If you stipulate the best in the world at something comes from a country that has 1/2000 of the world's popualtion and if there is is nothing about that country that would indicate far and away greater skill, than it is about 2000-1that the second best will also be from that country. Not that unusual. But it is four MILLION to one against the third best being from there as well.

Much more likely there is something that makes these results far from independent events. Perhaps good coaching. Except that, unlike most sports sprints can be impoved very little via trainig and coaching. (Some may remember Dr. Delano Meriwhether, a runner who illustrated this point.) Other explanations make a lot more sense.

A seemingly irrelevant bronze medal may be the key clue to something else. If so, remember you heard it here first.

something something black people

Oh god

DS just did a massive rail and had to come here to post that.

David Sklansky makes good points.

+1

michael johnson did some doco recently about why black american sprinters dominate. said slave ships had super high mortality rates (some at 50-80%), so only the strong survived and that jamaica was last stop on the slave ship circuit

also had more more crap about how the the best ones with each other or whatever like thoroughbreds

then why haven't they been winning this event in past decades?

apparently its their favorite sport, so they could easily be more like 1/200 or even 1/20 relative to the world in terms of how many people become prospective sprinters.

I wonder what Dean Heller's opinion is on this subject?

I think I see what you're getting at here. Are you suggesting that Jamaicans have a competitive advantage because they have an extra bone in their foot?

Itt DS implies proof of Bell Shaped Curve based on one rac..er match sample size.

^

DS, why so jelly?

Jamaicans just sprint better than the rest of the world right now.

Where's cwocwoc when we need him?

how happy do you think david was when he thought of this title

I think he's kicking himself for not being able to find a synonym for "suspicious" that starts with B

in on first page

After a brief circuit through the internet, I'm not finding one that has similar usage.

1. Jamaicans love track. Same reason a country with 4 million people has the best record in the world at rugby.

2. Call it a right shifted curve, a flatter curve, or historical effect, but a higher percentage of Jamaicans are freakishly fast. In 2010 (more now, I think), American Samoa had TWENTY EIGHT players in the NFL. That's an island of 60 thousand people. In other words, someone born on Samoa is 40 times more likely to be able to make it to the NFL than someone born on the mainland.

so the 2k:1 is obviously loltastically off, but stuff like this happens in the Olympics pretty frequently. Chinese sweep tons of events, Americans swept the 400 last time and then didn't even have a runner in the final this year.

Plus, if it didn't happen, you wouldn't be talking about it. If Spearmon runs a microsecond faster, you don't make this oh-so clever post.

No ****ing **** these aren't independent. Jamaicans are faster, love track and Blake got pushed by the fastest person in history every single day in training.

Please tell us more about your extensive knowledge of track and field. People shatter records every single olympics almost as a ritual. Every four years, dozens of people run faster and jump higher than anyone in history has run or jumped before them.

Why? Better diet, better training regimens, better understanding of the science of the sport, etc. etc. An excellent track coach is a part of that. I have no idea if these guys' coaches are better than the rest (honestly, I'd just assume that the Americans have the best coaches, but with all the sponsorships and such, it wouldn't be shocking if Bolt and Blake had some superstar coach)

Detective Holmes is on the case!

Yes, you are LITERALLY the first person to suggest that a country with notoriously lax drug testing rules for its athletes might have had its runners use steroids.

Imagine how famous you'll be if it's discovered years from now that Bolt was using steroids. THESE ALLEGATIONS WERE FIRST UNCOVERED BY MATHEMATICAL WIZARD DAVID SKLANSKY OF TWO PLUS TWO, WHO FAMOUSLY POSITED THAT IT WAS SOMEWHAT UNLIKELY THAT THREE DUDES FROM THE SAME SMALL COUNTRY WOULD GO 1-2-3 IN A RACE. EXPERTS EVERYWHERE WERE STUNNED, AND RUSHED TO EXAMINE HIS THEORIES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_seco...rier#Ethnicity

Nearly all the sprinters who have beaten the 10-second barrier are of West African descent. Namibian (formerly South-West Africa) Frankie Fredericks became the first man of non-West African heritage to achieve the feat in 1991 and in 2003 Australia's Patrick Johnson (who has Irish and Indigenous Australian heritage) became the first sub-10-second runner without an African background.[5][6][7][8] Frenchman Christophe Lemaitre became the first white European under ten seconds in 2010 (although Poland's Marian Woronin had unofficially surpassed the barrier with a time of 9.992 seconds in 1984).[9] In 2011, Zimbabwean Ngonidzashe Makusha became the 76th man to break the barrier, yet only the fourth man not of West African descent.[10] No sprinter of predominantly Asian or East African descent has officially achieved this feat.[11][12][13]

Colin Jackson (an athlete with mixed ethnic background and former world record holder in the 110 metre hurdles)[14] noted that both his parents were talented athletes and suggested that biological inheritance was the greatest influence, rather than any perceived racial factor. Furthermore, successful black role models in track events may reinforce the racial disparity.[12]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_a...superiority.22

"Black athletic superiority" is the belief by some people that black people possess certain traits that are acquired through genetic and/or environmental factors that allow them to excel over other races in athletic competition. Whites are more likely to hold these views; however, some blacks and other racial affiliations do as well.[11][12] The notion of “black brawn vs. white brains” is prevalent in sports commentary in the United States.[13]. A 1991 poll in the United States indicated that half of the respondents agreed with the belief that "blacks have more natural physical ability".[14]

Various theories regarding racial differences of black and white people and their possible effect on sports performance have been put forth since the later part of the nineteenth century by professionals in many different fields.[15] In the United States, attention to the subject faded over the first two decades of the twentieth century as black athletes were eliminated from white organized sport and segregated to compete among themselves on their own amateur and professional teams.[16] Interest in the subject was renewed after the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and Jesse Owens's record-breaking performances at the 1935 Big Ten Track Championships.[16]

In 1971, African-American sociologist Harry Edwards wrote: "The myth of the black male's racially determined, inherent physical and athletic superiority over the white male, rivals the myth of black sexual superiority in antiquity."[17]

Jon Entine has argued, most prominently in his book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why we’re Afraid to Talk about It, that body type and physiology are shaped by evolution and can be correlated, somewhat loosely, to skin color.[18] He claims that Africans from different parts of the continent have different body types and on average, excel in different sports. For example, Kenyans have won most of the cross-country races for the better part of thirty years, and East Africans who trace their ancestry to areas along the Rift Valley dominate endurance running. East Africans have a higher percentage of slow-twitch fibers in their muscles, a slightly longer body, longer legs, and larger lung capacities which help in endurance and long-distance running.[18] Conversely, Western African-descended runners dominate in anaerobic sports, including sprinting. People with ancestral roots in this region of Africa have bigger, more visible muscles along with a higher number of fast-twitch fibers in their muscles. They also have less natural body fat, narrower hips, and higher levels of testosterone.[18] Anthropologist Ian Kerr criticized Entine's hypothesis, stating that biological variation cannot be used to uphold claims of racial superiority in athletics.[19]

Joseph L. Graves argues that Kenyans and East Africans who have done well in long distance running all have come from high-altitude areas, whereas East Africans 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. 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. Similarly, Graves argues that while it is superficially true that most of the world recordholders in 100-metre 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.[20]

John Milton Hoberman, a historian and Germanic studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has acknowledged that disparities in certain athletic performances exist. He has asserted that there is no evidence to confirm the existence of "black athletic superiority".[21]


This whole article is quite interesting; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_sports

OP - you seem to have applied the maths in a way that suggests every single person in the world has an equal chance of becoming a world class sprinter. You haven't adjusted for genetic make-up, access to facilities, cultural differences and other such things. Pretty disappointing really.

Also, I'd love to know what your "other explanations" are. Are you suggesting that the other sprinters aren't on drugs?

what M johnson said on the beeb about studies surival of the fittest from slaverly sounds plausable.
sprinting is the no1 sport in Jamaica they all want to emulate their local heros like Bolt etc and its prolly only the last 20 years they had the finance fr top coaching and facilities.

Just now they are on top but it will be between black guys in US and Caribean and the odd other guy for the foreseeable future

If there saying that just as many white people have this muscle type gene thats optimal for running fast why have 81 black guys broken 10 seconds versus 1 white guy. Surely these genes have gotta be more of a factor then the analysts are making out.

Although probably the fact that so few whites compared to blacks will seriously try and be sprinters nowadays.

If we add the conditions "West African descent", "not from some dirt poor African country" and "not in the NFL" + the Jamaican love for the sport, it becomes much less unusual. Still, obviously he's doping. They all are.