Again, WHY THIS OBSESSION WITH nationality. It's absurd, especially in the
light of the silly barbs thrown my way.
But as for your latest barb, you are flat out wrong....
I did discuss this numerous times, and most recently in my post a while back
about "why Brits" will are doing so lousy. The FACT is...and you can check
the lists of top times and top runners..is that you and others have
swallowed a MYTH that there were a lot of runners of "US, UK and Northern
European stock" that were setting the world on fire years ago. There were a
few great races by a handful of great runners such as Cram and Coe competing
in a field in which most of the rest of the world did not compete,
particularly runners from Africa, most of Asia, and South America.
Now that the field is more level, the best talent comes to the top. Again,
check the lists of top times and runners... Those so-called "great" times of
years ago pale in comparison RELATIVE to the population numbers AND overall.
In the 800 metres, for instance, 92 of the top 100 times are held by those
of mostly African ancestry. Was Coe a great runner. Of course. And we will
always have great runners. But he was no where near the consistent level of
a Kipketer or Cruz.
And as for why runners of "US, UK and Northern European stock" are not doing
as well as years ago, there are probably a number of explanations for it.
One of the most compelling is that runners of "US, UK and Northern European
stock"now have to compete in a world that is not unfairly skewed to their
benefit. The playing field is more level (although Africans still have far
fewer opportunities...wait until the field gets even MORE level!!!). Few
runners want to put in the grueling effort necessary to possibly achieve
elite status when they more or less know that considering the current
competition, they are likely to fall short of their goals. In other words,
just as whites have left pro basketball in droves, blacks avoid weight
lifting, and American, British and Canadian Blacks avoid distance running,
whites are RATIONALLY turning away from distance running in droves to pursue
other things (including sports) in which the effort they will have to expend
is likely to be rewarded.
That is a rational response by MOST "US, UK and Northern European stock" but
certainly not all, since there is a lot of human variation. Moreover, the
clear advantage of blacks of West African ancestry in the sprints is far
more impressive than disparities in distance running. The body
type/physiological advantages of certain populations in distance running is
quite small, meaning there will likely always be competitive whites, Asians,
etc. and even an occasional Coe and Cram. But don't hold your breath if you
think that the "old days' will return. It just can't happen.
On 8/13/01 4:12 PM, "Rich Harrington" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Jon,
>
> You have consistently failed to acknowledge why athletes from the US, UK and
> and Northern European stock are running more slowly than they did in the
> past. If they were running at the level of Cram, Coe, etc., perhaps they
> would be more competitive.
>
> Rich Harrington
>
> -----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 menıs 1500 metre final at Sundayıs 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
> worldıs 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. ³So where is the problem?²
> wrote Coe last week in the Telegraph. . ³The answer, I rather fancy, as
> Shakespeare said, lies not in the stars but in our handsı run faster.²
> Coe went on to exhort aspiring Brits to train with the ³brutal² commitment
> of days gone by ³the mental and physical intensity of what was commonplace
> 20 years ago,² he added modestly.
>
> Hereıs 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 whatıs behind this extraordinary
> phenomenon, be prepared for the usual cliché: the current crop of British
> athletes is too soft. If they just tried harder, theyıd challenge for gold.
> Certainly, Coeıs 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 Britainıs 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 didnıt compete. While
> nationalistic chest pounding may help deal with frustration of fading glory,
> it canıt change the hard reality that Britainıs middle distance running
> glory is gone for good, whatever training methods might be adopted. Now that
> the playing field is more levelrunning is a worldwide sport, drawing
> competitors from Africa, Asia and South AmericaNorthern Europeans are
> decidedly second-class.
>
> Consider the list of all time top 800 meter runs and runners. While Coeıs
> best time ranks third on the all time list, Elliottıs stands at 45, Cramıs
> at 67, and Ovettıs 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 Coeıs 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 Coeıs 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.
> ³Training regimens are as varied in Kenya as any where in the world,² notes
> Colm OıConnell, coach at St. Patrickıs Iten, the famous private school and
> running factory in the valley that turned out Kipketer and other Kenyan
> greats. OıConnell 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. ³Africans are naturally, genetically, more likely
> to have less body fat, which is a critical edge in elite running,² notes
> Joseph Graves, Jr., an African American evolutionary biologist at Arizona
> State University. "Evolution has shaped body types and in part athletic
> possibilities. Donıt expect an Eskimo to show up on an NBA court or a Watusi
> to win the world weightlifting championship. Differences donıt necessarily
> correlate with skin color, but rather with geography and climate. Genes play
> a major role in this.²
>
> 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 people1/12,000 of Earth's populationboasts 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.
>
> ³West Africans have already about 70 percent of the fast type muscle fibers
> when they are born,² says Dr. Saltin. ³And thatıs needed for a 100 metre
> race around 9.9 seconds.²
>
> 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 characteristicsand
> some of the genetic make-upof 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
> ancestryis the key determinant.
>
> Saltin brought a half-dozen established Swedish national class runners to
> Colm OıConnellıs 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 donıt 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. Todayıs aspiring British athletes
> would be a bit foolish to follow Coeıs 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 donıt 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
> ³race science,² 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
