Do you believe certain races are better at certain types of physical activity? The “Race and sports” Wikipedia article outlines some of the basic science but still leaves quite a bit of room for further experimentation and anecdotal experiences. I’m deliberately putting this in IMHO instead of GQ to allow for opinions as well as research data, if you so choose.
I’ve heard of things like certain genes being required for superior sprinting, Sherpas having adaptations (not sure if genetic) for high-altitude exertion. But then there are those amorphous assumptions like “black people are better at basketball”, which defies convenient testing because basketball is not one straightforward activity but a complex game. Or “Asians are better at ping-pong”, but they do have the most players interested in playing it to begin with.
Some examples are trivial and obvious – black people can do better at the unprotected sun-tanning marathon than guys with really, really pale skin.
Or, for a more meaningful example, some groups of people are, on average, shorter than other groups: the Olympic high-jump or long-jump will not favor them.
So, overall, maybe. What does it matter? If it turned out that Kenyans are better sprinters than Finns…do we make the former wear weights to equalize affairs, the way jockeys wear weighted saddles in racing? Do we make tall people wear weights to offset their advantage in jumping? Seems to me this is a really big “so what?” kind of affair.
Well, speaking of Africa, it’s a big place with lots of ancient peoples/races with more genetic diversity so you’ll find more outliers who are really good at this or that, but I’m not sure a whole race is necessarily better at this or that. My WAG.
A lot of times it seems cultural. If everyone loves soccer and plays it all the time, you’ll find more good soccer players, but that’s not necessarily race based.
I don’t have a problem with accepting that that certain groups will share a certain physical trait that may make them predisposed to a certain athletic discipline. Untangling the degree to which that pre-disposition is reinforced by culture and vice-versa is tricky though.
The only problem comes when we pre-judge on that basis. i.e. “you aren’t of west african descent so you can’t be a sprinter” or “You are of west african decent so you must be a good sprinter”
I suspect though that such issues are only of major influence in simpler athletic pursuits. Sprinting being a good example. The wider the range of physical and mental capabilities required, the more open it becomes for any group to excel.
Cricket is a good example of the latter. All colours and cultures can excel (and have done). Japan could take it upon themselves to put a ten-year program in place to become a great cricketing nation and there’s no reason why they couldn’t do it. I’d be less hopeful of success if they chose to become a great sprinting nation.
I like to look at pictures of two athletes, both regarded as among the greatest Olympians in history: Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi. Lewis is fast but he doesn’t look like he can race past 800 meters. Nurmi would be a sorry sprinter but he looks like he can run the whole day.
It’s always funny to me because at least in America, hockey, swimming, soccer, tennis, and baseball are predominately white sports. Yet you never hear anyone arguing that whites are natural athletes because of their dominance in these arenas.
You could even go further and make a reductio ad absurdum here. Spain has produced around a dozen top-level tennis players in the past two decades, and most if not all of them came from the Mediterranean regions. Does that mean that Mediterranean peoples are inherently better at hitting a fuzzy yellow ball with a rucket?
Hardly, I’m sure that the explanation is 99% cultural. This is the same feeling I get with many such issues: it’s so hard to distinguish between cultural and genetic reasons that all we can do is guess. My personal guess most of the time is that the former are more influential than the latter
Considering how much sports statistics have changed over time, it seems pretty silly to think that athletic outcomes now just happen to perfectly reflect some sort of biological hierarchy, but athletic outcomes from the past (when Jews dominated basketball, or whatever) were just reflective of culture. It seems pretty likely, for example, that the Jamaican cultural near-obsession with sprinting might have something to do with the over-representation of Jamaicans among top sprinters. And it seems pretty likely that the under-representation of black people in sports like hockey and tennis is based more on what sports black kids play and watch than what they are athletically capable of.
It’s certainly possible that some populations have some sort of intrinsic biological advantage for certain sports, but sweeping statements about non-biological socially-constructed groups like “black people” are more than likely not based in fact.
It’s undisputed that certain populations have genetic advantages for certain activities, for example Sherpas have the ability to operate at high altitudes better than any other population. There are specific mutations that have been identified that give them those advantages. It’s not universal among Sherpas, but it is extremely widespread.
The problem comes when you go from well defined populations that share a common gene pool to the nebulous concept of race which has no rigorous definition and is has a huge history of misuse.
Sometimes you have to be honest with yourself and admit that that no how hard you train, no matter how talented in a sport you are, there will always be someone better than you.
You see this with alot of white kids who get to the point they know that no matter how good they are at basketball, a black kid will always be better. This is why the NBA is 90% black. Yeah, I know it sounds racist but unless your 6’9" its probably the truth.
As for hockey the 2 top payers on my sons hockey team are black.
Is there a correlation between being black or being 6’9"?
I think the basketball world is actually a good argument against racialist (is there a better word?) theories. Sure, most of the players seem to be African Americans, but look at some of the white Europeans in the league. Pau Gasol, Marc Gasol, Dirk Nowitzki, Sabonis, Goran Dragic… they are all as good as the best players in the NBA. It seems to me that basketball just doesn’t appeal to white Americans as much as it does to white Europeans or to African Americans. Given enough training and opportunities, a white player can be just as good as a black one, the question we should ask is why white Americans are not opting for that career path.
Can anyone name a “white” sprinter (I’ll let you define the term as broadly as you like) who has run the 100 meter dash in under 10 seconds?
Let’s pretend for a moment that the USA is FILLED with white sprinters capable of winning Olympic gold, but that for cultural reasons, they just don’t try to succeed in track.
Why are the fastest Canadians always black, too? ANd the fastest Frenchmen and the fastest Englishmen? Why is the Olympic 100 meter finals almost always an all-black affair?
Races, in the current most broadly used sense, are self-assigned groupings, the categories for which were originally intended to reflect continental origins.
The continental origins in turn reflect the history of human migratory patterns as traced from archaeological and genetic studies, particularly as revealed by mtDNA and Y chromosome studies.
Race is not very definitive about an individual’s genes. (Barack Obama might self-assign to “black” for cultural reasons even though his personal genetic makeup may have much more in common with eurasians than africans.) But historic migratory patterns have driven average genetic pools, even for so crudely-defined a grouping as a self-assigned “race.” For example, one can broadly split off “blacks” as having a genetic pool distinct from “europeans” since at the out of africa migratory split about 75kya (except for some earlier coastal migrations toward australia) there was minimal back migration into africa. Descendants of post-africa populations wouldn’t pass new genes back into africa at nearly the penetration level of descendant populations which ended up in eurasia (and ditto for new genes arising in post out-of-africa african populations.
For this reason, one finds average distributions of genes clustering among modern self-identified “races.”
While a “race” can’t be identified with a single marker, average genetic pools are quite distinct among self-identified races.
David Epstein’s “The Sports Gene” covers a number of these topics.
I might also recommend Jon Entine’s “Taboo” and Kenan Malik’s “Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate.” (Malik’s book particularly if you are a splitter and want to show how defining races genetically is quite arbitrary, even if we have tended to do so to date.)
Do not expect Eskimos to take their turn in the NBA the way blacks and eastern europeans supplanted the whites of the Hebrew Leagues when the door was opened for all participants.
Nor will white sprinters return en masse to the 100 meter dash once they realize fame and fortune await there.
