Swimming and Race

Few Swimmers Competing at Highest Level are Black?
 Posted by: "carruthersjam"
 Date: Sun Jun 25, 2006 6:40 am (PDT)
Members may enjoy reading the following extracts from FT Magazine:
By David Owen
Very few swimmers competing at the highest level are black? Is this
by choice, because of discrimination or restricted opportunities - or
do genetics play a part?
"If you swim in the sea a lot, you swim differently. The sea is salt.
It's denser. It encourages the development of a significantly
different technique."
But Goodhew said something else that gave me pause for thought: a few
years back there was a theory going around suggesting that the
paucity of top black swimmers "was to do with bone density and muscle
density. Some black people are very muscular and very dense in their
structure."
He made clear at once that this was not a line he bought into.
"I think the major issue is socio-economic: a swimming pool is
expensive; coaching is expensive." It seemed to me, though, that if
this was the full story, we could reasonably have expected the
occasional aquatic Linford Christie or Venus Williams to have emerged
over the years - and not just Eric the Eel. I decide to probe further.
Google turnad up an array of references to a book, Taboo: Why Black
Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We 're Afraid to Talk About It by
Jon Entine, scholar in residence at Miami University in Ohio.
"I don't think there's any question that there are physiological
factors [that help to explain why swimming is such a white sport],"
he said "It has been known for hundreds of years that blacks
are 'sinkers' because they don't have natural buoyancy. Black
skeletons are, on average, heavier than white. We also know that
blacks have on average less natural body fat for no other reason than
that they evolved near the equator."
However, he cautioned, "what complicates the matter is that, unlike
running or football, the barrier to entry for competing at elite
swimming is among the highest of any sport because, besides needing a
swimming pool, you need sophisticated coaching. Teasing out the
degree to which success is based on genetics, as opposed to social or
cultural issues, is impossible."
Relative bone density and body fat levels fell into the realm,
surely, of scientifically verifiable fact. And even if one couldn't
say precisely how much they contributed to the scarcity of top black
swimmers. It seemed common sense to acknowledge that they were likely
to affect buoyancy and, hence, swimming performance. But where were
the studies to back up Entine's assertions?
I unearthed references to several of them in an article "Measures of
body composition in blacks and whites: a comparative review" - co-
authored by Dale R. Wagner and Vivian H. Heyward. When I spoke to
him, Wagner, an exercise physiologist
at Utah State University, had no hesitation in supporting Entine's
remarks on bone density. "From all the research that has been done,
black people overwhelmingly tend to have greater bone density than
white people on average," he said - although he added: "I don't
necessarily know how that would translate into being a world-class
swimmer."
However there was "no conclusive evidence" that black people had less
body fat than whites. "A lot of studies have used a two component
model separating the body into fat and fat-free tissue," he said "The
problem is that you have to make the assumption that everybody's fat-
free body density is essentially the same." Since black people's
bones were on average denser than whites, such studies would tend to
underestimate their body fat levels……
One UK based lecturer in bioethics seemed to think it better to leave
such un alatable hypotheses unacknowledged. "Even if it's true, where
does that leave us?" he asked of the supposed difference in bone
density between blacks and whites. "It does lead towards separating
people out by race,"
It was then that I spoke to Simon Underdown, a lecturer in biological
anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. What he told me appeared
to undermine the theory I had developed. His argument, in essence,
was that the human skeleton is more dynamic than I had previously
supposed, changing in structure in line with the nature of out
lifestyles. If you led the life of a huntergatheer, for example, your
skeleton would become denser. And this would happen within your
lifetime; it would not require the passage of generations for the
changa to become apparent. Citing the now extinct indigenous
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, he said the relative harshness of
their living conditions was reflected in their "enormously dense
skeletons"
.
If Underdown was correct, then of course those studies of comparative
bone density that I had taken as proof that black swimmers laboured
under a physiological disadvantage reflected only the difference in
the respective lifestyles that the owners of the testes skeletons
led. His conclusion, therefore, came as no surprise: "I cannot think
of a skeletal reason why black people should be handicapped as elite
swimmers,"
So can the paucity of top black swimmers be blamed on economic and
sociological factors alone? Not necessarily; even if the bone density
theory is wrong, it doesn't mean that people weren't influenced by
it. Brian Pote-Hunt, a consultant on equal opportunity issues for the
UK's Amateur Swimming Association, certainly believes that
such "myths" once played a part in discouraging sports instructors
from promoting swimming as even a recreational activity for black
people. Physical education instructors at schools sometimes used to
take the view that since there were not many black swimmers, they
would push black students towards other sports such as athletics and
football," he says, "Everybody kowtowed to the stereotype that black
people were not good at swimming.."
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Any comments?
Jamie Carruthers
Wakefield, UK
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