Indeed, surface appearance is often a highly misleading way of assessing the genetic distance between populations. This evidence demonstrates how absurd it is to engage in racial generalisations - how crazy it is to witness a tiny group of black people winning at, say, the 10,m and to infer that all people who share the same skin colour share an aptitude for 10,m running.
But our subconscious assumptions about race have more than merely sporting implications. Consider an experiment in by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, two American economists. They drafted 5, CVs and placed archetypal "black" names such as Tyrone or Latoya on half of them and "white" names such as Brendan or Alison on the other half. They then divided the white CVs into high and low quality and did the same with the black CVs. A few weeks later the offers came rolling in from employers, and guess what?
Employers were using skin colour as a marker for employment potential, despite the fact that the candidates' CVs were identical. But that's not all. The researchers also found that although high-quality "white" candidates were preferred to low-quality "white" candidates, the relative quality of "black" CVs made no difference whatsoever.
It was as if employers saw three categories - high-quality white, low-quality white and black candidates. The amazing thing is that doctors had ordered Keino not to run the race at all. A gallbladder infection is incredibly painful. Keino not only won the race, but he also set the Olympic record.
Personally, I think its a myth that Black athletes are dominant because of their physical structure. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it. But as we are throwing light on this topic of Black dominance in athletics, I would like you all to watch a video on how one Kenyan village produces the worlds fastest distance runners.
Western research on the nature of Kenyan runners, and on successful African athletes in general, is complicated by some particularly thorny racial politics. High altitude - the Kalenjin live on a plateau 7,ft above sea level - increases the number of red blood cells which carry oxygen around the body and is thought to explain the low heart rate.
The land there is flat with mild year-round weather, encouraging regular outdoor running. The high elevation — about 7, feet — could help runners develop lungs capable of functioning in thinner air. When these runners descend to the relatively low-elevation courses at Boston or Beijing, the thicker atmosphere there would give them, in effect, a sustained oxygen boost. This may help explain why they developed physical traits better suited for running. Conditioning like this is common in training athletes.
He is also not above bringing in misleading evidence to back up his case. For example, Italy's Pietro Mennea stands out as an anomaly in sprinting. A white man who held the metre world record for 17 years, before Michael Johnson broke it in Entine notes that Mennea, like many southern European runners, traces 'a significant percentage of [his] genes to Africa as a result of interbreeding'. This is true, but it is from North Africa that Mennea's ancestors hail, a part of the world where, according to Entine, endurance not speed is encoded in the genes.
You don't have to be a genetic dogmatist to realise that the traditional liberal explanation for black sporting dominance is in need of updating.
The idea that blacks show greater determination to succeed because they have fought their way out of poverty may hold more true than it should but it is not without flaws. Clearly the paradigm does not fit Donovan Bailey, the Olympic metre champion, who left in his supercharged wake only the affluence of his earlier career as a Porsche-owning stockbroker.
And Michael Jordan was hardly a product of the projects. Entine says that the fiercest criticism he has received has come from white liberals. They think because the book is about race it must be racist and so they attack it because they don't want to be seen as racist. This appears to be an exaggeration. Indeed his two most vocal antagonists are black Americans, Harry Edwards, and another sociologist, Todd Boyd.
Edwards recently said that the data presented in the book amounted to an 'underhand way' of saying that blacks were 'closer to beast ' than they are to the rest of humanity. For all Entine's talk of respecting the 'biodiversity' of humanity, our attitudes to race are not yet so evolved that we are able to take ethnic difference in our stride.
Even in Britain - which, if not as afflicted by racial division as America, is a long way from being colour blind - few have the appetite to confront the notion of racial superiority in any form. When Sir Roger Bannister , the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes, spoke in as a neurologist at a British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting of 'certain natural anatomical advantages' possessed by 'black sprinters and black athletes in general', he provoked a mixture of fear, anxiety and silence.
Garth Crooks, the black former Spurs striker who is now BBC football reporter, said at the time: 'I don't think it matters what the biological conclusions are.
It forges a distinction between black and white athletes which is unhealthy, unhelpful, and untrue. But he refused to accept Bannister's argument: 'What Sir Roger said is a cop out, in a way. As long as white people believe that black people can run faster, they always will. It makes my job a lot easier. I'll accept that. But Allan Wells was an Olympic champion. Valeri Borzov was an Olympic champion. So it can be done. If your goal [as a white athlete] is to be a gold medal winner then you're wasting your time.
But when you get into metres it starts to change. We shouldn't be surprised if a white wins the metres at the Olympics. It's unlikely, but it's possible. He concentrates on biology, looks at environmental influences, but largely skips over the question of psychology. To maximise performance, you have to minimise doubt. But even the highest ratio of fast-twitch muscles, other phenotypic advantages, and extensive training are not guaranteed to deliver an optimum performance.
That can only be realised by the willingness of the mind. With Christie, his sheer confidence often seemed to take him past opponents who were, on paper, faster.
Self-belief works to expand the sense of the possible. You can see its effects take shape in the clusters of top athletes that seem to form at certain times and places. Is it not possible that as well as inspiring each other to greater feats, Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram also gained a psychological edge over their opponents, who may have not been able to block out the popular wisdom that Britain, in the s, was the home of middle distance running?
The first Briton to beat Linford Christie in the metres, to end his decade-long reign, was Ian Mackie, a white Scot. How does he feel competing in an event in which he is expected to lose because his skin colour testifies to his limitations? Despite the glaring statistics, the topic was somewhat of a taboo subject until recent years. Most scientists, authors and journalists avoided any quest for an explanation out of a fear of being accused of racial stereotyping. Other arguments revolved around the apparent thinner skin and lighter internal organs of black athletes.
In a study , two American academics insisted that black athletes' dominance of the sport was down to their higher centre of gravity. The legacy of slavery and the need to escape poverty are also more controversial theories that have come and gone. By the end of his research, Leclaire was left in no doubt.
It is a gene present in all humans in two forms, either the RR form which helps speed, or the RX form which aids endurance.
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