barrett wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:12 pm
Another book, The Sports Gene, by David Epstein has a section on the 100 meters being dominated by athletes of West African descent and another about the Kalenjin distance runners from Kenya. The latter have a huge advantage in part because they tend to have slender lower legs which allows the "pendulum" to swing back and forth while requiring less energy.
There's an additional explanation. A much simpler one.
As someone who lived in Kenya as a child, I can speak from firsthand experience that most of the rural tribes run as a basic mode of transportation. Seriously, the idea of getting somewhere in a jeep or a car is not an option, so if you have to go somewhere 15 miles away you just run.
And you run, not walk because daylight is a factor so time is not always on your side. When you have been running routinely as a basic way of getting from point A to point B, and you've been doing so since childhood, you can imagine how very good and efficient at it one will become.
In the case of the Kalenjin, they have the added benefit of living at altitude above the escarpment, so they've lived and run
all their lives in the conditions that Olympic athletes go to Colorado Springs to replicate.
So with all due respect to the author making the genetics argument, I'll lobby for at least one mark in the nurture column.
I won't deny some genetic predispositions and ethnic traits, but I happen to believe the much bigger factor is environment, opportunity and experience specific to the individual. I'd recommend The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, or the 10,000 hours of work thesis by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Coyle's book in particular is the only explanation I've ever found to explain the breathtaking achievements of the Renaissance that happened in a very condensed period of time concentrated in pretty much one compact place, Florence, Italy.