* When I was younger, my mildly athletic white friends and I would often play basketball as a team against much more athletically talented black teams. It always surprised me that we won a good portion of the time.
The reason that we could win against them was that we played a team oriented style that focused on passing, high percentage shots and defense while they tended to play as individuals with each one wanting to be “Jordan”.
* African-Americans got much better at the less glamorous parts of basketball, such as defense away from the ball, during the 1980s. In the late 1970s for two seasons in a row, three of the five NBA All Defense players were white (Bill Walton, Bobby Jones, and Don Buse.) But nowadays whites are notorious for poor defense.
My impression is that Coach John Thompson at Georgetown with Patrick Ewing in the early 1980s made defense glamorous for blacks. He had an interesting kind of Black Nationalist vibe, apparently refusing to recruit white Americans (he often had one white European on his squad).
Basketball used to be more like baseball in that you could hide guys with strong offensive skills and weak defense. If you go back far enough in time to when Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game in 1962, there was kind of a message that defense didn’t sell tickets so let’s not work too hard on defense.
The quality of defense improved a lot in the 1980s, leading to the notorious 1990s scoring drought, so the NBA took steps in the rules to make defense less suffocating and now has a well-balanced game.
* Black boys (link) and girls (link) both mature earlier on average than whites. So they may respond well to certain PED’s earlier in their life histories, enabling them to out-compete whites for sports opportunities (like scrimmaging/competing with better teammates, access to better coaches, etc.) which may power a compound-interest effect leading to higher terminal attainment.
Perhaps the old mental-capability age-ratio formulation for IQ holds a clue for us, to help us understand a possible way in which blacks could be “more sensitive” than whites to some athletic PED’s.
Just as the ability to benefit from schooling at an earlier age (high IQ) may drive an “compounded returns” cycle for a while leading to higher educational attainment by school-leaving age for high-IQ subjects compared to low-IQ subjects, the ability to benefit from some PED’s at an earlier age might drive an “compounded returns” cycle for a while leading to higher athletic attainment by sport-retirement age for earlier-maturing athletes compared to later-maturing ones.
* My impression from reading old sports books is that up into the 1960s the concept of a “sprinter’s build” meant somebody like Dave Sime: 6’2″ and 179 pounds: i.e., slightly more ectomorphic than mesomorphic. The assumption was that it didn’t make much sense to have lots of surplus upper body mass to have to accelerate.
Carl Lewis might have fallen into this category as well, although musculature was so much more prominent during his era.
But Bob Hayes, the 1964 gold medalist was more mesomorphic than ectomorphic.
We now know that upper body strength helps sprinters rise up out of a crouch faster.
But perhaps the area of interest is the calves: maybe general muscle-building among whites puts too much weight into the calves, which slow runners down (e.g., look at deer or horse legs). Maybe whites on steroids tend to grow heavier calves, while blacks on steroids add more weight relatively in their thighs?
Jamaica’s sprinting talent has been tied into American college track teams for at least a half century. For example, when OJ Simpson was on a world record sprint relay team at USC the anchorman was Lennox Miller of Jamaica, who medaled twice in the Olympic 100m. So Jamaicans and Americans are part of the same information sphere of training techniques.
I think what happened is that after the 2004 Olympics, where the US did well in the sprints with really massive guys like Justin Gatlin and Shaun Crawford, the USOC imposed more serious drug testing, while the Jamaican equivalent did not. Jamaica is not a rich country, so spending a lot of money to catch their national heroes was not a priority for them.
The other thing of course is that Bolt is just a Carl Lewis-level phenom who likely would still be dominant in a totally clean world.
