• Question: why are black people better than everyone at sprinting

    Asked by ixabdulxi to Andrew, Ben, Beth, Heather, Louisa on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      This is not my area of expertise, but I think it is to do with the larger amount of twitch muscles they posses. And it is not all black people it is in fact just decendants of a people from certain areas of West Africa. This is a genetic trait, similar to the fact that the best long distance runners from come from East Africa (Kenya and Ethiopia mainly).

      This is a great example of evolution and genetics at work. The best example, taken from Ref 1, is that “One tiny district, the Nandi, with only 500,000 people, sweeps an unfathomable 20 percent of major international distance events, marking it as the greatest concentration of raw athletic talent in the history of sports.”

      If you want to read more there is a good article in Ref 1.

      Ref 1 http://run-down.com/guests/je_black_athletes_p2.php

    • Photo: Louisa Chard

      Louisa Chard answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I don’t think it is helpful to generalise into black and white like this. I remember from the last olympics some information : East African backgrounds seem to be better at long distance, west african better at sprinting. By your definition, these would both be classed as black. Try not to generalise so much and split things into black and white as this can confuse issues and answers. There are lots of different genetic backgrounds in all populations, including black and white, so what stands for one black population may not stand for another.
      The reason why the west africans are better than the east at sprinting? I don’t know, but it will be to do with their build and muscle type (more fast twitch fibres) that is inherited in the genes.

    • Photo: Heather McKee

      Heather McKee answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      This tends to be a vast generalisation with the underlying assumption that all black people are decendents of the same area. There are massive gene based differences from those all over africa. It is thought that people who are ancestors of west african tribes(carribeans for example) have more of a certain muscle fibre type known as fast twitch muscle which has been linked to speed in running.

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I dont’ know enough about this area, but I don’t think there is enough scientific evidence to be able to comment fairly on this. I would say that in any given group of people, the chance of the fasted sprinter being black or white is not predictable.
      Olympic teams only field a handful of sprinters; granted some of them are black, but some of them are white as well. We would need to do a study with a sufficiently large group of people, both men and women, and I think the results might be surprising.

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