I highly recommend following
article by Jon Entine titled “The
DNA Olympics -- Jamaicans win sprinting 'genetic lottery' -- and why we should
all care” published on 8/12/2012 in Forbes Magazine. Same author has also
written a book about this subject.
The Record
“The trends are eye opening:
Athletes of African ancestry hold every major male running record, from the 100
meters to the marathon. … Over the last seven Olympic men’s 100-meter races,
all 56 finalists have been of West African descent. Only two non-African runners ... have cracked
the top 500 100-meter times.”
The Sprinters
“For decades, …Jamaica, Cuba,
Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts, Barbados, Grenada, Netherlands Antilles and
the Bahamas in the Caribbean and Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and
Namibia in western Africa, as single countries, have each produced more elite
male sprinters than all of white Europe and Asia combined.”
The Long-Distance Runners
“While terrible at the
sprints, runners [from east Africa like] Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia,
along with a sprinkling of North and Southern Africans, regularly dominate
endurance running.”
Genetics Still In Its Infancy
“Genetically linked, highly
heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of
muscle fiber types (for example, sprinters have more natural fast twitch
fibers, while distance runners are naturally endowed with more of the slow twitch
variety), reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency and lung capacity are not
evenly distributed among populations. Do we yet know the specific genes that
contribute to on the field success? No, but that’s not an argument against the
powerful role of genetics in sports. We do not yet know all the factors that
determine skin color, but we know that genetics determines it. Slowly,
geneticists will link human performance, including sports skills, to our DNA
and more specifically to our ancestral roots—populations.”
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