Steve Sailer writes: The most striking statistic in human biodiversity studies was, to the best of my knowledge, first pointed out by Runner’s World editor Amby Burfoot in an article in the spring of 1992. He noted that in both the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, all eight finalists each time in the men’s 100 meter sprints were black. When you considered that people of substantial sub-Saharan descent only make up a modest fraction of the world’s population, then 16 out of 16 was extraordinary.
Typically, over 64 sprinters enter the Olympic 100m dash, from a huge range of countries around the world. To make it to the finals, you have to survive the octofinals, quarterfinals, and semifinals. So just making the Olympic finals is a major career accomplishment.
Astonishingly, however, the same thing has happened six more Olympics in a row since Burfoot’s observation, for a running total of 64 blacks out of the last 64 finalists.
You can see this stat for yourself in motion: for the record, here are videos of the last eight Olympics’ mens’ 100 meter finals.
1984 Olympics, Los Angeles
1988 Olympics, Seoul
1992 Olympics, Barcelona
1996 Olympics, Atlanta (only 7 men actually finished the 1996 final because 1992 gold medalist Linford Christie was disqualified for false starting).
2000 Olympics, Sydney
2004 Olympics, Athens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F14EaVEDyUs
2008 Olympics, Beijing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O7K-8G2nwU
2012 Olympics, London
COMMENTS:
* Sprinting is the general factor of athletic ability.
* The meaning of the term “athleticism” has changed somewhat over my lifetime. It used to be associated at least somewhat with eye-hand coordination, but that has largely been dropped. Golfer Phil Mickelson or baseball slugger Miguel Cabrera might have been considered athletic 50 years ago, but now they are seen as being at the opposite pole from “athleticism.”
Now, pretty much like intelligence being whatever it is an IQ test measures, athleticism means whatever an NFL cornerback does.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the ability to run fast backwards correlates even higher with the current meaning of athleticism than the ability to run fast forwards.
Anyway, the NFL Draft combine collects a lot of data on college football stars, so it would be interesting to see which subtests correlate best with success at cornerback in the NFL.
In contemporary discussions of athleticism, eye-hand coordination is now treated a little bit like psychometricians treat 3-d cognitive skill: something more striking for being more orthogonal to the g-factor than most other cognitive skills.
What about eye-foot coordination? Soccer player Lionel Messi has unbelievable eye-foot coordination, but I don’t know enough about American responses to soccer to say whether that is treated as evidence of athleticism or of something else.
In other countries, what Americans call “track & field” is called “athletics.”
But my impression is that Americans don’t really think of track & field as being the definition of athleticism anymore. It’s too cut and dried, pre-planned. Americans tend to associate “athleticism” with basketball and playing defense on football. That puts a high premium on reacting quickly, the ability to move your feet not necessarily in a straight line forward.
There’s a high correlation between sprinting speed and what an NFL cornerback or NBA guard defender does, but it’s not 1.0.
Sometimes, for example, you see running backs who are very fast in a straight line but aren’t that shifty. Herschel Walker, for example, was unbelievably fast going forward for his size, but he wasn’t particularly elusive like Barry Sanders was.
A big question is that we have a very spotty the history of steroids in American sports before, say, the 1980s. We have weird bits and pieces of knowledge, like that the coaching staff of the 1963 San Diego Chargers handed out steroids at training camp. But then what happened? We have other evidence that suggests that steroids did not systematically sweep the major American spectator sports until later.
My suspicion is that a lot of the iconic Southern California superstars of my late 1960s childhood were on the juice, such as The Juice and Wilt. O.J. was part of a record-setting sprint relay team at USC, and we know Olympic field guys were using steroids from the later 1950s onward. Wilt was a Muscle Beach regular soon after he was traded to the Lakers around 1968 and became the first NBA player to become ripped. O.J. was massively publicized at USC in 1967-68. There was a sort of sense at the time that he was the Football Player from the Future, and maybe he was.
One way to test the theory that blacks respond better to steroids is that we have a decent knowledge of baseball’s steroid history. No doubt some players had been quietly experimenting for years, but it seems pretty clear that Jose Canseco was the primary evangelist for steroids among big leaguers in the 1986-1992 era.
During this period, we see a general decline in the number of African-American ballplayers, so that would be a strike against the theory. On the other hand, when the best African-American ballplayer, Barry Bonds, decided to get seriously into steroids, he hit 73 homers.
It also seems likely that the over-the-counter availability of steroids in some Latin countries, especially the Dominican Republic played a role. It would seem like a great topic for some sabermetrician to research — steroid sales in the D.R. from 1970-2000 — but the stat guys seem amazingly averse to researching the general topic of What Just Happened?
My impressions is that this era saw the end of the stereotype of the wiry Latin banjo hitting utility infielder to be replaced by the stereotype of the Dominican slugger, who tended to be very black, much blacker than Dominicans in general.
Another subtest of what we think of as “athleticism” today in America is how high above your height you can get a hand. Being able to slam dunk is a proxy for this. One interesting aspect is that long arms are considered athletic, even though they are a fixed asset.
A future famous Southern Californian who started using steroids when he was 17-years-old in 1964 or 1965 is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
My guess is that way back in the 1960s it usually took initiative and individuality to get into steroids, and Arnold, OJ, and Wilt would qualify under those categories.
* Then they’ve been performance enhancing for a lot longer than 1980. I’d say a more plausible reason is that the Caribbean countries needed more time to build up their sports program–and blacks needed to be welcome emigrants in European countries in order to dominate their sprinting programs.
The last white winner of the 100 in a fully competitive Olympics was Valeriy Borsov in 1972, and it’s pretty well-acknowledged that he wouldn’t have won if the US coach hadn’t used an old schedule. Only one of the Americans showed up at the quarterfinals, thanks to that screwup. The two favorites missed their event. The two who didn’t start were the ones favored to win; our 3rd best candidate came in second place. Valeriy wasn’t a slouch; he came in 3rd in 1976 to two black Caribbean runners.
Allan Wells, the 1980 winner and the last white winner of the 100 in any Olympics, is the FloJo of his time; that is, people who don’t believe he wasn’t doping are just kidding themselves. The guy was originally a jumper who switched to sprinting late in his career and started beating everyone. And whispers of his doping have been going around for a while.
Leaving aside those exceptions, black men have been dominating the Olympics despite fewer opportunities in America and far fewer predominantly black countries having the money for sports programs. 1968 looks like an all black final. 1964 was the year of Bob Hayes; according to Wikipedia, a Pole and a German were the only nonblacks in 1964 (I didn’t look them up, but am assuming).
You’re correct that the three white guys swept the 1960 event, but Ray Norton and Frank Budd had beaten Sime in the trials. Norton was the overwhelming favorite and his fold during the finals is one reason that day is dubbed Black Thursday, an unexpectedly catastrophic day for US track & field at the Olympics. Norton had been considered the dominant US sprinting star for two or three years by that time. Frank Budd set the world record the next year; his poor performance is generally considered a case of nerves, as he’d never been in a major event before.
But you can go back further. In 1956, the only black guy in the field, Ira Murchison, was also expected to win that year but also seemed to have a bad year. 1952, the winner was a white American, but bronze and silver went to black men. 1948 had black men going 1-2-3,two Americans and a Panamanian. And of course, 1936 had Jesse Owens and Frank Metcalf.
In America, 100 meter Olympic finals have been all or mostly black for a long time. Here’s a special on Valeriy Borsov, and at the 4:14 mark there’s a clip from the US Olympic finals. I don’t see a white guy in it. Here’s a clip of the 1964 Olympic 100 finals, also just a couple whites.
So no, I’m unconvinced that the explanation is anything other than some genetic fast-twitch thing, because from the moment they were given any opportunity at all, blacks dominated.
* Steve, remember when NBC aired a “White Paper” about black athletic superiority around 1987? The then-track coach for Stanford was interviewed, and he vowed to find the Great White Sprinter. I sent him a letter saying “good luck with that,” and he sent it back to me with a handwritten imprecation to “crawl back under the rock you came out from.”
* One interesting theory that has been put forward by a commenter (unfortunately, I have forgotten his monicker) is that perhaps men of West African descent tend to respond more strongly to performance-enhancing drugs than do men of other races?
That’s also the armchair scientific theory in professional bodybuilding. From reading various sources, professional body builders also need to have a natural ability to gain muscle easily (so they get early positive feedback for their efforts) and the ability to handle the massive amounts of foreign substances without breaking down. Occasionally HDB slips out and people talk about the advantages that blacks have.
* Blacks are more sensitive to androgens since they average fewer CAG repeats on the androgen receptor gene, so the performance-enhancing drug hypothesis seems plausible. East Asians and Hispanics have longer repeats and are rarely competitive.
* It sometimes seems to me that white kids these days spend all their time shuffling along staring at rocks in their hands. I sometimes think I’m living in a world of monks who have taken vows of silence. Exertion would probably break their meditations.
* When I was looking at the runners in the videos to which you’ve linked, I was surprised that the runners all looked so large. I would have expected them to be thinner and have less bulky bodies (I do not follow track). Also, it’s a little hard for me to tell decisively, but the runners in the 1960s video appear to be of slighter build than the runners in the videos of more recent races.
* My opinion is that basketball is the be-all end-all of athletic sports. Since the NBA was founded in 1946, no other sport has seen the level of athleticism so conspicuously evolve. Watch a Bob Cousy highlight reel then an Allen Iverson highlight reel, or an Oscar Robertson highlight reel then a Michael Jordan highlight reel. Those are starker visual differences than even football has seen in terms of what we can only call athleticism, as though the NBA started out with mechanical dummies. And so the first thing I would say about a possible athletic g factor is that you know it when you see it. Which may suggest the key idea literally.
No one ever mentions this, but learning how to play basketball well has less to do with good coaching or good competition than with endlessly and intensely watching the pros on TV and film, and being able to then go out and imitate their physical nuances. The stylistic innovations that have accentuated athleticism in the NBA are, I would argue, a matter of binging on game footage, a matter of mimicry and incorporation, and not a matter of fundamentals being better taught as has been the NFL’s evolution. And indeed it’s probably the intuition of this that explains why NBA practices among all pro-sports are notoriously non-intense. Perhaps, maybe, the athletic g factor then is the ability to internalize motion, and to demonstrate this internalization by aping it down to subtle rhythms, and moreover doing so without being able to gauge your own accuracy, since you don’t practice in front of a mirror.
Somehow, it seems like athleticism must have essentially been born from dancing. The fact that children will dance to music by sheer instinct before they can even walk would seem to say something fundamental about human motion and thus athleticism. And of course dancing in the purest sense is just mimicking the rhythm of the music by your movements. Thus would dancing be the general factor of athletic ability if I had to guess. And as musical ability does not correlate with IQ, perhaps athleticism does not correlate with strength, so that sprinting ability is misleading insofar as the speed is a matter of leg strength.
* Maybe it’s mirror neurons?
A sense of rhythm seems to be crucial both to most sports and most performance arts, and certainly other arts, such as poetry, and maybe even painting. I have no sense of rhythm so I just skip over all the parts in literary criticism and the like that are devoted to praising the writer’s rhythm.
A decade or so ago it was a big surprise when some beat-up retired black athlete like heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield would go on Dancing with the Stars and excel. But now it’s expected.
Are there any famous black athletes who can’t dance? No doubt there are some who have kept it hidden, but I can’t think of any, and I’ve had it in the back of my mind for decades to remember any anecdotes about black teammates who can’t dance.
