CoachB wrote:
Renato:
What you are saying is that if:
1. A large population of whites were
2. Born, raised, and trained at altitude and
3. for the most part were interested in running,
Then:
Whites would be more competitive at distances 3k and above.
This is more or less what I've felt for a while.
You are likely right that they would be "more competitive" than they are now (who knows for sure), but they would likely NOT be as good as the East Africans even with those changes. Why?
1) Everyone romanticizes the East African environment for developing distance runners. There are surely some advantages as have been touched upon here and on other threads (altitude, dirt roads, lack of opportunity for obtaining wealth from endeavors other than running, tough upbringing which makes one tough and literally and figuratively hungry for success, etc). However, one often ignores the negatives: malnutrition, lots of diseases not present in 1st world countries which result in childhood deaths/malformation/weakness, lack of facilities and organized sports leagues to encourage participation, poverty which forces children to work at young ages and not think about leisure endeavors such as sports {remember, Geb's Dad almost succeeded in denying Geb a chance to become a runner. He forbade him to, but Geb did it anyway. They needed little Geb on the farm}, etc, etc
It is myth that one needs poverty to be hungry to be a champion. Some of the most dedicated and ferociously hungry athletes have come from solid middle class or above backgrounds (think Lance Armstrong, Alberto Salazar, Seb Coe, Paula Radcliffe, Ironman Triathletes, etc, etc, etc.The list goes on forever) And look at our current crop of top US runners: Solinsky, Rupp, Ritz, Hall, etc. They didn't need to be walking to school in bare feet surrounded by mosquitoes to become super competitors. Not even close. American has a culture of competition and drive to be the best, almost to the point of obsession and unhealthiness. This culture breeds champions and people who are willing to push themselves to the point of no return. This philosophy doesn't only come from africa and poverty. If anything is bigger in places like the USA.
And believe it or not, technology like Alter G's, swimming pools, artificial altitude chambers and houses, customized nutrition, cryogenic chambers for recovery, and on and on and on DO help our athletes become better. East Africans don't have access to these things.
SO......... my point is that people over romanticize and exaggerate the east african environment as being the perfect place to be born and grow up if you want to become a runner, and that 1st world countries like the US are somehow at a huge disadvantage environmentally (due to distractions and other opportunities, and easy lifestyles) when it comes to producing champion athletes, especially runners. There are pros and cons to both environments. Moving a bunch of white babies to east africa raised in typical families there might results in a lot of early deaths and kids too busy working to even think about running.
2) Renato said that East Africans are better because of a combination of reasons, ONE OF WHICH IS TALENT. Talent does not spring from being "born at altitude". Talent comes from having parents with talent. Suddenly moving your parents to african before you were born wouldn't change your their "talent," or yours, right? East Africans have ancestors that were born and have lived at altitude for GENERATIONS, and who had lives where running played a central role. Thus, genes that would be useful to running and working hard and surviving at altitude were selected for. This created "talent" for running in these peoples. If you randomly selected 1000 young men from Ethiopia and Kenya and 1000 who trace their fairly recent ancestry to Europe, you'd almost certainly find more talented distance runners in the East African group likely due to these selective pressures.
Therefore, growing up in East Africa is not as ideal of a setting as you might think if you want to become a champion runner, but having ancestors that have grown up there for aeons IS the right recipe for having talent, which plays a central role in one's ability. And we can't go back in time and change our ancestors.