Arguing With the Inarguable. By Steve Sailer.
The Olympics are a festival of human biodiversity. Different sports are best-suited to different body types: For example, swimmer Michael Phelps, winner of 23 gold medals, and eight-time gold-medalist sprinter Usain Bolt are roughly the same height, but Phelps has a long torso, like a human surfboard, while Bolt has long legs.
In turn, because humans evolved to have somewhat different body types in different parts of the world, that means that different racial groups have different athletic strengths and weaknesses, as you can see on NBC this week.
Granted, most whites aren’t physically much like Phelps and most blacks aren’t much like Bolt. But on average, whites are a little more long-torsoed and blacks are a little more long-legged. So, it’s not surprising that the greatest-ever swimmer is white and the greatest-ever sprinter is black.
PC overrides reality in many heads:
And yet, according to America’s current conventional wisdom, as espoused by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, all this can’t be true. Instead, evidence of superiority or inferiority in anything can only be the result of racist policy.
Although Kendi has been omnipresent in the media, as far as I can tell nobody has ever asked him about sports. The obvious racial gaps in various sports just never come up.
The most inarguable race differences can be seen in the simplest, most instinctual sport: running. All children naturally race to see who is fastest.
A recent first!
The big running news this week was that China’s Su Bingtian ran the race of his life to win one of the men’s 100-meter-dash semifinals in 9.83 to become the first runner without substantial sub-Saharan ancestry to qualify for the finals since the 1980 Moscow Games. That’s one out of eighty finalists.
2021 Final: The Chinese guy finished last, and the Italian winner is substantially of West African ancestry.
While I might call this evidence for human biodiversity inarguable, that doesn’t stop many from arguing that only a Nazi moron would imagine that biological differences have anything to do with Olympic track results.
So, here’s a slightly stylized dialogue:
Q. What kind of unscientific bozo thinks genes matter? The only reason Usain Bolt won all those gold medals was that he trained so fanatically hard.
A. During this Olympics, one of the countless commercials featuring the now-retired Bolt embodies that line of thinking: A stentorian voice-over announcer orates that Bolt pushes himself to the limit “even if it means sacrificing everything.” At which point, the big Jamaican goof says, “Wait, what? I never lived like that,” and cracks open a cold Michelob Ultra.
Bolt set three world records at the 2008 Beijing Olympics while following a rigorous diet of nothing but 100 Chicken McNuggets per day.
The truth is that the 100 meters requires fewer hours of training per week than just about any other Olympic event. Carl Lewis worked out eight hours per week to get ready to win four golds at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. (Their regimens are extraordinarily intensive, however.) …
Q. Hey, idiot, if genes are all that matter for why Jamaicans run fast, how come nobody has ever even heard of a Nigerian sprinter, huh? Huh?
A. First, there are numerous top Nigerian (and other West African) sprinters. …
Second, nurture matters as well as nature. … Coaching is better in Jamaica. Bolt wasn’t the easiest runner to train, but at times when he was a teenager, it sometimes seemed as if the whole country was checking in to make sure he fulfilled his potential.
Similarly, a lot of expertise might be needed to compete at the very highest levels and not test positive. Jamaicans are plugged into the American college track team recruiting network, so their coaches are likely sophisticated in the dark arts. …
Q. The reason Jamaicans run the 100m and Kenyans the marathon is solely because of colonialist stereotypes about what they’d be good at.
A. This might sound plausible if there were no other distances. But of course, track offers a ladder of events at multiple distances. Coaches are constantly trying to see if their runners could excel at longer or shorter distances. …
As it turns out, people of western African descent tend to be best from 100 to 400 meters, with a quick falloff after that. In the top 300, there are 22 Jamaican quarter-milers (400m) and eight Nigerians, but at 800m only one Nigerian and zero Jamaicans. And no Caribbean or West African runners from any country are in the top 300 at any length longer than 800m. In contrast, there are eleven Kenyans among the 300 best at 400m, but eighty at 800m (and 152 at the marathon).
What’s the reason for the 400m vs. 800m divide? Sports scientists say that’s where physical demands switch from more anaerobic to more aerobic. One weekly training plan, for instance, tells 800m men to run 48 kilometers per week on the roads, plus sprint training on the track. In contrast, quarter-milers are never expected to run more than twenty minutes in a single day. …
Q. Why do you want to know hatefacts like these anyway?
A. They seem interesting and important. All truths are connected to each other, while all lies are dead ends.
Imagine being doomed to believe facts in an era of political-mandated unreality. Poor Steve Sailer.
