Nature vs. Nurture

My Olympic Freestyle 100-Meter Q&A

August 08, 2012

Multiple Pages
My Olympic Freestyle 100-Meter Q&A

For fifteen years, I’ve been writing long analyses of how the data found in Olympic results can help us answer fundamental questions about nature v. nurture, human biodiversity, race, and sex (e.g., 1997, 2000, 2000, 2004, and 2008).

This time I’m going to answer random questions about the Olympics that I’ve made up, allowing me to speculate irresponsibly.


Q. Should Michael Phelps retire from swimming forever?
A. He’s earned a few years on the golf course. Still, come January 2016 he should get back in the pool and start training for a single event: the 50-meter freestyle. You don’t have to be young and aerobically fine-tuned to swim the 50. You just have to show up and be fast for 21 seconds. If Phelps entered just one event in Rio, would you watch? Of course you would.

Q. Is there a lot of diversity among top 100-meter-dash runners?
A. Sure—in height. At 6’5”, Usain Bolt is 17 inches taller than the 5’0” Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. But there’s negligible diversity in ancestry. Every single one of the last 64 men to make the finals of the Olympic 100, from 1984 through 2012, has had substantial genealogical roots in the Western half of Africa.

Q. Why are so many American track and field stars, such as Galen Rupp (who became the first American in 48 years to win a medal in the 10,000-meter run) and Ashton Eaton (who set the new decathlon world record at the US Olympic Trials), from Oregon?
A. Oregon’s mild weather is good for distance running, and Nike, founded by University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and his former runner Phil Knight, pours a lot of money into keeping the sport alive locally.

“I’m going to answer random questions about the Olympics that I’ve made up, allowing me to speculate irresponsibly.”

But mostly, Oregonians are the last Americans to care deeply about the sport. Track and field is an excellent sport to read about in the newspaper, but it doesn’t televise well (especially not the field events) and is thus fading. Moreover, its heavily numeric appeal attracts the nerdier sort of white and Japanese fans, but most of the champion runners are of West African (sprint) or East African (distance) background. In 21st-century America, distance running interests mostly white people, a few Mexicans, and a tiny number of East African immigrants.

Q. Why do so many famous decathletes/heptathletes, such as Jessica Ennis, Ashton Eaton, Bryan Clay, Dan O’Brien, and Daley Thompson, have one black parent and one nonblack parent?
A. The nature reason is likely that these “world’s greatest athlete” tests (decathlon for men, heptathlon for women) are conducive to people who happened to inherit an unusually wide array of genes, suiting them for events that most people find contradictory. The nurture reason is that black culture has largely lost interest in track and field (especially field), so decathletes tend to come out of mostly nonblack milieus. For example, Eaton was raised by his white mom in a small Oregon town.

Q. Why is heptathlon gold medalist Jessica Ennis, “the face of the London Games,” such a big deal to British corporate advertisers?
The Telegraph reported: 

Like Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1, she had the look the sponsors wanted in a country where increasing numbers of us have parents with different racial backgrounds. Research has shown that the face the majority of people of all ages find most attractive is symmetrical, flawless, and mixed race.

But not too mixed—for a woman, it helps to have plausibly blonde hair.

Q. Did Galen Rupp, the first American in 48 years to win a medal in the 10,000-meter run, smash stereotypes?
A. His coach Alberto Salazar says he thinks so.

 

But nobody seems to care much. It’s hard to imagine corporate America pushing Galen Rupp as a role model the way they’ve pushed black swimmer Cullen Jones for a half-dozen years. It’s perfectly reasonable for corporate America to promote Jones to get the message out to black parents to get swim lessons for their kids to cut down on the horrific drowning rate among black boys. But it’s not as if whites are in such great shape these days that they don’t need role models, too. Wouldn’t it be great if increasingly obese and diabetic white kids from across America were inspired by Rupp’s achievement to try running? 

Q. Can Frenchman Christophe Lemaitre, who has the third-fastest time in the 200M this year (behind only Jamaican superstars Bolt and Blake), smash stereotypes by winning a medal in the 200?
A. Sure, Lemaitre is the first white man to run 100 meters under 10 seconds (and he did it without appearing to be massively juiced). But once again, that’s assuming anybody cares about a white guy doing anything because he’s white. And there doesn’t appear to be much evidence of that. 

If Lemaitre had entered the 100M, he likely would have been the first white to make the finals since 1980 (although he probably couldn’t have won a medal without a lot of doping). In theory, Lemaitre making the 100M finals would have allowed the world to celebrate diversity. For example, when Liu Xiang won a hurdling gold in Athens in 2004, he exclaimed (to no objections from the press):

It is unbelievable—a Chinese, an Asian, has won this event.…It is a proud moment not only for China but for Asia and all people who share the same yellow skin color. Please pay attention to Chinese track and field. I think we Chinese can unleash a yellow tornado on the world.

Can you imagine if a Lemaitre or a Rupp said the equivalent? He’d be lynched from the nearest lamppost by an enraged mob of SWPLs. Everybody knows that celebrating diversity doesn’t apply to whites. 

Q. An NBC segment showed muscular American 100M silver medalist Carmelita Jeter working out under shadowy veteran coach John Smith on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Is that a reassuring sign?
A. No. The Santa Monica-Venice area has been Muscle Beach since the 1930s and a hotbed of steroid use for a half-century or more. (In general, Southern California’s fabulous athletic history—such as O. J. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy and world record in a sprint relay—should come with a big asterisk.) 

Q. Why have long jumps gotten shorter over the years?
A. The most subtle reason might be that the Ben Johnson Revolution around 1987 drove a wedge between the 100-meter men and the long jumpers, who previously often did double duty. Before Ben Johnson, it was assumed that the best physique for both events was that of sprinter/long jumper Carl Lewis in the early 1980s: long and lean. But Johnson’s (later revoked) 100M world records in 1987-88 showed that lugging a seemingly absurd amount of upper-body musculature down the track paid off in the 100. Johnson got caught, but his lesson lived on.

Q. Why isn’t golf in the Olympics?
A. Professional golfers have traditionally been unenthusiastic about playing for free, unless it’s a time-honored team event such as the Ryder Cup, so repeated efforts to add golf failed.

Q. Why was golf added to the 2016 Rio Games?
A. Because before his troubles started back in 2009, Tiger Woods was feeling bored and patriotic and was thus up for the challenge of going for the gold.

 

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