Olympic Biodiversity Preview


With the Summer Olympics starting a

month from now in Athens,
it might be fun to look at
some of the more enduring patterns in this global
pageant of nationalism and

human biodiversity
. For the casual fan who can`t
remember the names of individual athletes, it`s always
enjoyable to check in to see if old trends are still
operative.

*

Practically every boy on Earth
tries sprinting. Fast runners bubble up through local
competitions and finally, every four years, the 64
fastest sprinters in the world wind up at the Olympics
to compete in the men`s 100-meter dash.

Three rounds later, only eight are
left to race in the Finals.

Remarkably, in each of the last
five Olympics—1984 through 2000—every finalist, 40 in
all, has been of West African descent.

That streak may end in Athens. One
reason: a non-black,

Patrick Johnson of Australia
, has finally broken the
ten-second barrier in the 100 meters. (African-origin
runners have done it

267 times.) Interestingly, Johnson is
half-Irish—and half-Australian Aborigine.

Another reason: 2004 could be more
wide open, even confused, because doping crackdowns may
remove top contenders like world record holder

Tim Montgomery.
If the authorities look serious
about catching

cheaters
with post-event urine tests, expect to see
athletes suddenly withdrawing before their starting
times due to mysterious ailments. That could open the
door to a non-black—this year.

A third reason: a Japanese sprinter
just might break through into the finals. Three made the
semifinals over the last two Olympics. The best time
recorded by a Japanese sprinter is an impressive


10.00
,
same as the top mark ever for an all-white runner.

*

On the other hand, the Japanese are
the worst underachievers of all the large, rich,
sports-crazy nations. Curiously, they did significantly
better in the Olympics

medal tallies

back in the 1964-1984 era.

One obvious problem for the
Japanese: they are probably the shortest and smallest of
all the

industrialized peoples.
But they no longer do well
even in men`s gymnastics, a small man`s sport that they
used to dominate. In recent years, the string of


disappointing
performances
by Japanese athletes has
seemed to feed on itself, with the Japanese media
focusing

excruciating

pressure on each new contender. The poor athletes
seem overwhelmed at the prospect of disappointing the
entire nation and thus freeze up.

The Japanese, who are among the
most emotionally sensitive of all people, have gotten
themselves into a psychological rut. Eventually, a
string of victories will occur, which should get the
monkey off the national back, and they`ll snap out of
this long sporting slump.

*

Japan, however, is America, Kenya,
the old Soviet Union, and the New York Yankees rolled
into one compared to

India
.
In 2000, a billion Indians managed to capture just one
medal, a lowly

bronze

in the new (and, may I say, ridiculously
steroid-vulnerable) sport of

women`s weightlifting
. And one bronze is all they
won in 1996, too.

Will India`s growing middle class
follow the rest of the world into sports madness? Or
will they remain uninterested in just about all games
except

cricket.

*

Overall, however, there`s not much
evidence that steroid use can change the balance of
racial power in men`s sprinting. Women are different.
Doped-to-the-eyeballs East German frauleins dominated
women`s sprinting in the 1970s and into the 1980s—until
the late

Florence-Griffith Joyner
and certain other American
black women got on the juice too.

In contrast, white men from East
Germany were never competitive with African American men
no matter how much their coaches tried to turn them into
fuel-injected funny cars.

And if the new steroid tests are
effective, then you can expect the "gender gap"—how much
better men are than women in timed or measured events
like running—to widen.

Why? Basically for the same reason.
With the exception of, say, rhythmic gymnastics, sports
are basically a test of

testosterone
. Since women on average only produce
1/10th as much of the

manly molecule
as men do, they get a much bigger
bang for their buck from artificial male hormones. So,
when everybody has to cut back on steroids, women are
weakened more. 

Similarly, the marginal advantage
steroids offer men is much less.

I

showed

back in 1997 in National Review that, contrary to
all expectations, the gender gap in running had expanded
between the 1988 Olympics, when doping was rampant, and
the cleaner 1996 Olympics. The same might happen again
in 2004.

Of course, nobody on television
would dare mention such a heretical thought, so you`ll
just have to try to notice which sex is setting more
records.

*

No doubt, the media will try to
launch another of one of the funnier American fads:
those periodic whoop-tee-doos where we all swell up with
national pride over an American women`s team winning
gold in some sport played by the women of practically no
other county on Earth, except maybe Norway. Think back
to the ecstasy over women`s softball in 1996, women`s
ice hockey in 1998, or, most famously, the first

Women`s World Cup of soccer in 1999
.

We`d beaten the world! When cynics
pointed out that the world didn`t much care about
women`s soccer, well, that just made us even prouder of
how liberated our women are, compared to those poor,
oppressed women of Paris, Milan, and London, whose
consciousnesses haven`t been raised enough to want to
trade in their Gucci high heels for soccer spikes.

Who knows which sport it will be
this time—maybe the new entrant of


women`s wrestling
?

Unfortunately, after each

frenzy
of patriotic feminist chauvinism, our poor
women athletes come home and set up a domestic pro
league that rapidly loses the interest of almost
everybody except

lesbians and the kind of guy fan
who`ll watch
anything on ESPN2.

That`s because, to be frank, even
the best women aren`t anywhere near as good at sports as
the best men. So what`s the point in watching them
unless they are kicking evil foreign butt?

*

Everybody knows by now that the
greatest source of male distance runners in the world
are the East African highlands, especially

Kenya
and
Ethiopia. Recently, anthropologist Cynthia M. Beall
discovered that Ethiopians have evolved a

unique biochemical
adaptation
to living at high altitude,
different from the traits that evolved in the other very
high altitude tribes: Tibetans, such as the famous
Sherpa mountain climbers, and the barrel-chested Indians
of the Andes.

Although the famous

running tribe

of Kenya, the Kalenjin, has been studied in detail, less
has been reported about the second hotbed of distance
running greatness: Northwest Africa. Perhaps the top
runners of Morocco and

Algeria
are
descended from Atlas Mountains highlanders.

Or is there some other cause?
Morocco`s star miler

Hicham El-Gerrouj
,
for example, was born at sea level. Sports physiologists
should investigate.

*

Will the U.S. men`s basketball team
blow the gold medal? If the U.S. does lose, especially
if it gets beat by some pocket-sized country like the
perennial medal contenders Lithuania, Croatia, and
Serbia, it ought to inspire some serious thinking. What
has gone wrong with American basketball culture since it
peaked with the famous

Dream Team that crushed everyone at the 1992 Olympics
?
Why can`t

American basketball stars
play together as
cooperatively as they once did?

Interestingly, four of the twelve


1992 Olympians
were white, but everyone on the 2000
team that barely scraped by

little Lithuania
was black.

Perhaps diversity would be
good for

American basketball.
Or would that be the wrong kind
of diversity?

By the way, one reason these Baltic
and Balkan basketball teams do so well is that the
natives tend to be somewhat

taller
than
Americans.

*

Is there any country in the world
more patriotic when it comes to sports than South Korea?
Granted, El Salvador

invaded

Honduras in 1969 to avenge a soccer defeat. It sounds
funny, but it wasn`t to the

thousands
killed. Still, in my limited experience, the
South Koreans are in a class by themselves. (Although
God only knows what the North Koreans are like.)

My introduction to

South Korean
sports fans was at the 1984 L.A.
Olympics. At a slate of sixteen early round boxing
matches at the Sports Arena, I sat behind about 150
Koreans, including three Buddhist monks in saffron
robes.

Through the first twelve bouts,
they all sat impassively. The Koreans showed zero
interest in boxing

pour le sport.
Even the most gallant display by
a non-Korean boxer failed to inspire them to utter a
peep of approval.

Finally, the one Korean boxer of
the afternoon was introduced. The fans exploded into an
utter frenzy of flag-waving. The Buddhist monks jumped
up and down and screamed. The mob howled its head off
through the entire 45 seconds it took the Korean lad to
get knocked cold.

After their boy was hauled off on a
stretcher and the next fight was about to start, the
Koreans arose as one and silently filed out.

*

At this point, there is still
concern that some of the facilities in Athens won`t be
finished on time. Of course, if the Greeks liked to
organize themselves in a straight-forward fashion and
get things done with a minimum of complications, then
they wouldn`t be Byzantine, now would they?

It`s worth keeping in mind, though,
that Olympics with bad buzz going in have often worked
out beautifully—for example,

Los Angeles in 1984
and

Salt Lake City in 2002.
In contrast,


Atlanta in 1996
, which everybody thought was a
slamdunk, turned out to be a bit of an airball due both
to the humid heat and to the

operational ineptitude
caused by the organizers`

"commitment to diversity."

In any case, even if Athens proves
to be hot, noisy, smoggy, and stressed-out, don`t forget
that the other 95 percent of Greece is wonderfully
different.


[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and


movie critic
for


The American Conservative
.
His website


www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily
blog.]