Race and sports

Participation and performance disparities

Sprinting

In 1991, Namibian (formerly South-West Africa) Frankie Fredericks became the first sub-10-second 100 metres runner of non-West African heritage and in 2003 Australia's Patrick Johnson (who has Irish and Indigenous Australian heritage) became the first to achieve the feat without an African background.

In 2010, Frenchman Christophe Lemaitre became the first white European under ten seconds, (although Poland's Marian Woronin had unofficially surpassed the barrier with a time of 9.992 seconds in 1984). In 2017, Ramil Guliyev became the second white sprinter in history to break the 10-second barrier. In 2011, Zimbabwean Ngonidzashe Makusha became the 76th man to break the barrier, yet only the fourth man not of West African descent. No sprinter from South Asia or North Africa has officially achieved this feat. In 2015 Su Bingtian of China became the first ethnic East Asian athlete to officially break the 10 second barrier and British athlete Adam Gemili—who is of mixed Iranian and Moroccan descent—became the first athlete with either North African or Middle Eastern heritage to break the ten second barrier. Before the 2004 Athens Games, 494 of the top 500 times for the 100m were held by sprinters who were of West African descent.

Olympic 100 m medallists in the early phase of the Modern Olympic Games were principally white, Western sprinters of European descent, largely reflecting the euro-centric make up of the nations that took part and the ideological environment of racial segregation at the time. As the Olympic competition began to attract wider international participation, athletes with African heritage began to reach and eventually dominate the 100 m Olympic podium, particularly African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.

Eddie Tolan became the first non-white winner of the event in 1932 and this signified the start of a prolonged period of success by black male sprinters; since 1932 only five men's Olympic champions in the event have not had significant African heritage. The women's event was dominated by runners of European descent until Wilma Rudolph won the title in 1960. Soviet and German women returned to the podium in the period from 1972 to 1980, but since then African-American and Jamaican women have won the great majority of 100 m medals. Dominance in the men's event has been particularly pronounced from 1984 to 2016, during which time in a span of almost 40 years all the men's Olympic 100 m finalists have been of African heritage.

In the 2020 Olympics, Chinese sprinter Su Bingtian ran 9.83 in his semi-final heat and became the first athlete without African heritage to run sub-9.90 or sub-9.85 and the first athlete without African heritage to reach the final since 1980 within the span of 40 years, setting the fastest 60 metres split record en route. 9.83 is also the second fastest semi-final time and made him the fifth fastest man in the history of 100 metres at the Olympics behind Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake, Justin Gatlin and Marcel Jacobs.

Endurance running

Many Nilotic groups also excel in long and middle distance running. It has been suggested that this may be a function of slim body morphology and slender legs, a preponderance of slow twitch muscle fibers, a low heart rate gained from living at high-altitude, as well as a culture of running to school from a young age. A study by Pitsiladis et al. (2006) questioning 404 elite distance runners from Kenya found that 76% of the international-class respondents hailed from the Kalenjin ethnic group and that 79% spoke a Nilotic language. As of January 2021, of the 100 athletes from each sex holding the best marathon times in history, 76 women and 93 men were born in East Africa.

Joseph L. Graves argues that Kenyan athletes from the African Great Lakes region who have done well in long distance running all have come from high-altitude areas, whereas those from low-altitude areas do not perform particularly well. He also argues that Koreans and Ecuadorians from high-altitude areas compete well with Kenyans in long-distance races. According to Graves, this suggests that it is the fact of having trained in a high altitude, combined with possible local level physiological adaptations to high-altitude environments that is behind the success in long distance running, not race.

Graves also argues that while it is superficially true that most of the world record-holders in the 100-meter dash are of West African heritage, they also all have partial genetic heritage from Europe and Native America, they have also all trained outside of West Africa, and West African nations have not trained any top-level runners. Graves says these factors make it impossible to say to which degree the success is best attributed to genetic or to environmental factors.

Views in the United States

Various individuals, including scholars and sportswriters, have commented on the apparent over-representations and under-representations of different races in different sports. African Americans accounted for 75% of players in the National Basketball Association (NBA) near the end of 2008. According to the latest National Consortium for Academics and Sports equality report card, 65% of National Football League players were African Americans. However, in 2008, about 8.5% of Major League Baseball players were African American (who make up about 13% of the US population), and 29.1% were Hispanics of any race (compared with about 16% of the US population). In 2020, less than 5% of the National Hockey League (NHL) players are black or of mixed black heritage.

Chinese views

The idea among Chinese people that "genetic differences" cause Asian athletes to be "slower at sprinting" than their American, African or European rivals is "widely accepted". The People's Daily, a Chinese newspaper, wrote that Chinese are "suited" to sports that draw upon "agility and technique", such as table tennis, badminton, diving, and gymnastics. The newspaper said that Chinese people have "congenital shortcomings" and "genetic differences" that meant that they are disadvantaged at "purely athletic events" when competing against "black and white athletes". The success of hurdler Liu Xiang was explained by the hurdles event requiring technique which fit with the stereotype that Chinese are disciplined and intelligent. However, the recent successes of Chinese lightweight and middleweight weightlifters contradicts conventional belief, as weightlifting is one of the sports that demonstrates raw strength and explosive power best. Chinese and Korean professional weightlifters are especially overrepresented in olympic weightlifting, dominating international competitions such as weightlifting at the Summer Olympics and the International Weightlifting Federation.

Li Aidong, a researcher with the China Institute of Sports Science, said that sports coaches believed that Chinese athletes could have success in long jumping, high jumping and race walking. However, Li doubted that Chinese could compete in "pure sprinting", although there did not exist any "credible scientific studies" which supported the idea that "Asians" were disadvantaged in "sprinting". Professional sprinters Su Bingtian of China and Yoshihide Kiryū of Japan have contradicted this view of East Asians struggling to achieve quick footspeed, as both have broken the 10-second barrier in the 100 m and Su has ranked in the top five all-time fastest runners over 60 metres.