Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?

[dipsydoodle]

The conclusions that are drawn from black athletes dominating the 100m final go a long way to explaining attitudes in wider society, argues Matthew Syed.

The 100m final at the World Athletics Championships this weekend will be won by a black athlete.

Every winner of the 100m since the inaugural event in 1983 has been black, as has every finalist from the last 10 championships with the solitary exception of Matic Osovnikar of Slovakia, who finished seventh in 2007.

Assuming that this success is driven by genes rather than environment, there is a rather obvious inference to make - black people are naturally better sprinters than white people. Indeed, it is an inference that seems obligatory, barring considerations of political correctness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14679657

[freeplessinseattle]

1. no mention of the bellybutton theory?

"What's important is not whether an athlete has an innie or an outie but where his or her navel is in relation to the rest of the body, says the study published in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics

"The navel is the center of gravity of the body, and given two runners or swimmers of the same height, one black and one white, "what matters is not total height but the position of the belly button, or center of gravity," Duke University professor Andre Bejan, the lead author of the study, told AFP.

"It so happens that in the architecture of the human body of West African-origin runners, the center of gravity is significantly higher than in runners of European origin," which puts them at an advantage in sprints on the track, he said.

...

In the pool, meanwhile, whites have the advantage because they have longer torsos, making their belly buttons lower in the general scheme of body architecture."

http://news.discovery.com/human/belly-buttons-sports-athletes.html

[dipsydoodle]

2. More here

The African running phenomenon appears to have developed out of sheer simplicity and accessibility. Running costs next to nothing. So what sport do the Africans take up when they have no money for equipment and no access to sporting institutions? Well running of course. In addition to this reason it has also been a necessary skill for longer than it has been in western societies. In Australia and America we stopped needing to run a long time ago. In Kenya people have been travelling on foot right up until today. They have to walk places, there is persistence hunting, nomadic tribal traditions etc. It makes sense then that running is highly valued in a nation where it is just another everyday activity. The skill of running long distances in parts of east Africa is like the skills of driving, banking, washing dishes or using a computer to a western city slicker.

http://www.endlesshumanpotential.com/african-running-phenomenon.html

The main reason the subject caught my eye was because only last week one of our tv news channels here in the UK had a feature on the subject of young African girls , age 11 or so upwards, and their pride in getting special running training. That's especially those at high altitude which gives them an advantage when running at lower altitude.

[Will Miller]

4. A lot of kenyans

Live at high altitudes, where there is less oxygen. They train up in the mountains, and almost always run up-hill.

The result of training at high altitudes is that their body gets used to using oxgygen more efficiently, and running uphill makes them able to run longer distances on flat ground.

It is a combination of training, environment, and also genetics.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[m1049]

5. Not just black but...

Two points:

*It's not just blacks but *West Africans*. All of the 100 meter winners have been of West African descent. You'll never find a Kenyan winning the 100 meter (or a Nigerian winning the marathon).

*If it was as simple as "blacks are faster than whites," there wouldn't have been a white guy (Christophe Lemaitre) in fourth place. It's all about bell curves (not the arguably racist Bell Curve book of the mid-1990s). If you plot the short-distance speed of all able-bodied European men on a graph, you'd see that most people are in the middle, with fewer and fewer people at the far ends. If you were to plot the short-distance speed of a similar number of able-bodied African men, the chart would look pretty much the same, but the curve would be very slightly to the right (the "faster" part of the X-axis). If you were to look at only the "fast" part of the chart, there wouldn't be a big difference between the number of Europeans and the number of Africans. This is how high-school football teams from mostly white communities are able to compete with teams from mostly black communities -- you may only need to be in the fastest 10% of your age-group population to compete at that level, and there will be a lot of white people in the top 10%. However, when we're talking about Olympic sprinters, or NFL cornerbacks, we're looking at the far-right 0.001% of the chart -- some of the very fastest people on Earth. At this extreme end of the bell curve, the little ethnic difference, which is barely noticeable at a wider scale, is exaggerated.

At least, that's my theory.