A prima facie case for the genetic basis of African running success is that both long- and short-distance running are probably the most universally accessible sports that exist. Any group that doesn't exhibit a running "culture" probably just lacks the genes for it.
Precisely because the case is so rock-solid and most clearly manifests itself at the highest levels of running, I wonder what elite non-African sprinters themselves come to make of their relatively laggardly times compared to African peers. Do they accept that some physiological difference must explain why many marathon winners are Kenyan (look at their legs) when training regimens are largely the same? Or do they maintain that improvements in their training will eventually be enough for victory?
Anyway, it's a great article! Denial of the genetic basis of African running success is a hallmark of confusion on all things HBD.
There's a definite impact of stereotype threat on white American runners who come to the end of a fine college track career and think about whether they should go pro and focus on making the Olympics after the next in five years when they are peaking at age 27 or go to law school now and get on with life. If you are an 800m or 1500m man, maybe you stick with running as your job.
Is this “stereotype threat”? Stereotype threat is not a big thing and the studies don’t replicate. If these runners rationally decide that they cannot compete with the worlds best runners, that’s not stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat would be if someone white who could become a great runner decided to give up or at least underestimated himself because of his race. I think that’s unlikely especially given that there are objective measurements. People know how they stack up.
Please don’t repeat woke-tard arguments and invent allegations of stereotype threat out of thin air to cope with genetic differences. It’s cringe either way.
I think people would actually be excited about a very fast white guy, the same way people got excited about Jeremy Lin or Maryam Mirzakhani.
There is no “stereotype threat”. These talented white runners just realize they are not good enough to compete and go do something else.
"There's a definite impact of stereotype threat on white American runners who come to the end of a fine college track career and think about whether they should go pro and focus on making the Olympics after the next in five years when they are peaking at age 27 or go to law school now and get on with life."
Decisions, decisions. Yes, that is the dilemma for white American runners: continue in sports or get a law degree—or perhaps a STEM degree. LOL
I don’t doubt that HBD is part of it but still I do think culture/environment plays a role. Can Jamaican domination of sprinting vis-a-vis other West African populations be explained by biology and genetics alone? Jamaica has only 2 million people. Surely Nigeria with 100x as much West African people has at least as much people. It’s less developed though.
Great article. Beyond ethnic differences specifically, there is plenty of evidence that genes play a significant role in determining one's VO2 max and distance running potential generally (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5688475/).
'White Northern Europeans continue to excel at middle-distance running.'
Oh, for the days when Coe, Ovett and Cram used to battle it out. And before them there was Bedford, Foster and Morecroft.
Why is it that white people can still compete at middle-distances? Is it that European bodies are more 'general purpose' than the extremes of East and West Africans?
Right, my guess is that in some hard to define absolute sense, Europeans tend to be pretty good at all distances, but West Africans are extremely good at 400m and less and East Africans at 3000m and more, which leaves 800m and 1500m as the most diversely competitive events.
"Why is it that white people can still compete at middle-distances? Is it that European bodies are more 'general purpose' than the extremes of East and West Africans?"
The question is, why would anyone put serious importance on athletic endeavors in this modern high-tech age?
Is it? That question wouldn't have occurred to me. So you're saying that an interest in, and enjoyment of, sport should have become obsolete as soon as the first high-tech gadget showed up? What a strange idea. Do you also think that a love of art or desiring beautiful women should also be obsolete since we are now oh so beyond all that stuff?
Firstly, I'm not convinced that a discussion about the relative gifts of certain races for certain sports need be labelled 'Seriously Important'. Merely 'Seriously Interesting' would be better, though I can see how someone who's interested in neither sport nor racial issues would want to dismiss both as irrelevant. Especially now we are 'in this modern high-tech age'. Huh?
Secondly, I'm amazed that you would wish to set yourself up as the objective and neutral arbiter of all that is and isn't important. Let me guess. Important things are those that you are interested in, right?
And of course now we have Kerr and Ingebrigtsen in the 1500m and Ingebrigtsen in the 5K and 10K as well... Both far northern Europeans. Back in the day there also was Lasse Viren.
There was something about Viren's stiff running style that failed to ignite my imagination. He ran a bit like Mr. Jacobs, my headmaster at Junior School, who clearly learnt how to run from a manual.
...Along with that balding, whiskered Finn who looked like a Victorian gentleman scholar. Perhaps he even smoked a pipe as he was running round, but that might be just my faulty memory adding details. He won the 1971 European Games 10,000 metre title in Helsinki. Best finish to a race I've ever seen. Crowd going wild. Still makes my hair stand on end...Juha Vaatainen. Just looked it up.
It takes quite a bit of intellectual gymnastics to ignore the obvious fact that certain genetic ancestries do significantly better in some sports regardless of cultural context.
In addition to sprinting, there is also jumping, which uses similar muscles and coordination. Before West African descended blacks received the final touches of training, equipment, good shoes and good tracks for those events, Slavs were disproportionately represented in those events as well. Check the Olympics for the 25 years after WWII. And what do you know, what is the OTHER group besides West African descendants that excels in basketball? Slavs, and their close cousins the Balts. Tall, leapers, with good gross and fine-motor coordination. The Japanese are a third group that excels as sprinters, but not enough to enter world consciousness as serious threats. I don't know what their genetic package is, but it is apparently not quite enough. White Northern Europeans continue to excel at middle-distance running.
There are other genetic inheritances that also confer advantages, not just the slow-twitch muscle fibers of the Great African Rift combined with their narrow calves. Greater lung capacity is also nice.
A Japanese sprinter made the 100m Olympic final in the 1932 Olympics. A Chinese sprinter made the 2021 final.
Japanese baseball players can be quite fast like Ichiro, and Shohei Ohtani is putting up impressive power/speed numbers with quite a few stolen bases and triples for a slugger.
The Japanese often do well in the 4x100m relay, in part because they master the technical aspects of handing off the baton, while the Americans don't like to practice together. It's like getting Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman to team up.
" Not a single 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."
That changed recently. In 2022 Yupun Abeykoon of Sri Lanka ran 9.96 in the 100 meters, which is tied for the 735th fastest time ever, making him the 124th fastest individual ever. He benefited from a +1.6 tailwind and 1000 meters of moderate altitude in the Jura Mountains, but those aren't huge advantages. (Most sub-10.00 times benefit from slightly favorable conditions.)
He looks like a normal South Asian guy, in sort of the way Shohei Ohtani looks like a normal Japanese salaryman or Clark Kent looks like a normal mild-mannered newspaper reporter:
Thanks, Steve – this has been corrected. Incidentally, the reason I missed Abeykoon is that I searched for "LKA" (the ISO code for Sri Lanka), rather than "SRI" (the IOC code).
Regarding Kenyan and Ethiopian runners, a good guess would point to the East Africa Plateau, with much of those regions being at heights of 1000 to 1500 m, where there is ~ 15% less oxygen. Adaptation to that environment would fairly obviously enhance ability to sustain speed over medium and long distances (aerobic activity), but not enhance ability at (anaerobic) sprinting.
"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."
It is hard to conceive of a more useless trait in the modern world than running or excelling in any other physical trait. Humans are set apart from all animals by their cognitive abilities. A human has no chance of competing against animals physically.
Yes, blacks can run and jump better than whites; that is obvious. The question is, so what? How does that make their life better?
Exactly. I have no problem being the last boy picked for the pickup team. I just went out in the field for fun. On the other hand, I am thankful to be competitive in that which a 1st world technological society rewards—products of the mind.
So Rutherford's position is that if a black athlete beats a white athlete, that is due to factors other than genes?
There is a YouTube video called 'The reality of biology', a highly trained Polish athlete is easily overtaken and beaten by a black athlete.
She was an international runner, knew about sports science, was perfectly healthy, at a good age for runners, had been coached well, but was easily beaten because the other runner had genes which made them much faster.
The other runner was male. His advantage at running was entirely due to his different genes.
That is obvious to everybody. That is why the video is called 'The reality of biology'.
Now that we have established that the effect size of genetics can be much greater than the effect of training, good health, good coaching etc, let us turn to where the effect size of genetics is much less.
In this case, we need a bigger sample size than 1 Polish girl being beaten by a Black male.
The last 11 Olympics 100m and 200m are surely a sample that had enough power to detect the genetic advantages that are seen so clearly when somebody with XY chromosomes competes against a woman.
Surely, Rutherford can't maintain that the only reason white people are so underrepresented in such a big sample is because of bad coaching or not training hard enough or being injured.
I fail to see the point of this obsession with hereditarianism. Let's assume that West Africans have an inherent genetic advantage in sprinting, proven by their having a higher percentage of dominance in the sport commensurate with their numbers. But this doesn't mean that every West African is a champion sprinter, or that no other group can produce champion sprinters. So if the goal isn't to create a racial hierarchy, or to justify cuts to social programs because certain groups are deemed incorrigible and therefore unable to benefit from them, what is the goal? It's fine to say the goal is nothing more than pure knowledge, to learn something new and interesting about the world, but given the inevitable racialist overtones, it's important that those pursuing it take extra care that it isn't misused. They have an obligation that astronomers and bacteriologists don't have to worry about.
So if white football fans ever realise that the reason that cornerbacks in the NFL are Black is because of genes, they will go on a racial killing spree?
They will just get another beer from the fridge and go back to watching the game.
There are genetic differences affecting performance, for example women have a greater distribution of slow twitch muscle fibers, which are more resistant to fatigue and more adaptable to endurance.
A prima facie case for the genetic basis of African running success is that both long- and short-distance running are probably the most universally accessible sports that exist. Any group that doesn't exhibit a running "culture" probably just lacks the genes for it.
Precisely because the case is so rock-solid and most clearly manifests itself at the highest levels of running, I wonder what elite non-African sprinters themselves come to make of their relatively laggardly times compared to African peers. Do they accept that some physiological difference must explain why many marathon winners are Kenyan (look at their legs) when training regimens are largely the same? Or do they maintain that improvements in their training will eventually be enough for victory?
Anyway, it's a great article! Denial of the genetic basis of African running success is a hallmark of confusion on all things HBD.
There's a definite impact of stereotype threat on white American runners who come to the end of a fine college track career and think about whether they should go pro and focus on making the Olympics after the next in five years when they are peaking at age 27 or go to law school now and get on with life. If you are an 800m or 1500m man, maybe you stick with running as your job.
But if you are a sprinter, c'mon, be realistic...
Is this “stereotype threat”? Stereotype threat is not a big thing and the studies don’t replicate. If these runners rationally decide that they cannot compete with the worlds best runners, that’s not stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat would be if someone white who could become a great runner decided to give up or at least underestimated himself because of his race. I think that’s unlikely especially given that there are objective measurements. People know how they stack up.
Please don’t repeat woke-tard arguments and invent allegations of stereotype threat out of thin air to cope with genetic differences. It’s cringe either way.
I think people would actually be excited about a very fast white guy, the same way people got excited about Jeremy Lin or Maryam Mirzakhani.
There is no “stereotype threat”. These talented white runners just realize they are not good enough to compete and go do something else.
"There's a definite impact of stereotype threat on white American runners who come to the end of a fine college track career and think about whether they should go pro and focus on making the Olympics after the next in five years when they are peaking at age 27 or go to law school now and get on with life."
Decisions, decisions. Yes, that is the dilemma for white American runners: continue in sports or get a law degree—or perhaps a STEM degree. LOL
I don’t doubt that HBD is part of it but still I do think culture/environment plays a role. Can Jamaican domination of sprinting vis-a-vis other West African populations be explained by biology and genetics alone? Jamaica has only 2 million people. Surely Nigeria with 100x as much West African people has at least as much people. It’s less developed though.
Great post. So nice that we are still allowed to read pieces like this and the Ministry of Truth hasn't yet outlawed such articles.
I know, we're so oppressed.
Great article. Beyond ethnic differences specifically, there is plenty of evidence that genes play a significant role in determining one's VO2 max and distance running potential generally (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5688475/).
'White Northern Europeans continue to excel at middle-distance running.'
Oh, for the days when Coe, Ovett and Cram used to battle it out. And before them there was Bedford, Foster and Morecroft.
Why is it that white people can still compete at middle-distances? Is it that European bodies are more 'general purpose' than the extremes of East and West Africans?
Right, my guess is that in some hard to define absolute sense, Europeans tend to be pretty good at all distances, but West Africans are extremely good at 400m and less and East Africans at 3000m and more, which leaves 800m and 1500m as the most diversely competitive events.
"Why is it that white people can still compete at middle-distances? Is it that European bodies are more 'general purpose' than the extremes of East and West Africans?"
The question is, why would anyone put serious importance on athletic endeavors in this modern high-tech age?
I just saw an article advocating the addition of a truly competitive and physically challenging sport to the Olympics - pole dancing.
Is it? That question wouldn't have occurred to me. So you're saying that an interest in, and enjoyment of, sport should have become obsolete as soon as the first high-tech gadget showed up? What a strange idea. Do you also think that a love of art or desiring beautiful women should also be obsolete since we are now oh so beyond all that stuff?
"So you're saying that an interest in, and enjoyment of, sport should have become obsolete as soon as the first high-tech gadget showed up?"
Not at all my complaint is the obsession with athletics and other entertainment.
I believe I implied that when I wrote '... why would anyone put SERIOUS IMPORTANCE on athletic endeavors in this modern high-tech age?'.
"Do you also think that a love of art or desiring beautiful women should also be obsolete since we are now oh so beyond all that stuff?"
Of course not. Again, the importance of something should not be embellished.
Firstly, I'm not convinced that a discussion about the relative gifts of certain races for certain sports need be labelled 'Seriously Important'. Merely 'Seriously Interesting' would be better, though I can see how someone who's interested in neither sport nor racial issues would want to dismiss both as irrelevant. Especially now we are 'in this modern high-tech age'. Huh?
Secondly, I'm amazed that you would wish to set yourself up as the objective and neutral arbiter of all that is and isn't important. Let me guess. Important things are those that you are interested in, right?
Western civilization is obsessed with sports and entertainment. Bread and circuses all around.
You insist on mischaracterizing my position.
Move on.
And of course now we have Kerr and Ingebrigtsen in the 1500m and Ingebrigtsen in the 5K and 10K as well... Both far northern Europeans. Back in the day there also was Lasse Viren.
There was something about Viren's stiff running style that failed to ignite my imagination. He ran a bit like Mr. Jacobs, my headmaster at Junior School, who clearly learnt how to run from a manual.
...Along with that balding, whiskered Finn who looked like a Victorian gentleman scholar. Perhaps he even smoked a pipe as he was running round, but that might be just my faulty memory adding details. He won the 1971 European Games 10,000 metre title in Helsinki. Best finish to a race I've ever seen. Crowd going wild. Still makes my hair stand on end...Juha Vaatainen. Just looked it up.
It takes quite a bit of intellectual gymnastics to ignore the obvious fact that certain genetic ancestries do significantly better in some sports regardless of cultural context.
In addition to sprinting, there is also jumping, which uses similar muscles and coordination. Before West African descended blacks received the final touches of training, equipment, good shoes and good tracks for those events, Slavs were disproportionately represented in those events as well. Check the Olympics for the 25 years after WWII. And what do you know, what is the OTHER group besides West African descendants that excels in basketball? Slavs, and their close cousins the Balts. Tall, leapers, with good gross and fine-motor coordination. The Japanese are a third group that excels as sprinters, but not enough to enter world consciousness as serious threats. I don't know what their genetic package is, but it is apparently not quite enough. White Northern Europeans continue to excel at middle-distance running.
There are other genetic inheritances that also confer advantages, not just the slow-twitch muscle fibers of the Great African Rift combined with their narrow calves. Greater lung capacity is also nice.
A Japanese sprinter made the 100m Olympic final in the 1932 Olympics. A Chinese sprinter made the 2021 final.
Japanese baseball players can be quite fast like Ichiro, and Shohei Ohtani is putting up impressive power/speed numbers with quite a few stolen bases and triples for a slugger.
The Japanese often do well in the 4x100m relay, in part because they master the technical aspects of handing off the baton, while the Americans don't like to practice together. It's like getting Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman to team up.
I'm liking the book
" Not a single 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."
That changed recently. In 2022 Yupun Abeykoon of Sri Lanka ran 9.96 in the 100 meters, which is tied for the 735th fastest time ever, making him the 124th fastest individual ever. He benefited from a +1.6 tailwind and 1000 meters of moderate altitude in the Jura Mountains, but those aren't huge advantages. (Most sub-10.00 times benefit from slightly favorable conditions.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yupun_Abeykoon
He looks like a normal South Asian guy, in sort of the way Shohei Ohtani looks like a normal Japanese salaryman or Clark Kent looks like a normal mild-mannered newspaper reporter:
https://www.srilankafoundation.org/newsfeed/yupun-abeykoon-hits-a-new-sri-lankan-record-in-100m/
Thanks, Steve – this has been corrected. Incidentally, the reason I missed Abeykoon is that I searched for "LKA" (the ISO code for Sri Lanka), rather than "SRI" (the IOC code).
Regarding Kenyan and Ethiopian runners, a good guess would point to the East Africa Plateau, with much of those regions being at heights of 1000 to 1500 m, where there is ~ 15% less oxygen. Adaptation to that environment would fairly obviously enhance ability to sustain speed over medium and long distances (aerobic activity), but not enhance ability at (anaerobic) sprinting.
"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."
Oh this again. While I doubt Jesse's medal haul enthralled der Führer, the medal count did not exactly dispel the notion of Aryan superiority that year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Summer_Olympics#Medal_count
I agree with the thrust of the article, but this trope is tired and tiresome.
Thank you for your glimmer of sanity in this sea of nog pandering stupidity!
It is hard to conceive of a more useless trait in the modern world than running or excelling in any other physical trait. Humans are set apart from all animals by their cognitive abilities. A human has no chance of competing against animals physically.
Yes, blacks can run and jump better than whites; that is obvious. The question is, so what? How does that make their life better?
Exactly. I have no problem being the last boy picked for the pickup team. I just went out in the field for fun. On the other hand, I am thankful to be competitive in that which a 1st world technological society rewards—products of the mind.
So Rutherford's position is that if a black athlete beats a white athlete, that is due to factors other than genes?
There is a YouTube video called 'The reality of biology', a highly trained Polish athlete is easily overtaken and beaten by a black athlete.
She was an international runner, knew about sports science, was perfectly healthy, at a good age for runners, had been coached well, but was easily beaten because the other runner had genes which made them much faster.
The other runner was male. His advantage at running was entirely due to his different genes.
That is obvious to everybody. That is why the video is called 'The reality of biology'.
Now that we have established that the effect size of genetics can be much greater than the effect of training, good health, good coaching etc, let us turn to where the effect size of genetics is much less.
In this case, we need a bigger sample size than 1 Polish girl being beaten by a Black male.
The last 11 Olympics 100m and 200m are surely a sample that had enough power to detect the genetic advantages that are seen so clearly when somebody with XY chromosomes competes against a woman.
Surely, Rutherford can't maintain that the only reason white people are so underrepresented in such a big sample is because of bad coaching or not training hard enough or being injured.
I fail to see the point of this obsession with hereditarianism. Let's assume that West Africans have an inherent genetic advantage in sprinting, proven by their having a higher percentage of dominance in the sport commensurate with their numbers. But this doesn't mean that every West African is a champion sprinter, or that no other group can produce champion sprinters. So if the goal isn't to create a racial hierarchy, or to justify cuts to social programs because certain groups are deemed incorrigible and therefore unable to benefit from them, what is the goal? It's fine to say the goal is nothing more than pure knowledge, to learn something new and interesting about the world, but given the inevitable racialist overtones, it's important that those pursuing it take extra care that it isn't misused. They have an obligation that astronomers and bacteriologists don't have to worry about.
So if white football fans ever realise that the reason that cornerbacks in the NFL are Black is because of genes, they will go on a racial killing spree?
They will just get another beer from the fridge and go back to watching the game.
There are genetic differences affecting performance, for example women have a greater distribution of slow twitch muscle fibers, which are more resistant to fatigue and more adaptable to endurance.
The Chinese athlete was genetically engineered.