I don‘t want to break down any racist discussions please don‘t get me wrong but it isn‘t deniable that the best sprinters in history are of black descent. Why is it so, that black people have this advantage over European or Asian people?
There’s probably 2 other factors that matter more. First being the opportunity to get into something, realise talent is there, which allows someone to decide to pursue a sport. Like if you live somewhere that isn’t big on swimming, young people won’t be exposed to it. Here in Aus, we tend to be introduced to swimming early. We’ll go to beaches etc. Kids are taught to swim as it’s a nice thing to do when it’s hot weather. I learned to swim as a young kid at a local swimming centre tied to a university.
On the flipside, lots of other countries will kick our ass when snow or ice is involved. We just aren’t exposed to those sports anywhere near as much. Some are entirely foreign to us. Australia will never win an ice hockey medal. Personally I’ve seen actual snow once in my life.
The second is gov funding or the means to individually progress. Some sports don’t have much interest from a country therefore no funding isn’t put into them. Less affluent countries may have very little if not zero funding put into any athlete. That’s why you’ll hear stories of athletes who overcame a lot just to make it to the games at all, let alone be on a podium.
So with any event, it’s good to keep in mind, how much access does someone truly have to it? How much sporting culture does a particular country have? What kinda sports have people from a country historically been keen on, therefore that country actively tries to get people into? Ya know, it’s why the Brazilian women won beach volleyball, and not say, the Finnish.
Baseball and cricket are on the way next time and there’s a set of countries who will be in contention for each. And I doubt there’ll be much overlap. In those cases, it’s a national exposure thing. Race isn’t much of a factor if at all.
To add some nuance to the “black person fast” rhetoric here…
There is a higher degree of genetic variation among humans in Africa than across the entire rest of the world. This is because humans first evolved in Africa, some 300 000 years ago, and then first left Africa some 60 000 years ago. So Homo sapiens spent about 80% of their existence in Africa alone. (Though other hominids left Africa earlier and did later interbreed with Homo sapiens such as Homo neanderthalis and Homo denisova.)
So this means that, crudely, if we were to plot the “inherent genetics-based” speed of humans from different continents, Africans would likely have the flattest, widest bell curve.
Then because the Olympics approximately selects for the most elite athletes from each country, you can imagine that like taking the right-most fraction of each bell curve from each continent. Then of those subsamples, we’d expect that the Africans would be fastest, though population size would also have an impact. Same for things like tallest and shortest and other traits closely linked to genetics.
Ted Talk here discussing why people from different parts of the world excel at different sports.
This paper also goes over it.
https://www.witpress.com/elibrary/dne-volumes/5/3/454
The anthropometric literature shows that the center of mass in blacks is 3 percent higher above the ground than in whites. This means that blacks hold a 1.5 percent speed advantage in running, and whites hold a 1.5 percent speed advantage in swimming. Among athletes of the same height Asians are even more favored than whites in swimming but they are not setting records because they are not as tall.
I’ve read that countries who are good at long distance running like the East Africans have a higher portion of slow twitch muscle fibres which you need for endurance running
I’ve heard an interesting take years ago about the good results of athletes from the Caribbean : they said that during the slaves trade years , those who escaped the boats going to America were the strongest and then established in those islands (a lot of great french athletes come from Guadeloupe or Martinique)… Genetics did the work after that.
I wouldn’t know if it’s scientifically accurate though.
It’s not “black people”, the African continent has more genetic variety that the rest of the world. They all happen to have black skin, but that’s about it, be weary of generalizations. Genetically “black” doesn’t make sense.
Now regarding sprinting, it’s likely to do with a higher percenge of type 1 muscle fibers in West Africans, which is where most black people from the US and the caribbean descend ultimately from.
Lots of pseudoscience bullshit here. The more people train for a sport, the more of them will excell. How many black African gymnast vs black american gymnasts?
OP, already forget about that Dutch 4x4?
I’m not dismissing the hypothesis but go compile some hard data before making a post on this because I can think of so many counter examples. But in general there is so much representation from other ethnicities / parts of Africa.
They were extremely good also the Japanese which were a secret favorite for 4x100m and ran a crazy good race. I don‘t want to play down any achievements from other nations.
I will say it’s not just black people run faster, people of west african anncestry are the best at sprinting, while east Africans especially Kenya and Ethiopia are the best at long distance, all that is because of muscle fiber stuff that you can look into, but it’s not just that blacks are the fastest which is why you don’t see Kenyans winning the 100m or Jamaicans winning the marathon