorizing>
Much depends upon the city as to the number of public swimming pools in black neighborhoods. In some cities, there were a number of public swimming pools before the neighborhoods became black (and outside of the South there were few black neighborhoods until sometime between the 1930’s and the 1950’s). In those cities, the black neighborhoods tend to have swimming pools. In other cities, where swimming pools often didn’t get built until the 1950’s and then mostly in the suburbs, the black neighborhoods tend not to have very many swimming pools.
Yeah, my gut reaction was that it probably had more to do with socioeconomic factors than anything else. However, I didn’t want to just go with my gut reaction.
I’ve had other conversations with people I know where they say that African-Americans are better at sports because of some genetic advantage. I’ve thought that this is probably partly, or wholly, bunk. I guess I don’t have anything to back this up though.
I remember seeing this very thing in Navy boot camp. There were two black guys in the company; they jumped off the platform together. One managed to make it to the edge of the pool, but the other one sank like a stone. Never saw anything like it. He sat on the pool bottom and the instructors waited until bubbles started coming out and then stuck the rescue pole down for him to grab.
Lower body fat = less bouyancy. Also, less weight to drag around while playing other sports, so–better performance in other sports. Of course, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions but anyway. Averages and all that.
It is generally noted that exceptionally-low-body-fat people generally do not enjoy swimming. It is tough for them to remain afloat, and to retain body heat. Note that most if not all of the people who have successfully swam the English channel have been quite pudgy. Many many thin people in excellent overall physical condition have tried, but they generally fail.
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> Lower body fat = less bouyancy. Also, less weight to drag around while playing
> other sports, so–better performance in other sports. Of course, there are
> exceptions, there are always exceptions but anyway. Averages and all that.
But black Americans are heavier on average than white Americans, probably because of a tendency to eat a diet that’s higher in fat. And in any case, it’s not true that blacks in the U.S. are “better” at sports in general. Blacks are actually slightly underrepresented among professional athletes in the U.S. - 10.5% as opposed to being about 12% of the American population - and are probably even more underrepresented in sports with only amateur competitions. There are only four American professional sports that blacks are overrepresented in - basketball, football, boxing, and certain sorts of track and field events. They are no longer overrepresented in baseball. As of 1975, 27% of major league baseball players were black. Now it’s only 9%, so they are underrepresented. In every single other American professional sport (and in all the other ones with only amateur competitions too) blacks are somewhere between slightly underrepresented to almost completely unknown.
This is a misleading comparison; many professional athletes don’t come from the US. For example, white Americans are vastly UNDER-represented in hockey; virtually all pro hockey players are foreign born. You’re comparing (# black American athletes / # all athletes) to (# black Americans / # all Americans); the denominators are in different units, so the ratios aren’t comparable.
Also, could you give a source for the 10.5% number? Not that I believe you made it up, but it sounds really low. Especially when you consider how large football teams are – I bet there are more blacks on an average football team than there are whites in a NASCAR race.
I think Malia Metella (50m freestyle silver medalist, 2004) might be interested in this thread - she’s of Guyanan descent and swam for France.
(The French are also notable, among European countries, in having had a successful ‘non caucasian’ ice skater in Surya Bonaly and tennis star, Yannick Noah.)
There’s a TV show in the UK called ‘Superstars’ where stars from various sporting disciplines are pitted against each other in a series of events (sprint, shot-put, mountain bike, gym tests etc.) - they are NOT allowed to compoete in their own field BTW, in the most recent series the 100m crawl was consistently won by the sportsmen who had good upper body strength (sprinters and rowers) irrespective of ethnicity.
Essentially I’m with the ‘nuture’ not ‘nature’ crowd on this one.
I had heard this stated by swimmers and paramedics, and accepted it. But information from this thread has me convinced that it’s more likely sociologically caused.
However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that there may be average physical differences among different ethnic groups.
E.g., back when I was a competitive bodybuilder, it was (and may still be) conventional wisdom that black bodybuilders had a harder time developing calf muscles, supposedly because they had (on average) proportionally longer lower legs. (When I first moved to the DC/Baltimore area, the first gym I joined was in a predominantly black neighborhood, and the guys there ascribed to this belief – I was often told I had ‘white-guy’ calves). It was also widely believed that Asians have a harder time getting big. Again, these are averages – there are plenty of individual exceptions.
Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder made comments along these lines ca. 1987 (I can’t recall exactly, but I think he asserted that blacks had longer legs). But he also included some very ignorant statements (i.e., claiming it was caused by slave-breeding), for which he was rightly excoriated.
Body fat has nothing to do at all with boutancy. While I have a bit more now then I did years ago, I’m still not all that big. And it’s all around the belly. I float like a cork. My legs, which have very little fat on them also float. There was an article in SWIM magazine a few years ago, and the top US breast stroker at the time had 3% body fat. Plus wouldn’t more body fat be harder to move through the water?
I swim quite a bit and see thin people all the time, and I as a thin person love to swim and always have. I have never seen a stat that shows how fat a person is that attempts to swim the Channel. Though a good 60% do not finish, it has little to do with body fat, the Channel is long, 21 miles at the shortest, and most people swim 30-40 miles because of the current which changes through out the day. Salt water just begins to eat you alive after a few hours in the water, any rubbing will generate tears and cuts on you. Plus if you are touched in anyway by a boat or person you are out which I’m sure accounts for many of the people who do not finish.
I would say that the reason you don’t see many black swimmers is beacuse swimming is something you have to learn, you can’t just watch someone swim and be good at it, it takes a lot of time in the pool. That’s why a lot of the good swimmers have parents who are more well off. Even the people who are on my Masters swim team are very well off because being on a team isn’t cheap either.
Contrary to what was indicated in the OP I didn’t see much of a difference. Most of us enlisted folks in the Army were from less lucrative families, and there were a lot of people that couldn’t tread water or swim. I grew up 1/4 mile from Lake Huron, so of course I could swim. Most of the others – white/black/hispanic – only had very rudimentary skills.
As for the drill sergeants being racist – let’s see. In basic I think it was white-black-black; career specific training #1 was black, and career #2 was black. I think we did the swimming thing at all three of those, and at permanent unit we did every year.
I grew up in rural Georgia in the 70s. The public swimming pool in town always had plenty of black kids splashing around, right along with the white kids. There were black kids at the rural swimming holes, too.
When I moved to Atlanta as an adult, my first two residences were in Apartment complexes where blacks were in the majority. In both of those apartments there were planty of black people taking advantage of the apartments’ swimming pools.
Atlanta also has quite a few public pools. Drive by one in the summer and you’ll see lot’s of working class black kids in the water.
So based on all the black people I see swimming, I don’t buy the cultural argument.
As to whether black people are poorer swimmers on average than white people, I couldn’t tell you. Nor (if it’s true) could I speculate on the reasons. All I can tell you is that I see plenty of black people swimming.
And that’s exactly what it is, kids in the water playing, not swimming. Throw damn near anyone into the water and they can do something, even my cat can. That’s not learning how to swim, and it’s sure not going to get you an olympic metal. It would be the same as two brothers wrestling on the floor, they are only playing and not learning how to wrestle. To learn to swim you will need some sort of training, and that costs quite a bit of money.
For me to be on my swim team, as an adult, it costs me around $1000 a year, that’s with a large number of people on the team. To swim at a younger age takes a lot more money because the teams tend to be smaller. I see plenty of people in the public pools when I swim off the team, and very few of them can actually swim. Getting into a pool and swimming are not the same.
I don’t know much about swimming, but I always thought it made sense that bodyfat made you bouyant. Anecdotally, I know several fat people who have no trouble floating. I’ve never floated, and I have very low bodyfat. Then again, I’m fairly muscular, and muscle is heavier than fat.
Is it possible that having a lot of bodyfat makes you float better, but hinders your ability to swim fast? Staying afloat ain’t the same thing as winning the Olympics.
Body fat will allow you to float, no question there, but in a swimmer it’s not going to help. Good body possition is what really makes a good swimmer. Most people just can’t pick that up, you can splash around all you want and you’re not going to learn.
I still think it has at least something to do with money. The only place I’ve ever really seen swimming lessons is at private pools. And as I’ve said you can’t do much more then splash around in a pool.
