Let’s begin with nation X. It’s not a country that devotes billions of dollars to sporting success, nor is it one with disproportionately drug-fuelled question marks. But, not long in the distant past, it emerged as an astonishing powerhouse of middle- and long-distance running. It started in the mid-1970s, when one of its men broke world records in the 2,000 and 3,000 metres, another shattered the 10,000-metre world record, a third broke the 5,000-metre world record and a fourth the world marathon record. Two of its men took turns in breaking the 800, 1,500 metres and mile world records, and gathered five Olympic medals. They were overtaken by an even faster fellow, who smashed world records in the 1,500 metres, 2,000 metres and the mile in a nineteen-day spell, as well as winning world championship gold. And by another who, after winning world and Olympic medals, was the highest-ranked 800-metre runner in the world.
There was a gap before nation X’s women caught up but one of its runners went from winning the 10,000-metre Olympic silver to world championship gold, along with winning the world half-marathon title and three big city marathons. She was overtaken by the greatest-ever female long-distance runner, who twice won the world cross-country championships, the gold medal for the marathon in the world championships, won the world half-marathon championships three times, won seven big city marathons, and obliterated the world record twice. She still holds that record. Nation X’s female middle-distance athletes kept pace; one doubled up, winning Olympic gold in both the 800 and 1,500 metres.
What was it about nation X that gave it the talent to have such consistently astonishing success? Why did its middle- and long-distance runners do so much better than other nations’? What made this group so fast, holding twenty-eight world records between them?1 Surely, something in their genes? No one asks these questions, because nation X is the United Kingdom. Churchill, who was obsessed with race, called its citizens the Island Race but really, Brits are Europe’s mongrels; the words ‘race’ or ‘ethnic group’ simply don’t fit.
I asked my running club chairman, Jerry Odlin, a contemporary of Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett in the 1980s, why British middle- and long-distance runners excelled in his era. He mentioned youth cross-country racing, very competitive then, less so now. ‘That created a critical mass, so that we were all competing with each other and pushing each other,’ said Jerry, who ran the 10,000 metres in twenty-eight minutes in the 1980s. ‘If I did that time today, I’d be number eight in Britain. Back then I was number fifteen.’2 The change, he suggested, came from the decline of competitive sport in state schools, a more sedentary culture in which fewer people walk and more play computer games, the increased availability of alternative sporting options and gym membership. Football has grown from dominant to hegemonic, and participation in smaller sports has grown, including some such as cycling, BMX, triathlon and boxing that require similar cardiovascular fitness to distance running.
More Brits are running than ever before. The growth has been most rapid among women generally and the over-thirty-fives specifically, but the elite standard has declined, even if a few outliers occasionally break records. Steve Jones’s 2:07:13 was the UK marathon record for thirty-three years, until finally broken in 2018 by the Somali-born Londoner Mo Farah; Steve Cram’s British 1,500-metre record stood for twenty-eight years, finally broken in 2013, also by Farah. Just as outstanding performance is fostered by cultural developments that encourage participation, together with elite training programmes – the rise of British cycling and rowing are other examples – so negative cultural developments contribute to decline. In neither case is it wise to assume that genetics plays an overwhelming role.
This takes us to Kenya. It is widely assumed that its runners have genetic advantages. Attention focuses on the Kalenjin tribe and particularly a small area, the Nandi Hills in the Great Rift Valley, where fewer than 2 per cent of the population live. According to the South African sports medicine specialist Tim Noakes, a Nandi runner has, on average, twenty-three times more chance of succeeding than his average Kenyan counterpart.3 Or, as the author Matthew Syed puts it:
Far from being a ‘black’ phenomenon or an East African phenomenon or even a Kenyan phenomenon, distance running is actually a Nandi phenomenon … Or, to put it another way, much of the ‘black’ distance running success is focused on the tiniest of pinpricks on the map of Africa, with the vast majority of the continent underrepresented.
The ‘pinprick’ has fascinated running enthusiasts for decades. There are few more adamant advocates of the biological case than the Kenya-based American journalist and runner, John H. Manners, who claimed that natural selection endowed the Kalenjin tribe, and the Nandi clan within it, with the perfect raw material. The Kalenjin represent less than one eighth of the population but comprise three quarters of the country’s running elite. ‘I contend that this record marks the greatest geographic concentration of achievement in the annals of sport,’ he wrote.4 How did this happen? The livelihood of the tribe was once bound up with long-distance cattle rustling, he noted. The quickest runners brought home the cows, had more wives and sired more children; the slowest were caught and killed. In this way, the genetic predilection to be able to run quickly was born. For good measure, he also threw in an odd nurture element; stoicism in the face of pain is highly valued, as in Kalenjin men’s circumcision, which had to be endured without flinching. This helped them to develop their courageous attitude to running through pain barriers.
These ideas are entertaining but, really, quite silly. The fact that someone can persuade stolen cows to run faster doesn’t imply a speedy genetic trait that can be passed on. Natural selection doesn’t work this way. It’s usually a slower process because there can only be selection for randomly produced mutations, which require relative genetic isolation and often take thousands of years to gel in a population. Also, the relationship between keeping still during the pain of adult circumcision (which is by no means unique to the Great Rift Valley) and maintaining your form when lactic acid is building up is rather obscure.
Noakes also veers towards the biological. He notes his research on black South African distance runners has prompted the conclusion that their superiority ‘must be due to at least some genetic determinants’.5 He speculates: ‘This is perhaps due to an ability to sustain levels of skeletal muscle recruitment before developing fatigue. Black distance runners also seem to have more Type II (white) muscle fibres than their white counterparts.’ Intriguingly, however, the distance runner who for him ‘embodies athletic perfection’6 is the white South African Bruce Fordyce (who won the 87-kilometre Comrades Marathon nine times in the 1980s, held the world record for the 100 kilometres and still holds it for fifty miles), both because he was ‘genetically superior’7 and because he trained properly and was strong-minded. Noakes also considered the explanations for Kenyan success – long thin legs, stretchable hearts, different muscle fibres and cattle-raiding genes – and decided that ‘the ultimate explanation might be that all of these factors are contributory but all are under the control of a single regulatory mechanism, the brain.’8 Later he dropped the heart explanation, noting there was no evidence that the Kenyans had either a superior cardiovascular function or a greater capacity to transport oxygen to their muscles. Instead, he said, it ‘seems’ their success is due to a ‘multitude of physiological factors’ that allow their brains to ‘drive them to higher levels of skeletal muscle recruitment’. In future he would focus on legs: ‘To run so fast, the Kenyans’ muscles must be incredibly powerful – a point that has been fastidiously ignored.’9
It is hard to know what to make of all this because the evidence is lacking. Noakes’s use of qualifying words such as ‘seems’, ‘seem to’, ‘must be’, ‘perhaps’ for his claims suggests a gulf between speculation and evidence and his point about leg strength seems, well, rather obvious, which is no doubt why it is ignored. Is he really suggesting Kenya’s elite has something extra in the leg department that Mo Farah and Steve Jones lack?
The first blow to the genetic view came on the podium: the Ethiopians arrived. No Kenyans could quite match the record-breaking heroics of Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele on the track. They were further challenged by Eritreans, Ugandans and Tanzanians in long-distance events, and by Moroccans and Algerians over the middle distances. The era of Kenya-worship seemed to have passed in the 10,000-metre final in the 2012 Olympics, when a Somali-born Brit took gold and was followed in by a white American and an Ethiopian. Or perhaps it ended when the Brit, Farah, went on to win the 5,000 metres, and repeated the double win at the 2013 and 2015 World Championships and 2016 Olympics. However, the heroics of the marathon world record holder, Eliud Kipchoge, helped restore the balance.
The decisive blow came from the research conducted by Yannis Pitsiladis, a Greek academic based at the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences, University of Glasgow. He patrolled the Great Rift Valley and Ethiopian highlands with his test tubes and swabs, collecting DNA samples from leading athletes past and present. His findings kicked away the underpinnings of the Nandi-biological explanation. This required the Nandi to be genetically isolated; without that, they couldn’t develop the distinctive features that gave them the edge in running. Pitsiladis’s research showed the Nandi population was genetically diverse and had never been isolated. His analysis of Ethiopian DNA showed the same thing: great genetic diversity. He also showed that the Ethiopians and Kenyans were far apart in terms of key markers, scotching the idea of a shared East African genetic inheritance for running. ‘The more we have studied the phenomenon, the more we have realised that the patterns of success are not genetic, despite being specific to certain populations,’ Pitsiladis said. ‘[W]e can already say with reasonable confidence that social and economic factors are the primary factors driving the success of Kenyan distance running.’10
Even before the decline of the biological case, attention was shifting to environmental considerations: the impact on distance runners of living at the perfect altitude (2,100–2,400 metres), the active lifestyle of young people, many of whom run to and from school, the perception, ever since Kip Keino won Olympic gold in 1968 and 1972, that running is a way out of poverty and a source of adulation, the critical mass of top-level runners, whose talents are forged by training groups that work at high altitude and by academies that transform them into world-class athletes. Several of these factors, including altitude, also apply to the Ethiopians.
And, of course, there are the drugs. Until very recently, there was minimal testing in Kenya and evidence of considerable corruption in the system, which meant that Kenyan runners could dope with impunity. In 2015, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the international body tasked with rooting out drugs cheating, declared Kenya ‘non-compliant’. Athletics’ governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), took action, suspending officials and demanding compliance. Threats and pressure finally brought a modicum of order to Kenya’s anti-doping regime, after which several international athletes who had used the country as a training base moved to Ethiopia, which was even more lax than Kenya. The suspicion remains that at least some of the outstanding success of Kenyan and Ethiopian runners is drug-fuelled.
This doesn’t imply that genetics plays no role at the population level. Slow-twitch muscle fibres, longer legs and lighter bones provide a significant advantage, and these are in higher supply in Kenya, Ethiopia and Morocco than in, say, Samoa, Nigeria and Jamaica. And when these long legs and light bones combine with high altitude and a running-to-school lifestyle, potential kicks in. A Swedish exercise physiologist, Bengt Saltin, compared Swedish distance athletes with highland Kenyan runners in the 1990s and found they had identical muscle make-up. It also emerged that sedentary Kenyans had no aerobic capacity advantage over sedentary Swedes. But when considering why Kenyan teenagers were consistently leaving his elite Swedish adult runners behind (he estimated at least five hundred Kenyan schoolboys could outpace his men), he came up with an intriguing insight: Kenyan runners had more blood capillaries surrounding their muscle fibres and these contained more mitochondria, which help to generate energy. And after intense exercise sessions, the Kenyans’ muscles contained less ammonium lactate (which is associated with fatigue), meaning their bodies were more efficient in using fat as fuel. However, Saltin suspected this wasn’t genetic, suggesting it was a result of running at altitude throughout their lives and training more intensively. In support of this view, he found that Kenyan children who ran to school had a VO2 max (maximum oxygen intake) 30 per cent higher than those who did not.11
The epidemiologist Robert Scott, of the University of Cambridge, who has studied the DNA of Kenyan runners since 2004, also stresses environmental factors but raises an additional biological consideration: genetic variation among East Africans is far greater than among white Europeans.12 This relates to a point I made in earlier chapters: there is far more genetic variability in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the world, because only small groups migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. In any sub-Saharan African population, the genetic range will therefore be wider than among people with European ancestral heritage. A population with greater genetic diversity would be more likely to have genes favourable for distance running; more people with slight physiques, light bones and long legs. And also more with physiques wholly ill-suited to distance running. Then again, the body types needed for record-breaking are not confined to East Africa, as Ovett, Coe, Cram, Jones and the rest showed in the 1980s and Paula Radcliffe twenty years later.
Since the inaugural event in 1983, every 100-metre gold medallist at the World Athletics Championship has been black. More than 93 per cent of the occasions that sprinters have dipped below the ten-second mark have involved athletes of West African genetic descent, and they are also responsible for 83 per cent of the 200-metre times below twenty seconds.
People with West African ancestry have, on average, bigger gluteus muscles, heavier bones (which are less vulnerable to injury) and less fat beneath the skin, increasing the potential for more of the fast-twitch muscle fibre that is essential for sprinting. Referring to fast-twitch fibres and world-class sprinters, the Swedish exercise physiologist Bengt Saltin said: ‘If you don’t have at least 70 to 80 per cent fast-twitch muscle fibres, I’d say it’s unlikely you could be among them. But if you have that kind of level, you could probably do well – and if you have 80 to 90 per cent that’s even better’.13
A study of sprinters by the Neuromuscular Research Centre at the University of Sydney took this a step further in 2003, isolating a gene, ACTN3, that promoted fast-twitch muscle development. They also discovered the ‘sprint version’ of this gene was more common in people of West African origin; 98 per cent of black Jamaicans had at least one copy of ACTN3 compared with 82 per cent of people of European origin. If the two populations were the same size, the curve of their performance potential would be heavily skewed in favour of Jamaicans but population statistics redress the balance, because there are 742 million Europeans and just 2.9 million Jamaicans. Subsequent research found that a slightly higher proportion of Kenyans than Jamaicans had the sprint version of ACTN3 and yet the Kenyans have had no international success in sprinting.
Nevertheless, this news prompted one of the greatest sprinters of all time, the American Michael Johnson, to propose that Jamaican and American dominance reflected the fact that their sprinters were the descendants of slaves, who had inherited this ‘superior athletics gene’. The hardiest survived hazardous voyages, and slave owners bred slaves for strength. ‘It is a taboo subject in the States,’ said Johnson, ‘but it is what it is. Why shouldn’t we discuss it?’ The Jamaican Usain Bolt, the fastest sprinter of all time, agreed that this brutal heritage was relevant. ‘It’s a background from slavery,’ he said. ‘The guys back in the day were so strong from physical work … The genes are really strong.’14
Bolt’s Lamarckian argument implies that hard work helps create strong genes, which is not how evolution works. Johnson’s contention is barely more realistic, because it implies there was selection or breeding for the ability to run fast, which affected the entire gene pool. Slave owners might indeed have picked strong-looking slaves but that’s not the same as selecting fast-twitch muscles. Being big doesn’t improve your chances of surviving for months aboard slave ships, and it doesn’t make you fast. Elite male sprinters include slight men, such as the former 100-metre World Champion Kim Collins (1.77 metres, 77 kilograms), bulky men such as the former 200-metre World Indoor Champion John Regis (1.8 metres, 98 kilograms) and the long, lean Bolt (1.95 metres, 94 kilograms). Elite women range from the 1.52 metre-tall Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, former world and Olympic 100-metre and 200-metre champion, to the 1.78 metre-tall Marion Jones, the former Olympic champion, who was stripped of her medals after admitting drug use.
When the Cambridge epidemiologist Robert Scott studied Jamaican athletes, he found that ACTN3 was absent in two of the country’s leading sprint stars.15 Daniel MacArthur, one of the Australian geneticists who found the ACTN3 gene in 2003, poured further cold water on the science behind Michael Johnson’s claims, saying that ACTN3 played a ‘pretty small role’ and that there was no clear relationship between its frequency and Jamaican sprinting success. ‘It is almost certainly true that Usain Bolt carries at least one of the “sprint” variants of the ACTN3 gene,’ he wrote. ‘But then so do I – along with around five billion other humans world-wide. That doesn’t mean you’ll see me in the 100-metre final … Unfortunately for me, it takes a lot more than one lucky gene to create an Olympian.’16
The contemporary focus is therefore on individual genomes rather than whole populations. Dr Ken van Someren, former director of sports science at the English Institute of Sport, noted that the closer individuals come to the outer limits of their potential, the more likely it is that their personal genetic make-up will create ‘some sort of glass ceiling’. He added that no single gene accounted for speed and power or for sprinting, instead describing a ‘complex interaction’ of multiple genes. ‘So it’s impossible to say there’s a West African genotype for sprinting or an East African genotype for endurance running.’17
Let’s stick with the Jamaicans. Peruse the all-time sprinting records and you find an even mix of African Americans and Jamaicans but over the last decade Jamaicans had the edge. In the 2012 Olympics, they won five of the six available medals in the men’s 100 metres and 200 metres, plus the 100-metre relay; in 2016, they won men’s and women’s gold in the 100 and 200 metres. If West African genes are the main explanation, where were the West Africans? If it’s all about slavery, why are the elite of a population of 2.5 million descendants of slaves outpacing the elite of a population of 45 million descendants of slaves?
The answer relates mainly to the high status of sprinting in Jamaican culture. Speedy African Americans are likely to end up in basketball or American football. Speedy Jamaicans sprint. As with British distance runners in the 1980s, or Kenyan and Ethiopian distance runners today, specific running cultures have created a critical mass vying to be the best of the best. It starts with athletics programmes at primary school level and goes on to scholarships to elite athletics high schools. Even the Junior National Championship draws crowds of twenty thousand. In recent years the Jamaican Amateur Athletic Association, backed by the state, has fine-tuned elite training at its High-Performance Training Centre. A further reason might relate to evidence of widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs and lax testing.
To return to the question of whether black people are naturally better sprinters … put like that, the answer is a tentative ‘no’. East Africans or Southern Africans seldom break records. Nor, for that matter, do Australian Aboriginals, Central African Bambuti (Pygmies) or the San (Bushmen). However, there would appear to be a slight genetic advantage in some people of West African origin, magnified by the running cultures of North America and the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica. Without that strong, well-organised, well-funded sprinting culture, genes are not enough. Which is why, of the sixteen West African countries, only Nigeria has enjoyed consistent international sprinting success.
Also, despite the domination of people of West African ancestry, it is not a complete shut-out. Now and then, someone breaks through to remind us that ACTN3 and fast-twitch muscles and sprint-suitable bodies are not restricted to a single ethnic origin. One such was the white South African sprinter Paul Nash, who equalled the 100-metre world record four times in 1968, running ten seconds flat. Another was Frankie Fredericks, a mixed-race Namibian who won four Olympic medals and World Championship golds in the 1980s and 1990s and broke the twenty-second mark for the 200 metres twenty-four times and the ten-second mark in the 100 metres twenty-seven times, putting him fourth on the all-time record list. The stand-out non-West African woman is Dafne Schippers, from the Netherlands, the 2015 and 2017 world 200-metre gold medallist and the third fastest woman of all time at the distance. Above all is the ‘Coloured’ South African Wayde van Niekerk, the world 400-metre record holder, world and Olympic champion and the only man in sprinting history to have run under ten seconds for the 100 metres (9.94), under twenty for the 200 (19.84) and under forty-four for the 400 (43.03).
However, it’s hard to ignore the preponderance of sprinters with West African ancestry. ACTN3 is not the only factor. Other considerations – heavier bones, larger gluteus muscles, less fat beneath the skin – also play a role. Here we return to the bell curve; as the geneticist David Reich shows, a small genetic advantage in the average sprinting ability (say a 0.8-standard deviation advantage over average innate European sprinting ability) ‘would lead to a hundredfold enrichment in the proportion of people above the 99.9999999th percentage point’.18
There is another possibility, one already suggested in relation to East African distance running ability: the far higher genetic variability in sub-Saharan Africa. This could mean there is more variation in innate sprinting ability in people with West African ancestry; more people with naturally high abilities and more with naturally low abilities. As Reich points out, there is a 33 per cent higher genetic variability in West Africans than Europeans.19
When I lived in South Africa in the 1980s, I had a journalistic sideline reporting on professional boxing. At first some white trainers assumed that because I was white, I shared their prejudices, including the conviction that the abilities of fighting men were racially implanted. One trainer took me aside, telling me that while ‘darkies’ had the ‘fancy stuff’ they also had a ‘yellow streak’, which meant they couldn’t take it to the body. This myth was immune to logic, because whenever a black man wilted from a body blow, it seemed to be confirmed, whereas white men who struggled with body blows or black boxers who withstood them weren’t noticed; a classic example of confirmation bias.
To any objective observer, differences in style between black and white boxers related to how these young men were taught in the gyms, and to the milieux of the township and the town. But the best learned from each other, worked hard and ignored mythology about racial genes. The finest of the lot was a fiercely driven little fellow from a broken family in the rougher white suburbs. Brian Mitchell did not possess the flair of several of his countrymen – he was a so-so amateur – but he had a work ethic and capacity to learn equal to none, and an ability to focus. He put in the hours, lived the life and forged his skills by fighting in black townships, which few other white boxers were prepared to do. He got better and better in defence and attack. He went on to become South Africa’s greatest-ever boxer, winning two versions of the World Super Featherweight title and fifteen world title fights during a five-year reign. He ended his career with just one loss (avenged three times) in forty-nine fights and a forty-two-fight unbeaten streak. He is the only South African boxer to have been elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Mitchell is an example for those holding to the ‘10,000-hours rule’, who believe that application is more important than innate talent. This idea started with a paper written in 1993 by Anders Ericsson, of the University of Colorado, and others, entitled ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’. It referred to a Berlin study of violin students, showing that those who reached the top did not seem to possess superior natural gifts. Ericsson argued that many characteristics thought to reflect innate talent were really the result of intense practice for ten years or more, averaging out at about ten thousand hours. He added that the ‘differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain’.20
This idea was boosted by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, Outliers,21 which cited Ericsson’s research and in turn, associated his name with the phrase. Ericsson complained that the ‘10,000-hour rule’ was a Gladwell invention, and that 10,000 was simply an average. Many of the best musicians put in ‘substantially fewer’ hours to reach the top.22 He also complained that Gladwell failed to mention deliberate practice. Gladwell hit back that he disagreed with Ericsson’s view that deliberate practice was enough, saying he believed that elite performance also requires ‘a big healthy dose of natural talent’.23
Yet when we look at those who reach the top, we often find other boys and girls who initially seem more gifted but lack the drive to push themselves single-mindedly to excel with a focus that allows no compromises; missing the compulsion to train harder and more consistently than anyone else and to let nothing get in the way. In several of the elite-of-the-elite I’ve interviewed over the years, it seemed that some childhood deprivation or damage, or some personality defect, prompted them to sacrifice everything that interfered, including family and friends. But their solipsism often came at a cost; they were seldom in the habit of interrogating their inner lives and when they tried, their inner reach didn’t extend far. Their lurking demons so often caught up with them when they retired, all too often resulting in alcoholism, drug addiction and other forms of self-harm.
In stressing the psychology of extraordinary sporting achievement, I do not pretend that genetic inheritance is irrelevant. Some people are born with quicker reflexes, more fast-twitch or slow-twitch muscles, better hand-eye coordination, lateral vision and balance, greater strength relative to body weight, a naturally lower resting pulse rate or more appropriate bone structure. No one reaches the pinnacle without huge dollops of ingrained individual talent. I’m also not disputing that some populations, because of shared genetic inheritance, are more likely to succeed in certain sporting disciplines. The point is that when considering success, either at the individual or population level, it’s all too easy to put it down to favourable genes. The answer often lies elsewhere, and boxing provides a good example.
For the first half of the twentieth century professional boxing was dominated by Americans of Irish, Italian and Jewish heritage. The ‘fighting Irish’, in particular, were seen as innately scrappy. When Billy Conn was knocked out by Joe Louis in the thirteenth round of the World Heavyweight Championship in 1941, having decided to go for glory after leading on points, he explained his hot-headed error to be a product of his Irish blood. ‘What’s the use of being Irish if you can’t be thick?’ he said. Black boxers, on the other hand, were viewed as having fewer noble qualities. When the former World Heavyweight Champion Jim Jeffries returned to the ring in 1910 to fulfil his destiny as ‘the chosen representative of the white race’ (as the novelist Jack London called him), he was the favourite in the betting against the first-ever black Heavyweight Champion, Jack Johnson, because it was believed the black man had a latent ‘yellow streak’. Johnson dished out a one-sided beating, which prompted race riots in twenty-five states, leaving eight black people and five white people dead.
This gave promoters an excuse to bar black men from fighting for the heavyweight crown for twenty-two years, until Louis arrived to rule for more than a decade. The last white American World Heavyweight Champion was Rocky Marciano. He retired in 1955 and would have fought at light-heavyweight if competing today. After Marciano, white heavyweights were derided as ‘hopeless white hopers’, so much so that none embraced the label. In 1969, when the promising Irish-American heavyweight Jerry Quarry was asked whether he thought of himself as a Great White Hope, he replied: ‘Screw White Hopes. I’m a fighter.’ That he was, and a good one too, but not quite good enough or large enough to beat the best black heavyweights such as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton.
Black Americans were assumed to be naturally bigger, stronger, more athletic; men whose genes gave them a huge edge. White heavyweight contenders were rare beasts, until the fall of the Berlin Wall released boxers from the Soviet sphere into the professional game. The Ukrainian Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Wladimir, took over, until one retired and the other was beaten by a white Briton. A fractious supporting cast of Eastern Europeans took their turns, along with the occasional black American, Briton or Cuban, while the elite at the lighter weights included Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Kazakhs, Japanese, Thais and Filipinos.
The 1992 film White Men Can’t Jump tells the tale of the white hustler Billy, who can sink a shot from beyond the half-court line but is useless at slam-dunking. In the end, through persistence, Billy wins the crucial game with a perfect slam dunk, refuting the assertion. The film’s title was drawn from the higher proportion of black jumpers than white in the National Basketball Association (NBA), which in turn had something to do with the fact that African Americans comprise 78 per cent of NBA squads. And this had something to do with the reasons why basketball took off in poorer black areas: it is a sport that can be played on small concrete courts rather than needing big open fields.
After the release of the film, several in the game felt inclined to go with the title rather than the message. ‘It’s a physiological fact that black players tend to be faster, more flexible and better jumpers,’ Mark Hannen of the English Basketball Association told me.24 Alex Anzelmo, chief physiotherapist of the British and Irish basketball associations, added that players of West African genetic origin had bigger gluteus muscles and longer gastrocnemius muscles and Achilles tendons, all of which help jumping. However, they had less developed quadriceps and hamstrings, increasing knee injuries. He also acknowledged ‘socioeconomic influences’ in black slam-dunking, ‘which are important in the same way that the lifestyle of the Kenyan distance runners is in aiding their performance’.25
The picture is clear: black players have a genetic edge, magnified by ‘socio-economic’ factors. Or is it? Surely a better source of jumping data would be the high jump. The men’s world record has long been held by the black Cuban Javier Sotomayor. But the gold medals in the last five Olympics were won by white men. Over the last six Olympics, black jumpers have won only five of the twenty men’s medals and two of the nineteen women’s medals. It would seem that the business of jumping high might have more to do with the culture of the sports concerned than with any ethnic genetic advantage.
This brings us to professional cycling, a sport that includes sprinters, with chunky pedal-churning thighs, and long-distance specialists who need the lean, slow-twitch muscles and recovery powers of a marathon runner. All the leading competitors on track and road, male and female, are white; so much so that when the British commentator Phil Liggett spotted a black Frenchman, Yohann Gène, Team Europcar’s talented domestique (a rider who works for the benefit of the team) in the 2013 Tour de France, he was compelled to put his foot in his mouth, referring to him as a ‘coloured cyclist’. No one would wonder aloud whether the shortage of black cycling stars was the result of a genetic shortfall, because cycling is so obviously a sport that black people have not taken to in large numbers. There are indeed more black cyclists than ever before, and some, such as Gène, are very good but they make up such a small proportion of the total that there are unlikely to be many on the medal podiums for a few years to come.
On the other hand, African Americans, who comprise 14 per cent of the American population, dominate NBA and National Football League (NFL) fixtures; just 37 per cent of NFL players are white. What’s the reason for this dominance? Those West African genes again? A higher proportion of black Americans see sport as a potential profession, and it is not hard to understand why. The black unemployment rate is nearly double that of the white; the picture is even more skewed in youth unemployment, even though the education gap is closing.26 Young black men still face people who avoid looking at them when they pass on the pavement, being refused job applications because their names sound black, and being suspected of criminal behaviour because of the colour of their skins. And they have a significantly higher chance of ending up behind bars.27 Sport is seen as a way out and up, offering income and status not available elsewhere. Success breeds success, encouraging further participation, not least because of the mythologies of genetic superiority. If you believe you’re likely to do well because you’ve heard you have the genes for success, you’re more likely to sign up. Conversely, if you’re a white sprinter, a non-African distance runner or a black swimmer, you might believe you’ll never excel and follow a different path.
African-American sporting participation is therefore more concentrated, focusing on American football and basketball. In other sports, black participation is on a downward trajectory. In 2017, just 7.1 per cent of Major League baseball players on opening-day rosters were black, compared to 19 per cent in 1995. Black participation has also fallen in professional boxing, where Hispanics have become more prominent. And despite the triumphs of Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, there has been no flood of black players into tennis or golf. Sporty whites, on the other hand, spread their bets. Their participation in American football is falling, as it is in basketball and sprinting, but it is rapidly increasing in soccer and remains unchallenged in baseball, motor sports, tennis, golf, swimming, road running, triathlon, ice hockey, lacrosse, cycling, mountain biking, martial arts, horse racing and other equestrian sports, squash, handball, surfing, rowing and other water sports, and a wide range of esoteric individual sports. If more black Americans are entering professional sport and concentrating on fewer sports, while white Americans are diluting their sporting focus, it’s no great surprise that a few major professional sports are black-dominated.
In 1980, I overheard a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Cape Town discussing the evils of apartheid. One of his friends agreed, remarking how terrible it was that black people couldn’t use white facilities such as beaches and swimming pools. The nineteen-year-old nodded earnestly but added that perhaps this was not so much of an issue as it was a ‘known fact’ that blacks couldn’t swim because their bodies couldn’t float. How did he draw this astounding conclusion, his friend asked? He replied that he’d ‘heard it somewhere’ and, in any event, he’d ‘never seen one’ in the water.
Beliefs along these lines have persisted in the swimming world and have found their way into some academic studies focusing on the ‘lower buoyancy’ of black Americans. The swimming genes debate parallels the sprinting genes debate, with the race bias reversed. The same is true of participation. Visit any running track and you’ll find most of the sprinters are black. Go to a swimming club and the picture will be reversed. Swimming is perceived as a white sport, just as sprinting is perceived to be a black one. But is the racial culture of the sport the main reason why there are so few top black swimmers, or is this culture at least in part a reflection of innate ability?
First, the genetic argument: are black people really less buoyant? Among people of recent African descent there is more variation than among other population groups, so there are people at both the upper and lower ends of the bone mass and bone density scales. However, those of West African descent tend, on average, to have slightly higher bone density and mass. All things being equal, a lower bone density might aid buoyancy but even among top swimmers there is a significant range.
There are other, more important, assets that help make a good swimmer, including height, arm length and foot size. Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, stands 1.93 metres tall, has a long upper body and long arms (a 203cm span), which help the thrust from his arms’ propulsion, and size 14 feet that can bend at an angle fifteen degrees greater than the average. But Phelps’s main advantage is his outstanding stroke mechanics, which come from expert tuition and thousands of hours of practice. The former USA team physician H. Richard Weiner, put it like this:
I guess it’s hard for people just to believe that it can just be stroke mechanics for Phelps … I’m sure if we could measure Phelps as much as we would like, we would find attributes better than average for swimming but I don’t think we would find any glaring abnormalities. I suspect if we could comprehensively measure all Olympians in finals, we would see significant differences but we would not see them having freakish things like 200 per cent more lung capacity or muscles that can contract at twice the force of a normal human muscle. I mean, come on.28
Part of the argument against the buoyancy idea comes from the success of elite black swimmers, mostly Americans of West African heritage, over the last thirty years. By 2016 black swimmers had won eighteen Olympic medals (six gold) and had set several world and Olympic records.29 Their example shows that ethnic heritage and skin colour are not inbuilt impediments to international success in the pool. But just like Frankie Fredericks, Dafne Schippers and Wayde van Niekerk in sprinting, these exceptions only prove that the rule does not exist; they do not explain the imbalance. For that, we need to look at the culture of American swimming. Fewer African Americans can swim than the US population average. According to a study conducted by USA Swimming, only 31 per cent of black children have learnt to swim reasonably well, meaning 69 per cent either can’t swim or have low swimming ability. And most of the children who can’t swim have parents who can’t swim. This contributes to a fatal drowning rate for black children three times that of white.30
One explanation relates to slavery; fear of them escaping meant slaves were forbidden from teaching their children to swim. The more recent history relates to the lack of public pools in poorer areas and lack of money for swimming lessons. In the UK, learning to swim is part of the school curriculum but not in America, where policies vary from state to state. In the 1920s and 1930s many white Americans learned to swim in two thousand new municipal swimming pools, from which black people were usually barred. This colour bar was lifted at most pools by the 1950s, so many whites joined whites-only private clubs and some had garden pools installed. Swimming thereby gained a reputation as a country club, big-garden thing.31 According to USA Swimming’s research, this is exacerbated by the fear of non-swimming parents that if their children learn to swim, they would want to swim and so open the possibility of drowning. Another reason given by African-American women is that the chlorinated water would damage their ‘relaxed’ hair.32 It would seem that the reason black people are under-represented in Olympic pools has everything to do with the culture of the sport and nothing to do with population genetics.
More generally, claims made about biological reasons for sporting success, particularly when they attach themselves to ethnicity, should be treated sceptically. It might be true that genes boosting fast-twitch muscles and gluteus muscles are slightly more prevalent among people of West African descent, but as we see from the lack of sprint medals from West Africa, genes are never enough. It is certainly true that some populations grow taller and have greater muscle mass and higher bone density than others, although the reasons may relate not just to genetics but also to epigenetics, diet and other environmental factors. Increased protein consumption has consistently prompted the growth of Chinese and Japanese people over the past two generations and South Koreans are, on average, more than five centimetres taller than their North Korean neighbours because of their better diet.
One sport does provide a pointer to the spread of talent: football. Because of its ubiquity – more people follow and play it than any other team sport and there are few countries that don’t share the passion – it provides a more appropriate picture of population-by-population prowess. Yet in the ‘beautiful game’, it is hard to discern a pattern of ethnic dominance. When fans debate who was the greatest-ever player, they might opt for the black Brazilian Pele or the white Argentinean Maradona. Among today’s stars they might discuss whether the black Frenchman Kylian Mbappé is set to surpass the white Argentinean Lionel Messi or the white Portuguese player Ronaldo. Colour is not a major consideration when it comes to assessing talent.
Even when sporting genes are coupled with ethnicity, these are not racial genes; they are genes that are more prevalent in a particular population. Variation within and between populations can relate to anything from bone density, muscularity and fast-twitch muscles to disease patterns. But the fact that there has been population-based evolution in such areas does not imply that there has been continued and varied population-based evolution in something as complex as intelligence.
It is said you can’t compare apples and pears. But you can: ‘apples are not as sweet as pears; pears are squishier than apples.’ You could even compare a fish and a bicycle: ‘I’d rather buy a cheap bicycle than an expensive fish.’ You can’t, however, get away with: ‘because apples are crunchy, so must pears be’ or ‘fish can swim; therefore, so can bicycles’. The former examples use valid points of comparison. The latter are based on the fallacy that apples and pears, or fish and bicycles, are equivalent. So it is with the comparison between the evolution of fast-twitch muscle and intelligence. A valid point of comparison would be: ‘it’s easy to find single genes for fast-twitch muscles but difficult to find single genes that have a significant bearing on intelligence,’ or ‘the relationship between natural selection and lactose tolerance is clear but its relationship with intelligence is opaque.’ In these examples, the valid points of comparison are gene identification and the role played by natural selection. But it is not valid to say: ‘because lactose tolerance evolved over a few thousand years through natural selection, intelligence therefore evolved the same way,’ or: ‘because we can identify single fast-twitch muscle genes, we can therefore do likewise with intelligence genes.’ The reason is that intelligence and muscles are not the same, nor even similar, things. It’s pure fish and bicycles.