My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 24, 2008
My 2008 Olympics Wrap-Up
August 23, 2008
As Chris Rock might say ...
I don't see why Americans don't give the women-only sport of rhythmic gymnastics any respect. It looks like an excellent way to keep your daughter off the pole, a classy way for show-offy pretty girls to dance for the admiration of the crowd.
Wilt Chamberlain suggested a couple of decades ago that rather than try to match men in men's sports, women would be better served by inventing their own sports that highlight their physical advantages, such as flexibility.
By the way, returning to the topic of the unimaginative obsession with gender equality in the Olympics -- Men do the triple jump? Well, then women must hop, skip, and jump, too! -- one reason that women's (girls') gymnastics is so hugely popular at each Olympics is that the feminine events are adapted to feminine strengths. The men do six apparatuses, the girls four. The girls don't do the upper body strength events, the rings, the pommel horse, and the parallel bars, and they do two events men don't do (the balance beam and the uneven bars). Even the two similar events are adapted -- the horse was turned 90 degrees for girls in the vault, and they use music in the floor exercise.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 21, 2008
NYT catches up, 11 years later
Gina Kolata writes in the NYT:
Men, Women and Speed. 2 Words: Got Testosterone
BEIJING — No matter what happens in the men’s marathon here Sunday, one thing is all but certain. The winner will run the 26.2-mile course faster than the winner of the women’s marathon last Sunday.
The woman who won, Constantina Tomescu of Romania, was fast, of course, finishing the race in 2 hours 26 minutes 44 seconds — more than a minute ahead of the second-place finisher. But for a variety of intrinsic biological reasons, the best women can never run as fast as the best men, exercise researchers say.
Women are slower than men in running, in swimming, in cycling. Whether it is a 100-meter race on the track or a marathon, a 200-meter butterfly swim or a 10-kilometer marathon swim, the pattern holds.
And even though some scientists once predicted that women would eventually close the gender gap in elite performances — it was proposed that all they needed was more experience, better training and stronger coaching — that idea is now largely discredited, at least for Olympic events. Researchers say there is no one physiological reason for the gap, although there is a common biological thread.
“To a large extent, it’s a matter of testosterone,” said Dr. Benjamin Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at Presbyterian Hospital and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “That’s why systematic doping of women is even more effective than systematic doping of men. That’s why the East German women were so much more successful than the East German men.”
This line of analysis was put forward by sports physiologist Stephen Seiler and myself in the 12/31/97 issue of National Review in our article Track & Battlefield:
Everybody knows that the "gender gap" in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.
This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women, or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure, is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature, as well as to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.
... Despite all the hype about 1996 being the "Women's Olympics," in the Atlanta Games' central events -- the footraces -- female medalists performed worse relative to male medalists than in any Olympics since 1972. In the 1988 Games the gender gap for medalists was 10.9%, but it grew to 12.2% in 1996. Even stranger is the trend in absolute times. Track fans expect slow but steady progress; thus, nobody is surprised that male medalists became 0.5% faster from the 1988 to the 1996 Olympics. Remarkably, though, women medalists became 0.6% slower over the same period. ...
From 1970-1989, white women from communist countries accounted for 71 of the 84 records set at 100m-1500m. In contrast, white men from communist countries accounted for exactly zero of the 23 male records. Those memorable East German frauleins alone set records 49 times in just the sprints and relays (100m-400m). This was especially bizarre because men of West African descent have utterly dominated white men in sprinting. Another oddity of that era is that communist women set only seven (and East Germans none) of the 48 female records in the 5k, 10k, and the marathon.
The crash of women's running was brought about by two seemingly irrelevant events in the late Eighties: Ben Johnson got caught, and the Berlin Wall fell. ...
The communists were almost completely stumped at producing male champions because the benefits of a given amount of steroids are much greater for women than men. Since men average 10 times more natural testosterone than women, they need dangerously large, Ben Johnson-sized doses to make huge improvements, while women can bulk-up significantly on smaller, less-easily detected amounts.
The primitive testing at the 1988 Olympics did succeed in catching Benoid; yet the female star of those Games, America's Florence Griffith-Joyner, passed every urinalysis she ever faced. The naturally lissome Flo-Jo may have been the world's fastest clean 200 meter woman from 1984-1987, but she kept finishing second in big races to suspiciously brawny women. She then asked Ben Johnson for training advice, and emerged from a winter in the weight room looking like a Saturday morning cartoon superheroine. She made a magnificent joke out of women's track in 1988, setting records in the 100m and 200m that few had expected to see before the middle of the 21st Century. Then, she retired before random drug testing began in 1989, having passed every drug test she ever took.
"It is not that every man is inherently better than every woman"
Do you think we'll ever reach the level of intellectual sophistication where New York Times' subscribers understand words like "average" and "tendency" without being reminded?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The Postmodern Pentathlon
The International Olympic Committee today announced that the Modern Pentathlon -- an Olympic event that tests five skills a young officer would have needed to succeed as a courier during the Napoleonic Wars: fencing, shooting, swimming, horseback riding, and running -- will be replaced at the 2012 London Summer Games by the Postmodern Pentathlon, which will test the skills crucial to delivering a message in the 21st Century:
- Spinning
- Cellphoning while riding in an elevator
- Staying on message
- Being ubiquitous in the media
- Taking offense
Medal favorites include Mischa Saakashvili, Morris Dees, Karl Rove, and David Brock.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Gender equality uber alles
One contributor to the unwieldy giganticism of the Olympics is the perceived need to hold a women's event for every men's event, no matter how unpopular the sport is with women, or, in many cases, with both sexes. For example, modern pentathalon (in which you pretend to be a courier during the Napoleonic Wars and swim, horseback ride, run, shoot, and fence your way to delivering your secret message -- okay, in theory, it sounds pretty cool, but in practice, nobody cares) hasn't been all that big since George S. Patton finished fifth in it back in 1912, but, nonetheless, the Olympics added women's modern pentathalon in 2000.
Likewise, walking is the all-time dorkiest-looking sport, but sure enough, we've had a women's walking race in all the Olympics of this decade.
Weightlifting is a fun sport to attend, with a professional wrestling vibe as the big galoots try to psyche each other out, but it's hopelessly snarled up by steroids. Nonetheless, the Olympics added women's weightlifting in 2000. Women's wrestling was introduced in 2004.
Of course, gender equality in sports almost always means "separate but equal."
The only Olympic sports where men and women compete against each other is in equestrian (where the horse is doing most of the work) and some of the sailing events.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 20, 2008
Now we know
For years, I've been idly wondering what happened to all the tall white Americans, the kind who used to play basketball. There are lots of tall white Europeans doing well in the NBA these days, such as Dirk Nowitzki and Pau Gasol, but few white Americans at the All Star Game level. Granted, there are more white Europeans than white Americans, but still ...
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Japanese pressure
From 1960-1984, Japan was a solid medal producer at the Olympics, but from 1988-2000 its athletes tended to crumble under the incredible pressure exerted by the Japanese media to win one for the nation. A friend who lives in Japan wrote before the 2004 Olympics:
"When Japanese athletes compete in the Olympics they feel they are representing, not only their country, but also their race and all its members. When a Japanese is leading in a race the announcer's voice becomes flushed with emotion. When interviewed after competition, swimmers and judo-ists say they can't remember what happened, so great was their emotion. In fact in the moments leading up to a competition, Japanese seem almost paralyzed by nervousness. They are not competing for themselves, but for their coach, their team, their family, and everyone. If they win, it was not because of their own effort, but because of everyone's support. Their greatest emotion then is relief from the relentless pressure. If they lose, they have let everyone down. They cannot be good sportsmen and congratulate their opponents with a smile because their minds are elsewhere thinking about how they will apologize to their supporters."
In 2004, Japan bounced back, increasing its total medal haul from 18 to 37, moving from 14th position in 2000 to 6th position. Currently, they are in 8th place in 2008.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 19, 2008
100 meters: Why so Anglophone?
Over the last seven Olympics, from 1984 through 2008, the 56 men's 100m finalists have all been of West African descent. The 56 have consisted of 17 African-Americans, 17 black West Indians, 8 West Africans (all from former British colonies, including one Nigerian running for Portugal), 7 black Britons, 6 black Canadians (1 a Haitian from Quebec), and 1 black Brazilian.
One unanswered question is: why the dominance by Anglophones? I count only 2 of the 56 coming from somewhere where English would not be a national or provincial language.
One theory is that there must be a lot of technical information about how to sprint fast that is passed down in English. Yet, the 100m dash is universally considered less technical than the 110m high hurdles, where 18 of the last 56 finalists have been non-English speakers.
So, here's a theory I concocted in 2004:
While cultural continuity is no doubt important, I've got a new complementary explanation for why Anglophone New World blacks are so dominant in the 100m over Spanish and Portuguese speaking blacks: the Iberian acceptance of mestizaje vs. the more racist English disapproval of miscegenation.
The 100m is a one dimensional sport where one skill is rewarded. For Darwinian reasons that we don't fully understand, this skill evolved to its global peak in West Africa.
Thus, top 100m men tend to be not just kind-of sort-of black in a Barack Obama sort of way, but really African-looking. While there are a number of sports, like the decathlon, where being of mixed race heritage may be of help (e.g., 1980 and 1984 gold medalist Daley Thompson and 1996 gold medalist Dan O'Brien have black fathers and white mothers), the 100m is not one of them. The 100 meter greats, like Carl Lewis, tend to be very black-looking. Frankie Fredericks of Namibia was perhaps the only top 100m man of recent years to look noticeably part-white. (He looks rather like Sir Alec Guinness.)
The slave trade spread West Africans to the New World. But population genetics studies show a sizable difference in what happened next. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, black and white genes tended to spread out across the population, but in the English-speaking world they tended to bunch up toward one pole or the other. Sure, there was lots of inter-breeding, but the one-drop rule in the Anglophone world, combined with restrictions on interracial marriage, had a little-understood impact: by defining a half white-half black person as socially black, it drove them toward marrying another black person rather than a white person. Thus, socially defined black people tended to not be more than half-white.
Thus, the first genetic study I've seen to address this suggests that only 10% of self-identified African-Americans are more than 50% white. In contrast, blacks in Mexico were almost completely absorbed into the general population.
Thus, in the English-speaking countries, black genes tend to be more concentrated in particular individuals.
One other population genetic aspect that could be important is that North American blacks tended to come almost solely from West Africa, while South American blacks were drawn from a wider sphere of Africa, going all the way around to East Africa. Lots of Brazilians slaves came from Portugal's East African colony of Mozambique. The weakness of Brazilians as sprinters may have to do with A] The really fast runners go into soccer. and B] Even the blackest Brazilians aren't as West African as Anglophone blacks -- they may have more South African or East African ancestors. (East Africans tend to be best at longer distances from 400m through the marathon, depending on their tribe, but none have ever been world class world-class at 100m or even 200m.) That may help explain the fact that a dark-skinned Brazilian man set the marathon record back in the 1990s.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The Stick vs. the Bunny Hop
My wife and I are watching the contest to crown the world's top pixies (a.k.a., Olympic women's gymnastics, just as the Winter Olympics' figure skating crowns the Princess of the World), and the announcers start braying that some girl with one of those wonderful Romanian names like Oana Ban didn't "stick" her landing. My wife says, "But the bunnyhop landing looks much more graceful than those awkward, painful, arm-waving sticks." I point out to her that we've had this exact discussion about the superiority of the bunny hop precisely six times, once every four years when we watch gymnastics. We first held this conversation in 1984 when Mary Lou Retton needed a perfect 10.00 on her final vault to beat Ecaterina Szabo's Romanian team for the team gold medal. Mary Lou clearly bunny hopped the landing but they gave her the 10 anyway. "And well they should," said my wife, and she will say it again in 2008.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 17, 2008
Best line of the Olympics
Simon Barnes of the London Times on men's synchronized pairs diving:
It all looks like a wonderfully elegant gay suicide pact.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 16, 2008
Sprinters ...
Sprinters ...
Here's my June post on Usain Bolt and the general topic of doping in Olympic sports, with some interesting comments on runners and swimmers (e.g., Dara Torres) by people who know a lot more than me.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
White Africans in the Olympics
One interesting development I've noticed is the growing prominence of whites representing black countries, most notably swimmer Kirsty Coventry, who represents Zimbabwe (she's lived in America since college, although she retains a slight Rhodesian accent -- she pronounces her American college Auburn as OW-burn). She's won seven of Zimbabwe's eight medals in history.
I've seen other whites representing West Indian and African countries as well. Some of them live in those countries, some are presumably claiming ancestry by descent. It's often easier to get to the Olympics as the sole representative of Tanzania in your sport than by making the British or Australian Olympic team, which is typically limited in number (e.g., a maximum of three from a country in track events).
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Yao Ming: Successful Eugenics Experiment?
The Olympics are always a festival of human biodiversity, with each sport having its ideal body-type. The Chinese Olympic team flagbearer Yao Ming, the enormously tall Houston Rockets center who memorably led the Chinese in during the Opening Ceremonies next to the tiny hero boy who rescued two classmates buried in the recent earthquake, is the product of a more or less arranged marriage between the centers on the Chinese national men's and women's basketball teams. Colby Cosh points out the 2005 book Operation Yao Ming by Brook Larmer, which begins:
The faint whispers of a genetic conspiracy coursed through the corridors of Shanghai No. 6 Hospital on the evening of Sept. 12, 1980. It was shortly after 7 p.m., and a patient in the maternity ward had just endured an excruciating labor to give birth to a baby boy. An abnormally large baby boy. The doctors and nurses on duty should have anticipated something out of the ordinary. The boy's parents, after all, were retired basketball stars whose marriage the year before had made them the tallest couple in China. The mother, Fang Fengdi, an austere beauty with a pinched smile, measured 1.88 m—more than half a foot taller than the average man in Shanghai. The father, Yao Zhiyuan, was a 2.08-m giant whose body pitched forward in the kind of deferential stoop that comes from a lifetime of ducking under door frames and leaning down to listen to people of more normal dimensions. So imposing was their size that ever since childhood, the two had been known simply as Da Yao and Da Fang—Big Yao and Big Fang.
Still, the medical staff surely had never seen a newborn quite like this: the enormous legs, the broad, squarish cranium, the hands and feet so fully formed that they seemed to belong to a three-year-old. At more than 5 kg, he was nearly double the size of the average Chinese newborn. The name his parents gave him, from a Chinese character that unifies the sun and the moon, was Ming, meaning bright.
News of Yao Ming's birth was quickly relayed across town to the top leaders of the Shanghai Sports Commission. They were not surprised. These men and women had been trying to cultivate a new generation of athletes who would embody the rising power of China. The boy in the maternity ward represented, in many ways, the culmination of their plan.
The experiment had no code name, but in Shanghai basketball circles it might as well have been called Operation Yao Ming. The wheels had been set in motion more than a quarter-century earlier, when Chairman Mao Zedong exhorted his followers to funnel the nation's most genetically gifted youngsters into the emerging communist sports machine. Two generations of Yao Ming's forebears had been singled out by authorities for their hulking physiques, and his mother and father had both been drafted into the sports system. "We had been looking forward to the arrival of Yao Ming for three generations," says Wang Chongguang, a retired Shanghai coach who played with Yao's father in the 1970s and would coach Yao himself in the '90s. "That's why I thought his name should be Yao Panpan." Long-Awaited Yao....
The responsibility for arranging marriages among the most gifted retired athletes often fell to the coaches. "We had to do a lot of work as matchmakers," says Wang Yongfang, the former sports-institute leader who coached Da Fang early in her career and, after a long stint of hard labor in the countryside, was rehabilitated as the leader of the Shanghai women's team. "These girls spent far more time with the coaches and team leaders than with their own parents. Who else was there to make sure everything was O.K.?"
Before Da Fang even started to look for a husband, Shanghai officials had identified a suitable partner for her: Yao Zhiyuan. Yao, an active player who was two years her junior, was an agreeable man whose ready smile and love of a good quip contrasted sharply with Da Fang's grim demeanor. For several years the two players had eaten in the same cafeteria, lived in the same dormitory and practiced on adjoining courts, but, Da Fang says, "we didn't know each other very well." Shanghai coaches teased the two towering centers that they were made for each other. But it was up to a team leader named Liu Shiyu to make the match. He spoke with the players separately and convinced them that they could "make do" with each other—adding that they had the Communist Party's stamp of approval to do so. Given such high-level interest, how could Da Fang and Da Yao refuse?
The sports community didn't have to wait long for the first offspring of what the press was calling "the first couple of Asia." In the small apartment where Da Fang and Da Yao lived, everyone gathered to see the miracle child—long-awaited Yao.
For further reading, here's my 2003 article "NBA Height Spreading Globally" on where tallness is most frequently found.
Here's my article on the 2004 Athens Summer Games from The American Conservative.
Why did the gender gap in Olympic running speeds between male and female medalists unexpectedly widen after the 1988 Olympics? My 1997 National Review article explains here.
Here's my 2000 article from VDARE.com on the Sydney Games, including the media-induced psychological pressures that often keep the sports crazy Japanese from performing up to expectations, and the remarkable lack of interest in sports of Indians.
Here's my 2006 VDARE.com article on why Bryant Gumbel doesn't like the Winter Olympics -- too many guys.
Here's my 2000 VDARE.com article on why nationalism and the Olympics go together like bread and butter.
Here's my 2002 VDARE.com article explaining why the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta were notoriously full of organizational snafus, while the 2000 Winter Games in Salt Lake City were a model of efficiency.
By the way, I don't know why all the blank lines between paragraphs on my blog have suddenly disappeared, but, following the success of my strategy for dealing with the recent Sitemeter-Blogger-Firefox imbroglio -- not doing a damn thing other than hoping the problem goes away by itself -- I resolve to do as little as possible to deal with it.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 15, 2008
UPDATED: The World's Fastest Man - Round One
Over the last six Olympics, 1984 through 2004, all 48 finalists have been men of West African descent.
Of the 40 survivors of the 2008 first round, there appear to be 3 East Asians (two from Japan and one from China), six Europeans (Poland, Italy Britain, Slovenia, Spain, and Russia), one or two mulattoes (e.g., Brazil), and around 30 blacks of West African descent, including the representative of Norway.
The Japanese can be pretty fast, as baseball player Ichiro Suzuki shows. Japanese runners made up 3 of the 32 semifinalists in the 1996-2000 Olympics.
Judging by the first round times, I'm assuming this streak will continue for a seventh Olympiad.
If I had to guess the man to break this string, it would be 21-year-old Craig Pickering of Milton Keynes, England. The British beat the Americans to win the gold in the 4x100 meter sprint relay in Athens in 2004, showing that they are a legitimate sprinting power, so Pickering even making the British team for the Olympics is impressive. In the first heat, Pickering ran a solid 10.21 to finish third just behind two West Indian stars, former world record holder Asafa Powell and two-time Olympic finalist Kim Collins. That made him the fastest nonblack in the world on Friday. (To be precise about this, you should adjust for wind velocity, which I haven't done.)
But Pickering's year probably won't be 2008. His goal now is to make the semifinals. He'll likely be more of a threat when he's at his 25-year-old peak at the 2012 Games in front of the hometown crowd in London.
Pickering told the Guardian:
"I only get bothered when I'm asked about the race issue. I don't believe I can't run 100m in 9.99 because I'm white.
Of the 364 times that human beings have run under 10.00 seconds, only once was by somebody not of largely or completely West African descent -- Patrick Johnson of Australia, who is half Irish, half Australian Aborigine. (A Pole and a Japanese have run ten flat.)
"And I don't believe black sprinters think that just because of their colour they're automatically going to run under 10 seconds without working hard. But I don't like these questions because I'm scared of saying something that might offend black people - or even white people." ...
The prospect of both Pickering and Aikines-Aryeetey improving markedly between now and the London Olympics needs to be considered in light of Colin Jackson's recent assertion that it would take a miracle for a British athlete to win gold on the track in 2012. "I actually endorse that," Pickering says, while acknowledging that Jackson's formidable record as a world champion hurdler was also forged under Arnold's coaching. "If you look at the current state of British athletics, it is going to need a small miracle. America can produce 10 great new athletes a year. Nine of them might go to American football but the 10th will probably still beat most European athletes. The Americans won't be quaking that I've run 60m in 6.55. Next year in the indoor world championships they'll probably have three athletes running under 6.50 - so in that sense we might need a miracle."
And yet Pickering's strong displays this year are striking especially because, as he points out, "60m is not my best distance. I'm much more suited to the 100m and I'll be 25 in 2012 - which is the perfect age for a sprinter. So who knows?"
UPDATE: Spoiler Alert
Pickering ran the 17th fastest time in the quarterfinals, 10.18, just missing moving on to the semifinals of 16. The only semifinalist not of West African black descent is a Japanese runner, who had, I believe, the slowest time of all the semifinalists, a few hundredths of a second slower than Pickering, but in an easier heat.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 7, 2008
The Alternative History Olympics
My favorite part of David Wallechinsky's quadrennially indispensable The Complete Book of the Olympics are the discontinued sports and events, such as Motor Boating (1908 London games), Tug of War (1900-1920), Croquet (1900 Paris) and Jeu de Paume (or real tennis, which was won in Paris in 1900 by robber barron Jay Gould's son Jay Jr.).
The 1900 Paris Olympics went on intermittently over a five month stretch during the World's Fair to such little local interest that some athletes didn't realize they were competing in the Olympics. An American socialite girl won the gold medal in Ladies' Golf in Paris in 1900, shooting 47 for nine holes, but died in 1955 before learning that the little tournament had been an Olympic event and she was an Olympic Gold Medal winner.
Cricket's entire Olympic history consists of a single match in Paris in 1900 between Great Britain and France (a team recruited from the British Embassy in Paris). A French magazine explained, "Cricket is ... a sport which appears monotonous and without color to the uninitiated." A British observer reported, "We found the French temperament is too excitable to enjoy the game and no Frenchman can be persuaded to play more than once."
Discontinued track and field events include the Stone Throw (1906 "intercalated" Athens games), Javelin (Both Hands) (1912 Stockholm -- I don't know if this means they summed up your best throws with both your left and right hands, or if you were supposed to heave it two handed ... or did they throw javelins with each hand simultaneously?), and Triathlon (1904 St. Louis -- a combination of track and field and gymnastics).
American Raymond Ewry is the Carl Lewis of the Alternative History Olympics, winning ten track and field gold medals from 1900 to 1908 (including two in the now-forgotten 1906 Athens Olympics) in no-longer-existent events: Standing High Jump, Standing Long Jump, and Standing Triple Jump.
Gymnastics once had Rope Climbing and Club Swinging, Shooting had Dueling Pistol and (by popular demand among commenters) Live Pigeon Shooting, and Swimming featured the 200 Meter Obstacle Race.
My favorite of all the NLE swimming events is the Plunge for Distance, won by William Dickey of the USA at the 1904 Olympics by diving in the pool and not taking a breath and not taking a stroke until he had glided 62.5 feet. I've always had a feeling that if this event were both still around through sheer bureaucratic inertia and yet still unpopular and not very competitive, that I could have won an Olympic Gold Medal in it. Granted, I've never actually measured how far I could plunge, but I've always had a knack for floating face down.
I've sometimes dreamed that I had won an Olympic Gold Medal at some point in the past. When challenged in my dream about this unlikely accomplishment, I've tried to parry, "Yes, it was once a part of my life, but I choose not to talk about it much these days." When grilled on exactly which event I could ever have won, I usually come up eventually with "Plunge for Distance at the 1984 LA Games -- you probably don't remember it because it wasn't on TV." My dream interlocutors go away, grumbling, but unable to prove me wrong.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
August 6, 2008
Running tribes of Kenya and Mexico
When I was a kid, you heard more about the Tarahumara Indian runners of Copper Canyon in Mexico than you heard about the Kalenjin of Kenya. The Tarahumara were supposed to be the great runners of the world, able to run a hundred miles without stopping. But Tarahumara runners have only competed once in the Olympics, with indifferent success, while the Kalenjin have consistently won medals.
Here's an article comparing the two groups. The sports-obsessed British colonial administrators tried to get the young Kalenjin men to redirect their excess energy from cattle-rustling to track, while Mexico wasn't terribly interested in track, and the Uto-Aztecan-speaking Tarahumara didn't want anything to do with Mexicans, anyway.
The author argues that the Tarahumara's strong suit is distances farther than the 26 miles of the marathon. In contrast, by my calculations, the Kalenjin's best distance is about 3000 meters, which is why Kenyans really aren't that all-conquering at the marathon, a distance at which there are a wide variety of winners. (Here's my 1997 chart showing the best running race distances for different groups.)
In 1993, a 55-year-old Tarahumara showed up at the high-altitude 100 mile ultramarathon in Leadville, Colorado and won, running in sandals made from old tires. But since then they haven't really shown much interest in running professionally outside their canyons.
In this decade, an American named Micah True has organized an annual ultramarathon trail run deep in Copper Canyon. Organizers award as prizes 30,000 pounds of corn and $6,000 cash. In 2007, the top American ultramarathoner, Scott Jurek, participated, winning in a time of 6 hours and 32 minutes. But Arnulfo, a Tarahumara finished second in 6 hours and 50 minutes. In 2008, Americans won the top two spots, and local Indians the next eight.
So, it's hard to figure out just how good as runners the Tarahumara really are. There are only about 50,000 of them, so there isn't a big enough sample size for there to be many running prodigies. And they are sometimes malnourished (eating mostly corn), they chain-smoke, and they regularly get falling down drunk. A common estimate is that 100 days per year are devoted to either heavy drinking or recovering from benders. (Like the Japanese, they're emotionally reticent except when they've had a snootfull.) So, they're pretty darn good, but it's hard to get a precise sense of how good.
It's now theorized that their running style (very short strides, landing on the ball off the foot rather than the heel, as is necessary with a long stride) helps them avoid injuries while running on rugged trails. And their running in crummy sandals instead of cushioned supershoes means that their foot muscles don't atrophy, so they don't get the many injuries suffered by American runners.
Indeed, it occurs to me that there might be a hint of an explanation here for one of the more curious trends in sports history. Americans used to be outstanding distance runners. In the 1960s, three American high school boys, Jim Ryun, Marty Liquori, and Tom Danielson, running in low-tech shoes broke the four minute barrier for the mile, but it was 32 years before it happened again (Alan Webb). In 1972, Frank Shorter won the Olympic marathon, which opened the door to the famous running fad of the 1970s. Soon, everybody was running. The Nike Corporation began selling enormous numbers of ever more technologically advanced running shoes.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
April 13, 2008
The Beijing Olympics
But, the Olympics were promised to Beijing, anyway, and the Chinese have since spent vast amounts of money getting ready for them. They haven't improved on freedom, democracy, or Tibet, but they haven't gotten worse, either. They've lived up their end of the bargain, such as it was.
Yet, now, enlightened opinion wants to punish China's Olympics for all the same sins China was committing back when it was handed the Olympics in the first place. All the evidence suggests that this moral grandstanding by Westerners would just infuriate the Chinese people, who are always looking for reasons to be angry at the round eyes, and strengthen the Beijing government's grip.
The runner-up city for hosting the 2008 Olympics was Paris. I blogged back in 2002:
Yet, just because French anti-Americanism is not our fault doesn't mean it's not our problem. We should be looking for low-cost ways to placate France's wounded amour-propre. Backing Paris over Beijing for the 2008 Olympics would have been an easy one. I mean, Paris would have been a fantastic place to attend the Olympics, while Beijing's air pollution is horrendous. It was a no-brainer, but we blew it.
Sure, afterwards the French would have bragged about how much better Paris was as the site of the Olympics compared to Atlanta in 1996 (which, no doubt, would have been true), but, so what? If we are going to be the sole superpower and "provide the world with adult supervision," as one of my readers says, then we've got to grow up. Sure, it would be fun to appoint Jonah Goldberg ambassador to France, but if we are going to be the global hegemon, we've got to avoid juvenile pissing wars with our lackeys.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer