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Chariots of Silicon
ToddML writes "I just spotted this article at wired.com which talks about the current deficiencies of the U.S. long-distance running program, and more importantly, what is being done about it. An interesting story from both a gadget perspective, and for the source of the program -- private industry."
I don't understand why americans are so concerned about winning at every damn sports competition in the bloody planet.
Let it go! Go... go play with your silly oblongated ball.
jocks... an entire country of them.
MoitaCarrasco "Everyday I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive." - CARLIN
Generalisations are bad enough, but generalising inaccurately - I mean, Kenya isn't known for its sprinters. I'd suggest that being largely at high altitude and having a culture of long distance running helps distinctly. Kenyan kids want to be long distance runners in the same way that English kids want to be footballers.
What you are saying is drastically over simplified, and largely wrong!
On average there are differences in muscle composition between whites and blacks. Blacks tend to have more muscles of the fast twitch variety, which contract very quickly, and are well suited to things like running and jumping. Whites tend to have more slow twitch muscle fibers whisk are well suited to things like weightlifting, cycling and swimming. This only accounts for a small portion of the difference.
The main difference is cultural. In America the high profile sports are basketball, baseball, and American football, the fact that these sports are so popular causes many of the gifted athletes to want to do these sports; we don't have someone allocating America's great athletes to different sports, they allocate themselves. Now in many parts of Africa, there is only one sport (unless you are one of the social elite), that sport is running (think about it, if you were extremely poor, what sport could you afford to do). Running in Africa is a way of life, school children run to and from school further than many of us drive to work. Running is the way out of poverty there, poor children dream of being world class marathoners, the same way many poor Americans dream of NBA careers.
Wish me luck, my first Marathon is on October 13th...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
And here is the thing that you cannot do in football. Out tech them! There is no tech to football. You could give a team more endurance, but at the end of the day it relies on the individual, team and trainer.
Otherwise Brazil would not dominate the way it does. Brazil has no tech, just cut throat competition and the football lifestyle. I watched how Brazilian players are trained and it starts when they are seven or eight. It is in their "blood". The truly elite players in football, live, breath and eat football. And more often than not they come from poor areas, eg Zidane...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
There are some real aggregate genetic differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds. People of European descent never have sickle-cell anemia. This is because the genes that cause this disease are never beneficial in the European climate. Having one copy of the allele that causes sickle cell anemia provides better resistance to malaria, while two makes you deathly ill - so many people of African origin have inherited one allele from their ancestors because of the prevalence of malaria in their ancestral environment.
Many genetic disorders are far more common in a particular ethnic group, sickle cell anemia is just the most striking example. There's a genetic disorder that almost exclusively affects people who are ethnically Jewish and are born to two ethnically Jewish parents. The name escapes me.
On the whole, Kenyans appear to blessed with an extraordinarily high slow fast twitch/fast twitch muscle ratio. You cannot take someone with a lot of fast twitch muscle and turn them into a good marathoner; it just can't be done. Try this at home: jump as high as you can without bending your knees substantially. If you can't get more than six inches off the ground, your genes will never let you be a great sprinter, even if you started training at six and had all the training in the world. The colder you ancestors' climate, the more likely you are flunk, which makes the Kenya thing kind of weird.
But except in these corner cases, this stuff doesn't matter. A white person can be a great athlete, and a black person can be a brilliant scholar. Sadly, some people seize on these relatively trivial differences to make a case that are ancestry is far more important than it really is. Just because a particular group of people can or can't jump very high (on average) doesn't mean they should be treated any differently.
We can't feed, clothe or house a large segement of the US population. WHY IN THE HELL do we need to spend millions of dollars on "long distance running deficiencies." Why don't we instead subsidize cock enlargments for the entire nation, just so we can say ours are the biggest. Someone should tell Nike about the rest of the world.
--Should work--