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August 9, 2001 The End of the British Empire: Why a Brit (Black or White) Will Never Again Hold a Distance Running Record By Jon Entine When the gun goes off for the menıs 1500 metre final at Sundayıs World Championships in Edmonton, it might just as well signal the end of an era. The age of great British middle distance runners is gone forever. Once the worldıs dominant power, with a bloodline of Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, and Peter Elliott that regularly left competitors in the dust, the British hopefuls are today mere also-rans in a field dominated by North and East Africans. The collapse of the once mighty British Empire is actually part of a more sweeping trend. Where Brits, Aussies and others of Northern European stock used to dominate distance running, former greats such as Steve Cram and Sebastian Coe now indulge in British bashing. ³So where is the problem?² wrote Coe last week in the Telegraph. . ³The answer, I rather fancy, as Shakespeare said, lies not in the stars but in our handsı run faster.² Coe went on to exhort aspiring Brits to train with the ³brutal² commitment of days gone by ³the mental and physical intensity of what was commonplace 20 years ago,² he added modestly. Hereıs a wake-up call: you might as well look to the stars, because distance runners from Britain, northern Europe or North America, white or black, will never reclaim the mantle as world's best. And cultural factors have little do with this changing phenomenon. The world rankings, which combine race results from the 800 metres to the marathon, paint a stark picture. Africans, eight from Kenya, hold the top 10 places. Among the women, the top 3 and 7-out-of-10 are Kenyan. However, because of social taboos against women runners in Africa, non-Africans remain somewhat more competitive. If you ask self-proclaimed experts whatıs behind this extraordinary phenomenon, be prepared for the usual cliché: the current crop of British athletes is too soft. If they just tried harder, theyıd challenge for gold. Certainly, Coeıs 1981 800-metre run in Florence ranks as one of the great all-time performances. But a look at the all time list of 800 metre runs makes it clear that Britainıs reign as middle distance champion (and prior periods of domination by the Finns and other Northern Europeans) speaks mostly to the fact that for the most part Africans didnıt compete. While nationalistic chest pounding may help deal with frustration of fading glory, it canıt change the hard reality that Britainıs middle distance running glory is gone for good, whatever training methods might be adopted. Now that the playing field is more levelrunning is a worldwide sport, drawing competitors from Africa, Asia and South AmericaNorthern Europeans are decidedly second-class. Consider the list of all time top 800 meter runs and runners. While Coeıs best time ranks third on the all time list, Cram is at 39, Elliott stands at 45, and Ovettıs best time ranks 341. On a regular basis, none could expect to challenge the current world record holder, Kenyan Wilson Kipketer, who has 28 times in the top 100. Other Kenyan runners bring the total in the top 100 to fifty. Overall, athletes of African ancestry hold 82 of the top 100 times, with Northern Europeans holding but eight. What about Coeıs whine that British runners could transform themselves from joggers into champions if only they paid they mimicked the Kenyans. As the myth goes, Kenyans are great because they ran to school as kids and torture themselves in practice. That brings belly laughs from Wilson Kipketer, who destroyed Coeıs long-held 800-metre record in 1997. "I lived right next door to school," he laughs. "I walked, nice and slow." The reality is that for every Kenyan monster-miler putting in 100-mile weeks, there are others, like Kipketer, who get along on less than thirty. ³Training regimens are as varied in Kenya as any where in the world,² notes Colm OıConnell, coach at St. Patrickıs Iten, the famous private school and running factory in the valley that turned out Kipketer and other Kenyan greats. OıConnell eschews the mega-training so common among world champion wannabees in Britain and Europe. The explanation for African domination of running, it turns out, can be found mostly in the genes. ³Africans are naturally, genetically, more likely to have less body fat, which is a critical edge in elite running,² notes Joseph Graves, Jr., an African American evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University. "Evolution has shaped body types and in part athletic possibilities. Donıt expect an Eskimo to show up on an NBA court or a Watusi to win the world weightlifting championship. Differences donıt necessarily correlate with skin color, but rather with geography and climate. Genes play a major role in this.² Highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency and lung capacity are not evenly distributed among populations and cannot be explained by known environmental factors. Though individual success is about opportunity and "fire in the belly," thousands of years of evolution have left a distinct footprint on the world's athletic map. "Very many in sports physiology would like to believe that it is training, the environment, what you eat that plays the most important role," states Bengt Saltin, director of the Copenhagen Muscle Research Center, who outlined his findings in Scientific American. "But we argue based on the data that it is 'in your genes' whether or not you are talented or whether you will become talented. The extent of the environment can always be discussed but it's less than 20, 25 percent." East Africa is the epicenter of world distance running. Runners from highlands that snake along the western edge of the Great Rift Valley have clocked more than 60 percent of the best times ever run in distance races. Kenyans alone win 40 percent of top international events. The Nandi district of 500,000 people1/12,000 of Earth's populationboasts an unfathomable 20 percent, marking the greatest concentration of raw athletic talent in sports history. East Africans share a genetic history with mountain populations of North Africa. As a result of millions of years of evolutionary pressures, these populations turn out a disproportionately high number of body types with a biomechanical package for endurance activities: lean, physiques, large lung capacity, and a preponderance of slow twitch muscle fibers that propel endurance athletes. These are genetically-endowed attributes. No amount of hard-training can radically change what we are born with. This is not an issue of black and white, but the consequence of evolving in varying terrains. In fact, black East Africans have a very different biomechanical and genetic make-up than blacks who trace their ancestry from West Africa, which includes almost all British, Canadian, and American blacks. ³West Africans have already about 70 percent of the fast type muscle fibers when they are born,² says Dr. Saltin. ³And thatıs needed for a 100 metre race around 9.9 seconds.² Canadian geneticist Claude Bouchard, director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, found that West African descended blacks have naturally smaller lung capacity (about 15 percent when compared to whites and East Africans), a preponderance of fast twitch muscle fibers, and a more muscled, mesomorphic physique a goldmine for sprinting. Not surprisingly, there are no elite distance runners of West African ancestry. All the training in the world is unlikely to turn a black Brit into an elite marathoner or an East African into a top 100-metre runner. While the fastest Kenyan 100-metre run is 10.28 seconds, ranking 5,000 on the all-time list, blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, the ancestral home of almost all African Americans, hold the top 200 and 494 of the top 500 100-metre times. The pattern of which athletes excel has little to do with skin color but much to population genetics. Asian athletes, and their ancestral descendants in Mexico and South America, are very competitive in distance races, in part because of their small frames and extra layer of energy-generating body fat, which is otherwise a hindrance in sprinting. The few great white male distance runners are almost exclusively from southern Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and share many of the physical and physiological characteristicsand some of the genetic make-upof North and East Africans. "Differences among athletes of elite caliber are so small," notes Robert Malina, a Michigan State University anthropologist and editor of the American Journal of Human Biology, "that physique or the ability to fire muscle fibers more efficiently that might be genetically based ... it might be very, very significant. The fraction of a second is the difference between the gold medal and fourth place." If genetics and race really do matter in athletic performance, then we might expect to find noticeable differences in the ways different population groups sustain anaerobic and aerobic functioning. Sure enough, by applying population genetics to athletic performance and examining the aerobic/anaerobic energy cycle, scientists are beginning to understand the racial pattern in sports. Timothy Noakes, long-time director of the Sport Science Center at the University of Cape Town Medical School, and author of many scholarly books, including Lore of Running, has observed that black South Africans, who share much of their genetic ancestry with East Africans, sweep more than 90 percent of the top places in endurance races held in his country, despite the fact that blacks represent no more than one-quarter of the active running population. Noakes has attempted to figure out why in his laboratory. In a treadmill study, black marathoners consistently bested whites. Although white runners matched or exceeded the black runners at distances up to 5,000 metres, blacks were "clearly superior at distances greater than 5km." The fine print in the data was particularly revealing. There was a dramatic difference in the ability of the blacks to run at a higher maximum oxygen capacity. In the case of the marathoners, blacks performed at 89 percent of the maximum oxygen capacity, while whites lagged by nearly 10 percent. The muscles of the black athletes also showed far fewer signs of fatigue as measured by lactic acid. Noakes noted a link between his findings and the training habits of well-known Kenyan runners who report favoring low-mileage, high-intensity workouts. This presented a nurture/nature conundrum: Does hard training lead to a change in oxidative capacity and fatigue resistance, or does it merely reflect a genetically well-endowed athletic machine? The answer can be found in the wild card in performance: muscle efficiency. David Costill, former head of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, has shown that the adaptability of the muscle fiber for aerobic metabolism - its oxidative potential - is more important than the basic composition of the muscle. More aerobically efficient fibers produce fewer fatigue-producing lactate toxins, resulting in better performance. And although fiber composition is genetically fixed, which effectively limits the pool of possible successful athletes in each event, exercise can help muscles better utilize oxygen. A team from South Africa and Australia, including Noakes, has found an apparent link between oxidative capacity, resistance to fatigue, and race. The researchers measured "running economy"-the amount of metabolic work (and therefore oxygen consumption) that is required to run at a given speed, much like the fuel economy of a car. Running economy can be affected by a variety of factors both environmental, such as running technique, and physiological, such as body-mass distribution and muscle elasticity. "We've shown that the oxidative enzyme capacity of the [black] athletes we looked at was one and a half times higher on average than the white runners," reported Kathy Myburgh, a co-author of the report and senior lecturer at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Comparing black and white athletes with nearly identical race times, the researchers found that blacks were both more efficient runners and able to utilize a considerably higher percentage of their maximum oxygen potential - a decided advantage if two athletes otherwise have the same capacity. "Whilst the current study does not elucidate the origins of these differences," the report concluded, "the findings may partially explain the success of African runners at the elite level." A subsequent study determined that the superior fatigue resistance during high-intensity endurance exercise is partially related to the higher skeletal-muscle oxidative capacity and lower plasma lactate accumulation found more commonly in blacks. Bengt Saltin has also come to the conclusion that certain population groups, including Northern Europeans, who are notable endurance runners and cross-country skiers, may have superior fatigue resistance encoded in their genes. He has found that Scandinavian distance runners, Kenyans, and South African blacks all have consistently lower blood-lactate levels and perform more efficiently than athletes from other regions, the likely result of their having evolved in mountainous regions. Population genetics ancestryis the key determinant. Saltin brought a half-dozen established Swedish national class runners to Colm OıConnellıs school, St. Patrick's, in Iten, Kenya, to see how they might match up against up-and-coming East African schoolboys. It was a demoralizing experience for the Swedes. National champion after national champion was soundly trounced in races from 800 metres to 10 kilometres. Stunned, Saltin estimated that in this one tiny area of the Rift Valley there were at least five hundred school boys who could best his national champions at 2,000 metres. In a subsequent study, Saltin brought several groups of Kenyans to the Karolinska labs in Sweden, where he was then working. Muscle-fiber distribution was similar for the Kenyans and Swedes. But biopsies of the quadricep muscles in the thighs indicated that the Kenyans had more blood-carrying capillaries surrounding the muscle fibers and more mitochondria within the fibers. That's important because mitochondria act a little like power stations, processing the glucose with oxygen brought in by breathing into energy. The Kenyans also were found to have relatively smaller muscle fibers than the Swedes, which Saltin speculated might serve to bring the mitochondria closer to the surrounding capillaries. This process aids in oxidation, bringing more "fuel" to the mitochondria, the engine of the muscles. The Kenyans also showed little ammonia accumulation in their muscles from protein combustion, and less lactic-acid buildup. They have more of the muscle enzymes that burn fat, and their glycogen reserves are not burned as quickly, which improves endurance. Most impressively, they are able to take months off from regular training and then regain their old form quickly. When they do train, more than half of their total mileage occurs at heart rates of 90 percent of maximum, far higher than the rate for Europeans or Americans. In general, Saltin reported a 5 to 15 percent greater running economy at far less mileage, but at a higher intensity. Saltin has privately suggested that Kenyans appear to be innately efficient, durable, and fast - with the most perfect aerobic potential measured so far on earth. Could a North European or British runner defy the odds and emerge as a middle distance world record holder? Certainly, for genes only circumscribe possibility and any race opens the door for the roulette wheel of the human spirit. As a result of natural human variation, there will always be great runners from every part of the globe. But donıt expect a return to glory. Remember, there were almost no Kenyans or North Africans in the mix in the days when British athletes used to rule. Todayıs aspiring British athletes would be a bit foolish to follow Coeıs exhortations and devote themselves to grueling training regimens in hopes of cracking African hegemony. More than likely, in a sport in which a few hundredths of a second is the difference between a gold medal and finishing back in the pack, they donıt have the innate potential to become the elite of the elite. They are making a rational choice to focus on events and sports in which they are more likely to succeed. Humans are different, a product of the inseparable relationship of genes and environment. Popular thinking, still reactive to the historical misuse of ³race science,² lags this new bio-cultural model of human nature. Events such as the World Championships provide an opportunity to broaden our understanding of the genetic revolution now unfolding. Get used to it Sebastian: the glory days of the British distance running empire are gone forever. Jon Entine [http://www.jonentine.com] is author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. E-mail him at runjonrun@earthlink.net
Jon Entine
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