Has the Theory of “Racialized” Running Performance Been Debunked?

By Steve Sailer

03/13/2024

Earlier: “Track and Battlefield”: Sailer and Seiler on Women in Combat from 1997

With the Olympics coming up this summer in Paris only three years after the COVID-delayed Olympics in Tokyo, here’s a preprint attempting to debunk my arguments, going back to 1997, that Olympic running performance is related to human biodiversity.

Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running

Tade Souaiaiaa, Nabie Fofanah, Rawle De Lisle and Sheena Mason

The athletic achievements of African athletes in global running championships have long been subject to scientific and sociological inquiry. During the 1990s, a popular narrative emerged, suggesting that West African lineage conferred inherent sprinting advantages, and that North, South and East African’s are specialized for longer distances. Part and parcel to this narrative was the enthusiastic belief that it would very soon be substantiated by a genotyping revolution that would enable prognostication of individual athletic potential.

We revisit this hypothesis in the post-genomic era. First, we compare the global running records used to generate the racialist hypotheses with performances over the last twenty years (2004-2023). Focusing on the 100m reveals intriguing trends, including the ascendancy of Jamaica as a sprint powerhouse and the elevation of South African and East Asian sprinters to the global stage, a direct challenge to the racialist paradigm. In line with an in-depth analysis of the influences on elite runners, we build a regression model to predict 100m performance based on environmental and psychological factors.

Next, we direct our attention to 1500m, where the last two British champions have been part of a European resurgence that hasn’t been seen in decades. Examining three different time periods, we identify a thirty year national slowdown (1989-2018). Adapting our model to this time period reveals striking evidence that racial perception has greater impact on performance than racial physiology.

Synthesizing these findings, we introduce a psychocultural hypothesis, positing that interactions between racial perceptions and social dynamics shape the global distribution of running performance. We contrast this hypothesis with the racialist paradigm and propose extending it beyond sport where it offers insight across many domains.

The argument here is basically that if Nature can’t be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to determine 100% of running results, then Nurture must be 100% responsible and race plays no role whatsoever other than stereotype threat.

Personally, I’ve always argued for the interplay of nature and nurture, but the authors and their friends appear to be convinced that that’s cheating: You’ve got to pick one and only one: nature or nurture? Which is it?

As I may have mentioned once or twice over the decades and millennia, in the race for the World’s Fastest Man, the Olympic 100m dash, the eight finalists have been extraordinarily sub-Saharan by ancestry going back to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. At present, 79 of the last 80 finalists across the last ten Olympics have had at least one parent of primarily sub-Saharan ancestry.

On the other hand, a Chinese guy, Su Bingtian, broke that streak in 2021 by not just qualifying but winning his semifinal with a 9.83, using a spectacular start and then grimly muscling his way over the finish line in first:

And the fellow who almost caught him in the semi and won gold in the final with a 9.80, Lamont Marcell Jacobs, has an African American dad but a white mom.

So it could be that sprinting is getting slightly more diverse.

But still … 79 out of 80.

Most of the arguments the authors come up with are either ones that I’ve come up with too, or direct analogies. For example, they argue that countries go through cycles of greatness, such as British middle distance champions Steve Ovett, Sebastian Coe, and Steve Cram in the 1980s, or, with perhaps excessive enthusiasm, the British “Return to Greatness” in the mile since 2019.

I could well believe that an efflorescence of competition could egg runners on to great performances, as in Britain in the 1980s, whereas a decline in competition could sap times, as in America in the same era. Likewise, I wrote in 2004:

Why don’t American distance runners run as fast as they once did? It appears to be an instructive interaction of nature and nurture.

The decline has been absolute, not just relative to the rest of the world. From 1965 through 1967, three American high school boys (Jim Ryun [now a GOP Congressman from Kansas], Marty Liquori, and Tim Danielson) ran the mile in under four minutes. It didn’t happen again until Alan Webb did it in 2001. I suspect that what took the air out of the American middle distance balloon was Kenyan Kip Keino beating Ryun at Mexico City in the 1500m in 1968. This was at high altitude, where Keino was at home, so it didn’t seem so bad at first, but then the Kenyans just kept on winning. A huge boom in recreational distance running started in America in 1972 when Frank Shorter won the Olympic Marathon, but it didn’t lead to a new generation of world-class runners. The top endurance talent must have gone into mountain climbing or triathlons or bicycle racing or something else where they didn’t have to compete with the Kenyans.

Anyway, here are currently the 100 fastest marathon runners of all time. The authors decline to consider marathon running for reasons. But it looks pretty informative to me:

It appears to be 1 Japanese, 1 black Brazilian, 2 North Africans, and a whole bunch of East Africans, almost all of them Kenyans or Ethiopians. Among the top 100 all-time marathoners, there are 46 running for Ethiopia and 44 running for Kenya.

What about among the top 100 100-meter men?

Among the top 100 all-time 100-meter men (9.94 or lower), there is one East Asian (Su Bingtian), one white (Frenchman Christophe LeMaitre), one half Australian Aborigine and half Irishman (Patrick Johnson), and one Cape Coloured (Wayde Van Niekerk). I believe there are two half-blacks (Jacobs and Jimmy Vicault, although I could be understating this number).

There is now one East African top man in the 100m, Ferdinand Omanyala of Kenya. Yet, note that he is of the Bantu tribe, which is quite distinct from the Nilotic Luo tribe of former president Obama. Omanyala is much wider and more muscular than the Kenyan Nilotic Kalenjin distance runners, such as marathon great Eliud Kipchoge.

The authors make a big deal about how the fact that there are now five Southern Africans (and one Southwest African, 1990s star Frankie Fredericks of Namibia) somehow disproves the “racialist” perspective that West Africans are better at sprinting and East Africans at distance running, but the theory was always that sub-Saharans have overall advantages in running speed that are partly specialized by sprint vs. distance.

43 of the top 100m men are African-American, 32 are ethnically Caribbean, and 11 of the top 100 are ethnically recent West Africans.

The authors emphasize that West Africans are not as abundant as the theory that West Africa is the motherlode of sprint speed would suggest, but there are obvious nurture differences: life expectancy in Nigeria is only 54 years compared to 74 years in Jamaica.

So, I dunno. It looks like, as of 2024, that both Nature and Nurture play significant roles in running performance. But then I’m a bad person, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

[Comment at Unz.com]

< Previous

Next >