Do Africans make better runners?

A new paper tries to debunk hereditarian claims about African running success, but its arguments aren't convincing.

Written by Noah Carl.

You can see why people don’t want to believe that racial IQ gaps are genetic. They’re concerned the claim could be used to justify racism. But why do people refuse to believe that racial gaps in athletic performance are genetic? Athletic performance is much less morally loaded than IQ. Saying “he’s bad at sports” isn’t nearly as damning as saying “he’s not intelligent”. And the racial group that people are most concerned about protecting from racism, namely blacks, does well on athletic performance. It’s black overrepresentation in many sports that gets attention, not black underrepresentation.

One reason they refuse is that conceding genes contribute to racial gaps in athletic performance makes it more plausible they contribute to racial IQ gaps, and for many people that would be intolerable. As Greg Cochran observes, “if you admit that Kenyans have a different build than the Yoruba … then you’re admitting that regional selection can make people noticeably different”. Better to play it safe and insist everything is cultural.

Some recent books defending the position that there are no racial differences in athletic ability include: Superior by Angela Saini, Skin Deep by Gavin Evans, and How to Argue with a Racist by Adam Rutherford. Even Harvard professor Joe Henrich, who really should know better, told Richard Hanania, “If you grow up in Kenya, you might emphasize long distance running … That’s not because they get some special genes for long distance running”.

Recent books opposing “race science”.

The latest effort to disprove racial differences in athletic ability is a paper by Tade Souaiaia and colleagues titled ‘Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running’. Specifically, these authors challenge the “racialist paradigm” that West Africans have an inherent advantage in sprinting and East Africans have an inherent advantage in long-distance running.

They begin by referring to a 2005 paper which noted that, as of 2004, every male record holder in a running event had either West, East or North African ancestry. Souaiaia and colleagues point out that several of these records have since been broken by athletes without the relevant ancestry. For example, a Chinese athlete broke the 2004-record in the 110m hurdles. The argument here is that if non-West Africans can break records previously set by West Africans, there can’t be an inherent West African advantage.

But this is a rather arbitrary way to analyse the data. As Steve Sailer notes, a much simpler method is to look at the top 100 all-time performances in each event, and ask what are the ancestries of the athletes who achieved them. Sailer finds that in the 100m, 97 of the top 100 times were achieved by men with West/South African ancestry. And in the marathon, 96 of the top 100 times were achieved by men with East African ancestry. In other words, West/South Africans still overwhelmingly dominate sprinting, while East Africans still overwhelmingly dominate long-distance running.

Souaiaia and colleagues then present four pieces of evidence which they claim further undermine the “racialist paradigm”.

The first is “Caribbean enrichment”, the fact that Jamaica and some other Caribbean nations have achieved disproportionate success in sprinting, as compared to most countries in West Africa itself. But this simply shows that genetics isn’t the only factor that matters. Other factors surely play a role – such as talent identification, infrastructure for training, and, yes, a culture of running. The thing the sceptics need to explain is why people with West/South African ancestry excel in sprinting regardless of whether they’re from the US, the UK or the Caribbean. Why do black Britons perform like black Americans when it comes sprinting, rather than like Asian Britons or white Britons? Why are almost all British sprinters black when blacks comprise only 4% of the population?¹

The second piece of evidence is “African diversity”, the fact that some of the best African sprinters are not from West Africa. For example, the African 100m record is held by an athlete from Kenya. Yet this is unpersuasive, since the athlete in question, Ferdinand Omanyala, is ethnically Bantu. The theory isn’t that particular places have a causal effect on sprinting ability; it’s that particular ethnic groups have traits that make them better or worse at sprinting. Souaiaia and colleagues note that more of the top sprinting performances in the last five years have come from Kenyan or South African athletes than from Nigerian athletes. But this is easily explained by the fact that Kenya and South Africa have large Bantu populations.

Ferdinand Omanyala is from the Luhya, a Bantu tribe in Kenya.

The third piece of evidence is “East Asian Success”, the fact that the Chinese 100m record is faster than the West African 100m record, and there have been more Chinese athletes in the last ten 100m finals than West African athletes. But, again, this simply shows that genetics isn’t the only relevant factor. China has 1.4 billion people and perhaps the highest state capacity of any country. When you look at the data systematically, China does not do particularly well in sprinting. Of the top 100 all-time performances in the 100m, only one was achieved by a man of East Asian ancestry, compared to 97 that were achieved by men of West/South African ancestry.

The fourth piece of evidence is “morphological diversity”, the fact that elite sprinters are relatively diverse in terms of their biomechanics. This argument does have some truth to it. Elite sprinters certainly seem more diverse in this respect than, say, elite long-distance runners. Usain Bolt is 1.95m tall, whereas Su Bingtian is only 1.72m. Harry Aikines-Aryeetey is extremely muscular, whereas Christophe Lemaitre is comparatively thin. Yet it remains true that sprinting is overwhelmingly dominated by athletes with West/South African ancestry. And rather than having one single trait or gene, these athletes likely have a combination of traits that give them an edge over their competitors.

Souaiaia and colleagues complain that “attempts to locate "speed genes" have largely failed”. And while this is in part because scientists naively put too much faith in the candidate gene approach, it is also because of papers like the very one Souaiaia and colleagues wrote, which casually deploy terms like “racialist” and “scientific racism” in an effort to smear those who subscribe to genetic explanations for racial differences in athletic performance. As David Epstein noted in the Sports Gene:

Several scientists I spoke with about the theory insisted that they would have no interest in investigating it because of the inevitably thorny issue of race involved. One of them told me that he actually has data on ethnic differences with respect to a particular physiological trait, but that he would never publish the data because of the potential controversy.

Another point worth making is that some ethnic groups are dramatically underrepresented in elite sprinting, even compared to Europeans and East Asians. Only one athlete from South Asia appears in the top 3,949 men’s 100m times, despite this region comprising almost 25% of the world’s population.² By comparison, there are 772 entries for Jamaica alone – a country that makes up less than 0.04% of the world’s population. Do critics of the “racialist paradigm” seriously want to claim that South Asians are just as good at sprinting as West/South Africans? Of course, once you’ve conceded they aren’t, there’s nothing to prevent West/South Africans from being somewhat better than Europeans and East Asians too.

Incidentally, a 2019 study analysed data on a sample of South Asian skeletons spanning the last 11,000 years, and found that they had low bone breadth relative to bone length – as compared to skeletons from other human populations. Since bone breadth relative to bone length serves as a proxy for lean body mass, this suggests that South Asians are predisposed to high levels of adiposity and may account for their elevated risk of type 2 diabetes. The finding is consistent with South Asians having weak grip strength.

When it comes to East African dominance of long-distance running, Souaiaia and colleagues give little reason to doubt the genetic hypothesis. This may be because that dominance is so overwhelming – even more perhaps than West/South African dominance of sprinting. Of the top 5,049 men’s marathon times, 3,343 are held by athletes from just two countries, Kenya and Ethiopia. Only 101 are held by athletes from the US, the world’s most successful sporting nation. And not a single one is held by an athlete from South Asia – or Jamaica for that matter.

What’s more, we actually have a decent idea of why East Africans do so well at long-distance running. Like all Sub-Saharans, they have a narrow pelvis and long limbs for their height, giving them a larger ratio of surface area to total bodymass (see below). Their body proportions appear to be a function of the equatorial climate in which they evolved, as predicted by Allen’s rule.³ East Africans also have low bodyfat and an ectomorphic (slender) physique.

Each dot is an ethnic group. Source for top two charts. Source for bottom two charts. Polynesians are an outlier on the bottom two charts because they likely evolved in a colder environment than the one they now inhabit.

Studies of East African runners themselves have documented that they have unusually narrow legs, high calf insertions and long Achilles tendons.⁴ Combined with their slender bodies, these factors serve to enhance running economy over long distances – allowing them to expend less energy at a given pace than their competitors. As the authors of a 2017 paper note, “East African runners appear to have a very high level of [running economy] most likely associated, at least partly, with anthropometric characteristics rather than with any specific metabolic property of the working muscle”.

Interestingly, there appears to have been more research on the biological basis of East African success in long-distance running than on the biological basis of West/South African success in sprinting – suggesting the latter is more taboo. This may be because there aren’t many East Africans in the US, which tends to have the strongest taboos around race because of its history.

As an alternative to the supposedly erroneous “racialist paradigm”, Souaiaia and colleagues propose the “psychocultural hypothesis”. It’s not entirely clear what they mean, but they seem to be saying that stereotypes and role model effects explain the patterns in the data. Although I can’t rule out such effects completely, this seems to me an extremely unlikely explanation. How it can account for the emergence of East African success in the first place?

“In the early twentieth century,” Adam Rutherford notes, “Finnish people utterly dominated long-distance running”. And their success was attributed to innate factors by at least one contemporaneous writer. (Rutherford uses this a point against biological explanations for racial gaps.) If the “psychocultural hypothesis” were right, Finns should have continued to dominate long-distance running, since they had been stereotyped as good long-distance runners. Yet today, not a single Finnish athlete appears in the top 5,049 marathon times.

Likewise, the stereotype of Aryan racial superiority didn’t stop the black American athlete Jesse Owens from winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – making him the most successful athlete at that year’s games. Evidently, stereotypes aren’t very powerful when they’re wrong.

Overall, the evidence that West/South Africans have an inherent advantage in sprinting and East Africans have an inherent advantage in long-distance running remains highly compelling, while the notion that racial gaps in athletic performance are the result of stereotypes and role model effects is totally implausible. Some groups are better at certain things than other groups – and that’s okay.

The original version of this article stated that not a single athlete from South Asia appears in the top 3,949 men’s 100m times (rather than only one). This error was pointed out by Steve Sailer.

Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.

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1. There may also have been selection for athletic ability under slavery, though this is speculative.

2. South Asian countries comprise India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. I only checked nationalities. It is possible that more athletes with South Asian ancestry appear in the list.

3. North Eurasians have the opposite body proportions, which likely explains their dominance in swimming and weightlifting.

4. A systematic review published in 2017 concluded that the length of East African runners’ Achilles tendons may be the most important reason for their superior running economy.