Malmo:
You are an angry person...
Except the sprint results certainly do reflect, without question, the
underlying bio-genetic reality. Absolutely and unequivocally.
How you can turn science into bigotry is an issue you'll have to deal with
in the confessional both.
On 8/9/01 12:43 PM, "malmo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I guessed that because the sprints aren't complying with Entine's
> bigoted views he'd focus on the 1500.
>
> Nothing new, the same tired, old sh!t.
>
> malmo
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jon Entine
>> Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 2:46 PM
>> To: Track and Field List
>> Subject: t-and-f: The End of the British Rule in Running
>>
>>
>> Thought this would provoke the usual outrage. If anyone wants
>> to print this unpublished article, or reproduce it on a
>> website, please send me a note. I will be most obliging.
>>
>> ******
>>
>> 9 August 2001
>>
>> The End of the British Empire: Why a Brit (Black or White)
>> Will Never Again Hold a Distance Running Record
>>
>> By Jon Entine
>>
>> When the gun goes off for the mens 1500 metre final at
>> Sundays World Championships in Edmonton, it might just as
>> well signal the end of an era. The age of great British
>> middle distance runners is gone forever. Once the worlds
>> dominant power, with a bloodline of Sebastian Coe, Steve
>> Ovett, Steve Cram, and Peter Elliott that regularly left
>> competitors in the dust, the British hopefuls are today mere
>> also-rans in a field dominated by North and East Africans.
>>
>> The collapse of the once mighty British Empire is actually
>> part of a more sweeping trend. Where Brits, Aussies and
>> others of Northern European stock used to dominate distance
>> running, former greats such as Steve Cram and Sebastian Coe
>> now indulge in British bashing. So where is the problem?
>> wrote Coe last week in the Telegraph. . The answer, I rather
>> fancy, as Shakespeare said, lies not in the stars but in our
>> hands - run faster. Coe went on to exhort aspiring Brits to
>> train with the brutal commitment of days gone by - the
>> mental and physical intensity of what was commonplace 20
>> years ago, he added modestly.
>>
>> Heres a wake-up call: you might as well look to the stars,
>> because distance runners from Britain, northern Europe or
>> North America, white or black, will never reclaim the mantle
>> as world's best. And cultural factors have little do with
>> this changing phenomenon.
>>
>> The world rankings, which combine race results from the 800
>> metres to the marathon, paint a stark picture. Africans,
>> eight from Kenya, hold the top 10 places. Among the women,
>> the top 3 and 7-out-of-10 are Kenyan. However, because of
>> social taboos against women runners in Africa, non-Africans
>> remain somewhat more competitive.
>>
>> If you ask self-proclaimed experts whats behind this
>> extraordinary phenomenon, be prepared for the usual clich:
>> the current crop of British athletes is too soft. If they
>> just tried harder, theyd challenge for gold. Certainly,
>> Coes 1981 800-metre run in Stockholm ranks as one of the
>> great all-time performances. But a look at the all time list
>> of 800 metre runs makes it clear that Britains reign as
>> middle distance champion (and prior periods of domination by
>> the Finns and other Northern Europeans) speaks mostly to the
>> fact that for the most part Africans didnt compete. While
>> nationalistic chest pounding may help deal with frustration
>> of fading glory, it cant change the hard reality that
>> Britains middle distance running glory is gone for good,
>> whatever training methods might be adopted. Now that the
>> playing field is more level-running is a worldwide sport,
>> drawing competitors from Africa, Asia and South
>> America-Northern Europeans are decidedly second-class.
>>
>> Consider the list of all time top 800 meter runs and runners.
>> While Coes best time ranks third on the all time list,
>> Elliotts stands at 45, Crams at 67, and Ovetts at 341. On
>> a regular basis, none could expect to challenge the current
>> world record holder, Kenyan Wilson Kipketer, who has 28 times
>> in the top 100. Other Kenyan runners bring the total in the
>> top 100 to fifty. Overall, athletes of African ancestry hold
>> 92 of the top 100 times, with Northern Europeans holding but eight.
>>
>> What about Coes whine that British runners could transform
>> themselves from joggers into champions if only they paid they
>> mimicked the Kenyans. As the myth goes, Kenyans are great
>> because they ran to school as kids and torture themselves in
>> practice. That brings belly laughs from Wilson Kipketer, who
>> destroyed Coes long-held 800-metre record in 1997. "I lived
>> right next door to school," he laughs. "I walked, nice and slow."
>>
>> The reality is that for every Kenyan monster-miler putting in
>> 100-mile weeks, there are others, like Kipketer, who get
>> along on less than thirty. Training regimens are as varied
>> in Kenya as any where in the world, notes Colm OConnell,
>> coach at St. Patricks Iten, the famous private school and
>> running factory in the valley that turned out Kipketer and
>> other Kenyan greats. OConnell eschews the mega-training so
>> common among world champion wannabees in Britain and Europe.
>>
>> The explanation for African domination of running, it turns
>> out, can be found mostly in the genes. Africans are
>> naturally, genetically, more likely to have less body fat,
>> which is a critical edge in elite running, notes Joseph
>> Graves, Jr., an African American evolutionary biologist at
>> Arizona State University. "Evolution has shaped body types
>> and in part athletic possibilities. Dont expect an Eskimo to
>> show up on an NBA court or a Watusi to win the world
>> weightlifting championship. Differences dont necessarily
>> correlate with skin color, but rather with geography and
>> climate. Genes play a major role in this.
>>
>> Highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure,
>> muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency
>> and lung capacity are not evenly distributed among
>> populations and cannot be explained by known environmental
>> factors. Though individual success is about opportunity and
>> "fire in the belly," thousands of years of evolution have
>> left a distinct footprint on the world's athletic map.
>>
>> "Very many in sports physiology would like to believe that it
>> is training, the environment, what you eat that plays the
>> most important role," states Bengt Saltin, director of the
>> Copenhagen Muscle Research Center, who outlined his findings
>> in Scientific American. "But we argue based on the data that
>> it is 'in your genes' whether or not you are talented or
>> whether you will become talented. The extent of the
>> environment can always be discussed but it's less than 20, 25
>> percent."
>>
>> East Africa is the epicenter of world distance running.
>> Runners from highlands that snake along the western edge of
>> the Great Rift Valley have clocked more than 60 percent of
>> the best times ever run in distance races. Kenyans alone win
>> 40 percent of top international events. The Nandi district of
>> 500,000 people-1/12,000 of Earth's population-boasts an
>> unfathomable 20 percent, marking the greatest concentration
>> of raw athletic talent in sports history.
>>
>> East Africans share a genetic history with mountain
>> populations of North Africa. As a result of millions of years
>> of evolutionary pressures, these populations turn out a
>> disproportionately high number of body types with a
>> biomechanical package for endurance activities: lean,
>> physiques, large lung capacity, and a preponderance of slow
>> twitch muscle fibers that propel endurance athletes. These
>> are genetically-endowed attributes. No amount of
>> hard-training can radically change what we are born with.
>>
>> This is not an issue of black and white, but the consequence
>> of evolving in varying terrains. In fact, black East Africans
>> have a very different biomechanical and genetic make-up than
>> blacks who trace their ancestry from West Africa, which
>> includes almost all British, Canadian, and American blacks.
>>
>> West Africans have already about 70 percent of the fast type
>> muscle fibers when they are born, says Dr. Saltin. And
>> thats needed for a 100 metre race around 9.9 seconds.
>>
>> Canadian geneticist Claude Bouchard, director of the
>> Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State
>> University, found that West African descended blacks have
>> naturally smaller lung capacity (about 15 percent when
>> compared to whites and East Africans), a preponderance of
>> fast twitch muscle fibers, and a more muscled, mesomorphic
>> physique - a goldmine for sprinting. Not surprisingly, there
>> are no elite distance runners of West African ancestry.
>>
>> All the training in the world is unlikely to turn a black
>> Brit into an elite marathoner or an East African into a top
>> 100-metre runner. While the fastest Kenyan 100-metre run is
>> 10.28 seconds, ranking 5,000 on the all-time list, blacks who
>> trace their ancestry to West Africa, the ancestral home of
>> almost all African Americans, hold the top 200 and 494 of the
>> top 500 100-metre times.
>>
>> The pattern of which athletes excel has little to do with
>> skin color but much to population genetics. Asian athletes,
>> and their ancestral descendants in Mexico and South America,
>> are very competitive in distance races, in part because of
>> their small frames and extra layer of energy-generating body
>> fat, which is otherwise a hindrance in sprinting. The few
>> great white male distance runners are almost exclusively from
>> southern Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and share many of the
>> physical and physiological characteristics-and some of the
>> genetic make-up-of North and East Africans.
>>
>> "Differences among athletes of elite caliber are so small,"
>> notes Robert Malina, a Michigan State University
>> anthropologist and editor of the American Journal of Human
>> Biology, "that physique or the ability to fire muscle fibers
>> more efficiently that might be genetically based ... it might
>> be very, very significant. The fraction of a second is the
>> difference between the gold medal and fourth place."
>>
>> If genetics and race really do matter in athletic
>> performance, then we might expect to find noticeable
>> differences in the ways different population groups sustain
>> anaerobic and aerobic functioning. Sure enough, by applying
>> population genetics to athletic performance and examining the
>> aerobic/anaerobic energy cycle, scientists are beginning to
>> understand the racial pattern in sports.
>>
>> Timothy Noakes, long-time director of the Sport Science
>> Center at the University of Cape Town Medical School, and
>> author of many scholarly books, including Lore of Running,
>> has observed that black South Africans, who share much of
>> their genetic ancestry with East Africans, sweep more than 90
>> percent of the top places in endurance races held in his
>> country, despite the fact that blacks represent no more than
>> one-quarter of the active running population. Noakes has
>> attempted to figure out why in his laboratory. In a treadmill
>> study, black marathoners consistently bested whites. Although
>> white runners matched or exceeded the black runners at
>> distances up to 5,000 metres, blacks were "clearly superior
>> at distances greater than 5km." The fine print in the data
>> was particularly revealing. There was a dramatic difference
>> in the ability of the blacks to run at a higher maximum
>> oxygen capacity. In the case of the marathoners, blacks
>> performed at 89 percent of the maximum oxygen capacity, while
>> whites lagged by nearly 10 percent. The muscles of the black
>> athletes also showed far fewer signs of fatigue as measured
>> by lactic acid.
>>
>> Noakes noted a link between his findings and the training
>> habits of well-known Kenyan runners who report favoring
>> low-mileage, high-intensity workouts. This presented a
>> nurture/nature conundrum: Does hard training lead to a change
>> in oxidative capacity and fatigue resistance, or does it
>> merely reflect a genetically well-endowed athletic machine?
>>
>> The answer can be found in the wild card in performance:
>> muscle efficiency. David Costill, former head of the Human
>> Performance Laboratory at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, has
>> shown that the adaptability of the muscle fiber for aerobic
>> metabolism - its oxidative potential - is more important than
>> the basic composition of the muscle. More aerobically
>> efficient fibers produce fewer fatigue-producing lactate
>> toxins, resulting in better performance. And although fiber
>> composition is genetically fixed, which effectively limits
>> the pool of possible successful athletes in each event,
>> exercise can help muscles better utilize oxygen.
>>
>> A team from South Africa and Australia, including Noakes, has
>> found an apparent link between oxidative capacity, resistance
>> to fatigue, and race. The researchers measured "running
>> economy"-the amount of metabolic work (and therefore oxygen
>> consumption) that is required to run at a given speed, much
>> like the fuel economy of a car. Running economy can be
>> affected by a variety of factors both environmental, such as
>> running technique, and physiological, such as body-mass
>> distribution and muscle elasticity. "We've shown that the
>> oxidative enzyme capacity of the [black] athletes we looked
>> at was one and a half times higher on average than the white
>> runners," reported Kathy Myburgh, a co-author of the report
>> and senior lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch in
>> South Africa. Comparing black and white athletes with nearly
>> identical race times, the researchers found that blacks were
>> both more efficient runners and able to utilize a
>> considerably higher percentage of their maximum oxygen
>> potential - a decided advantage if two athletes otherwise
>> have the same capacity.
>>
>> "Whilst the current study does not elucidate the origins of
>> these differences," the report concluded, "the findings may
>> partially explain the success of African runners at the elite
>> level." A subsequent study determined that the superior
>> fatigue resistance during high-intensity endurance exercise
>> is partially related to the higher skeletal-muscle oxidative
>> capacity and lower plasma lactate accumulation found more
>> commonly in blacks.
>>
>> Bengt Saltin has also come to the conclusion that certain
>> population groups, including Northern Europeans, who are
>> notable endurance runners and cross-country skiers, may have
>> superior fatigue resistance encoded in their genes. He has
>> found that Scandinavian distance runners, Kenyans, and South
>> African blacks all have consistently lower blood-lactate
>> levels and perform more efficiently than athletes from other
>> regions, the likely result of their having evolved in
>> mountainous regions. Population genetics - ancestry-is the
>> key determinant.
>>
>> Saltin brought a half-dozen established Swedish national
>> class runners to Colm OConnells school, St. Patrick's, in
>> Iten, Kenya, to see how they might match up against
>> up-and-coming East African schoolboys. It was a demoralizing
>> experience for the Swedes. National champion after national
>> champion was soundly trounced in races from 800 metres to 10
>> kilometres. Stunned, Saltin estimated that in this one tiny
>> area of the Rift Valley there were at least five hundred
>> school boys who could best his national champions at 2,000 metres.
>>
>> In a subsequent study, Saltin brought several groups of
>> Kenyans to the Karolinska labs in Sweden, where he was then
>> working. Muscle-fiber distribution was similar for the
>> Kenyans and Swedes. But biopsies of the quadricep muscles in
>> the thighs indicated that the Kenyans had more blood-carrying
>> capillaries surrounding the muscle fibers and more
>> mitochondria within the fibers. That's important because
>> mitochondria act a little like power stations, processing the
>> glucose with oxygen brought in by breathing into energy. The
>> Kenyans also were found to have relatively smaller muscle
>> fibers than the Swedes, which Saltin speculated might serve
>> to bring the mitochondria closer to the surrounding
>> capillaries. This process aids in oxidation, bringing more
>> "fuel" to the mitochondria, the engine of the muscles.
>>
>> The Kenyans also showed little ammonia accumulation in their
>> muscles from protein combustion, and less lactic-acid
>> buildup. They have more of the muscle enzymes that burn fat,
>> and their glycogen reserves are not burned as quickly, which
>> improves endurance. Most impressively, they are able to take
>> months off from regular training and then regain their old
>> form quickly. When they do train, more than half of their
>> total mileage occurs at heart rates of 90 percent of maximum,
>> far higher than the rate for Europeans or Americans. In
>> general, Saltin reported a 5 to 15 percent greater running
>> economy at far less mileage, but at a higher intensity.
>> Saltin has privately suggested that Kenyans appear to be
>> innately efficient, durable, and fast - with the most perfect
>> aerobic potential measured so far on earth.
>>
>> Could a North European or British runner defy the odds and
>> emerge as a middle distance world record holder? Certainly,
>> for genes only circumscribe possibility and any race opens
>> the door for the roulette wheel of the human spirit. As a
>> result of natural human variation, there will always be great
>> runners from every part of the globe. But dont expect a
>> return to glory. Remember, there were almost no Kenyans or
>> North Africans in the mix in the days when British athletes
>> used to rule. Todays aspiring British athletes would be a
>> bit foolish to follow Coes exhortations and devote
>> themselves to grueling training regimens in hopes of cracking
>> African hegemony. More than likely, in a sport in which a few
>> hundredths of a second is the difference between a gold medal
>> and finishing back in the pack, they dont have the innate
>> potential to become the elite of the elite. They are making a
>> rational choice to focus on events and sports in which they
>> are more likely to succeed.
>>
>> Humans are different, a product of the inseparable
>> relationship of genes and environment. Popular thinking,
>> still reactive to the historical misuse of race science,
>> lags this new bio-cultural model of human nature. Events such
>> as the World Championships provide an opportunity to broaden
>> our understanding of the genetic revolution now unfolding.
>> Get used to it
>> Sebastian: the glory days of the British distance running
>> empire are gone forever.
>>
>> Jon Entine [http://www.jonentine.com] is author of Taboo: Why
>> Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk
>> About It. E-mail him at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> --
>> Jon Entine
>> RuffRun
>> 6178 Grey Rock Rd.
>> Agoura Hills, CA 91301
>> (818) 991-9803 [FAX] 991-9804
>> http://www.jonentine.com
>>
>>
>
--
Jon Entine
RuffRun
6178 Grey Rock Rd.
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
(818) 991-9803 [FAX] 991-9804
http://www.jonentine.com
