agip wrote:
coach d wrote:Part of the problem is a believe thing, that too many whites growing up don't believe they can compete with blacks. You see this in football as well as track, where whites are sent to the lines and blacks are sent to the skilled positions...sometimes even without testing them.
I was watching a hs meet the a few weeks ago in a highly segregated city (NYC) and guess what - 90% of the sprinters were black and 90% of the distance guys were white or asian.
That sort of self sorting is extraordinarily difficult for adolescents to avoid.
Yet an Asian kid did place 6th in the 60 meters - good on him.
If you sit and watch 100s of black kids running legs of the the 4 x 4...it sure looks like some of them would make fine distance runners, but they'll never get the chance.
Here's the infamous "White Guys Can't Run" piece from SI 20 years ago, which BTW I found linked by the stuffblackpeopledontlike blog:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1004184/index.htmI probably see the racism on the field more clearly because I played football and it is more overt there. But it is real and has been going on for a long time, though some of it is self imposed--the belief thing--and just like racing Kenyans, if you line up for a 60 or 100 and you believe the other guy is better than you because he's black, you've lost already. BUT the truth is that while Deion Sanders ran 4.22, Don Bebee (white) ran 4.21. You can say all you want about a kid wanting to do sprints or jumps, or WR/CB/FS in football but it means nothing if the coach won't let you because you're "not fast enough" because you're white.
Wariner, Andrew Rock, and Kevin Little won 16 championship medals in the last 20 years, as I recall. But this is all 200/400 (and only 200 for Little), but the Europeans and Japanese have had a number of pure sprinters with great success (leaving out Borzov due to obvious doping):
Marian Woronin
Alan Wells
Pietro Mennea
Koji Ito
(a bunch more, particularly Japanese, and Mennea, 35 years later, is still #9 on the all time 200m list)
About Alan Wells. He didn't have a gym, so his training was somewhat different from US practice, and I think this is significant. After the 1980 Olympics, US black sprinters complained the only reason he won gold is the US wasn't there. So he raced them in Europe--and he beat them all--just like Armin Hary did 20 years earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PJJsLorhXE&list=PLnkdE2kGerOsbQlxZUo1aYGgQiIrwBgSyhttp://ssa.nls.uk/film.cfm?fid=4713&search_term=easy&search_join_type=AND&search_fuzzy=yes