thelostepisodes wrote:
You guys crack me up. I wonder if across in Europe they look at guys like Greg Oden, Lebron, Kobe, Shaq, KG coming out of high school and question how old they are. I mean Lebron looked like and played basketball like your average 18 year old at 18, right? Staying in track...X-Man, J-Mee Samuels, Roy Martin Jr., Dwayne Evans..how'd thse guys excel like that at such a young age? Somethings gotta be wrong there, right?
"Oh that's different, they're sprinters/jumpers...it doesn't take them years and years to develop an aerobic base!" squawk the doubters. Well guess what?, for guys who have been walking/running to school their whole lives at altitude over hilly terrain, herding animals after school, playing soccer for hour upon hour for fun, carrying buckets of water from the river, bringing the food home from the market on their back, not pumping their bodies full of refined crap, their whole lives have been spent training for endurance events without them even thinking about it...long before they ever knew that one day some European agent would wisk them away to far away lands. I know that it takes some kid who spent most of his childhood being bused to school and with an xbox as a best friend a hell of a long time to recover from a fast 5K, but don't try and compare that kid to someone who's had a completely different upbringing.
Why is it possible for 13/14/15 year old Romanian gymnasts to hit perfect 10s year in and year out and take home gold medals without anyone getting their panties in a knot? How about the 16/17/18 year old Americans, Australians and Europeans who routinely turn in world-class performances in swimming at the Olympics? Oh...sorry...they're white....they get a free pass. Actually, the logical explanation is that from the age of 12 (or earlier) their asses are up at 5 o'clock for the first swim of the day, and later on they're doing dry land training on top of the swim miles. Bollitieri's and bunch of other academies are full of pubescent kids hitting tenning balls and golf balls for hours and hours, and the pro ranks in those sports feature McEnroe, Agassi, Evert, Sampras types who make their marks at 17,18, etc. World Cup soccer...the tournament was full of 18/19 year old types (Fabregas, Ronaldo of Portugal) who had a big impact and the best leagues in the world routinely feature kids younger than that...so why the disbelief that a 17 year old who has been training for runing his whole life, albeit unbeknowst to him/her, can do things Westerners find hard to swallow. Because mom and dad didn't sell the house and move half way around the world to enroll him in the KippieKeino Running Academy?
Hey...are some of these guys older than they say? Sure. Are some of them on drugs? Sure. But for you to look at the results of all of the races of the world cross country championships and then tell me with a straight face that the reason why 20 and 30 deep the results feature only a handful of white faces is because there is a vast conspiracy involving Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Burundi, South Africa, Morrocco, Algeria, Qatar, and that all of these people are drug cheats/age fakers is absurd. Face it, the genes/lifestyles/training of these folks are conducive to their performing at a high level as runners. So don't go trying to impose your Western lifestyle-based ideas of their physical limitations on others. Wasn't it not too long ago some yahoos were saying man would implode if he ran a sub-4 mile?
well put. I agree completely