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Reply #5: Not just black but... [View All]

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m1049 Donating Member (15 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Sep-13-11 08:51 PM
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5. Not just black but...
Two points:

*It's not just blacks but *West Africans*. All of the 100 meter winners have been of West African descent. You'll never find a Kenyan winning the 100 meter (or a Nigerian winning the marathon).

*If it was as simple as "blacks are faster than whites," there wouldn't have been a white guy (Christophe Lemaitre) in fourth place. It's all about bell curves (not the arguably racist Bell Curve book of the mid-1990s). If you plot the short-distance speed of all able-bodied European men on a graph, you'd see that most people are in the middle, with fewer and fewer people at the far ends. If you were to plot the short-distance speed of a similar number of able-bodied African men, the chart would look pretty much the same, but the curve would be very slightly to the right (the "faster" part of the X-axis). If you were to look at only the "fast" part of the chart, there wouldn't be a big difference between the number of Europeans and the number of Africans. This is how high-school football teams from mostly white communities are able to compete with teams from mostly black communities -- you may only need to be in the fastest 10% of your age-group population to compete at that level, and there will be a lot of white people in the top 10%. However, when we're talking about Olympic sprinters, or NFL cornerbacks, we're looking at the far-right 0.001% of the chart -- some of the very fastest people on Earth. At this extreme end of the bell curve, the little ethnic difference, which is barely noticeable at a wider scale, is exaggerated.

At least, that's my theory.
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