Sportsblogging!
Is Gregg Easterbrook being super-deadpan here, or clueless?
The NFL must be wary of tolerating this sort of thing on the part of coaches. If any coach can say, “I don’t like it here anymore and therefore don’t have to honor the promise I made by signing a contract,” how will players be prevented from saying the same?
What? Players might someday decide they’re not happy and refuse to honor their contracts?
Meanwhile Matt Yglesias refers, in an item about Malcolm Gladwell, to the famous conundrum of Kenyan distance running: Nature or Nurture?
I’ve studied enough about running and endurance sports the last couple of years to become convinced that there’s no reason to believe Kenyans must have a genetic advantage at distance running.
* Matt quotes Gladwell talking about how Kenyan distance runners in a study “ppeared to have more blood-carrying capillaries and more mitochondria (the body’s cellular power plant) in the fibres of their quadriceps” than a group of Swedish distance runners to whom they were compared. Problem: One of the things endurance training does is increase capillary and mitochondria density in the muscles trained. Until you’ve established that you controlled for mileage/time run and altitude, among other things, capillary and mitochondria counts don’t begin to establish anything about genetics.
* The degree to which “all Kalenjin kids ran back and forth to school every day” is controversial, but the Kenyan highlands have low auto density and a great year-round climate for outdoor activity - nurture/culture kicks in early enough that we can’t disentangle genetics from upbringing by looking at the performance of elite adult runners.
* Running is big business in Kenya! Elite Kenyan runners are stars. They’re the Kobe Bryants of Kenya. Producing them is a very sophisticated endeavor in which everyone, coaches and athletes, are highly motivated to succeed. You get network effects too.
“When they hear that I am a marathon runner, they want to know what is a marathon,” says Ann Mburu, a teacher at the Kip Keino School.
“Then they are told it’s a very long distance where you run.”
“Within three seconds you can buy a very beautiful car and they say ‘Wow! I wish I will run and do the same.’”
So, mark this one as Far From Proven.
Comment by Lis Riba —
January 31, 2006 @ 11:46 pm
Didn’t read the article, but has anyone studied ”average” Kenyans with comparably average Swedes (those who do a similar amount of running as you describe of Kenyan kids) to see what that shows?
Comparing only the top eschelon athletes seems rather… lopsided in its approach, if they want to look for something more innate.
Comment by Madeline F —
February 1, 2006 @ 2:03 am
Any two black people are likely to be more different from each other genetically than any two white people. The general idea is that some small number of people moved into Europe and got paler over time; meanwhile the enormous mass of the rest stayed in Africa.
So I’d rather doubt the ”nature” suggestion. I mean, the CIA World Factbook names 7 tribes in Kenya… Are all the great runners from just one of those tribes?
Comment by diddy —
February 1, 2006 @ 9:51 am
One of Easterbrook’s TMQ hobby horses is the way in which NFL teams and players announce long-term contracts with high aggregate dollar figures, knowing full well that the contract is structured so as to force renegotiation within 2-3 years. (Example below) It is no surprise that he is also going after coaches for unilaterally not honoring contracts, given how he comes down on players who don’t honor their contracts. He’s a bit of a Ring Lardner/Roger Angell purist when it comes to football.
Example: Team A signs player X to a contract with a signing bonus of $18 million, first 2 years’ salary of $2 million, a year 3 roster bonus of $12 million, and years 3-6 salary of $8.5 million. The team and the player will announce this as a 6 year, $54 million contract. However, if the team honors this contract as written, it will have to allocate $14.5 million towards its salary cap in years 3-6 ($3m from the signing bonus + $3m from the roster bonus + $8.5m salary). If the team CUTS the player before the roster bonus is due, then the remainder of the signing bonus amortization ($18 / 6 * 4 = $12) is accelerated to the year of the cut. The team is better off cutting the player in year 3 of a 6-year contract. But the team will probably not even cut the player, because it can renegotiate the deal to lessen the cap hit. The player has no leverage if the team decides to cut him, and renegotiation often involves implied threats of taking a massive hit to one’s salary or to be traded to a non-contender. Therefore it is Easterbrook’s contention that long-term NFL player contracts are disingenuous at best and fraudulent at worst.
Comment by Leonard —
February 1, 2006 @ 1:58 pm
Hate to lay the crimethink on you, but let’s be serious.
There are hundreds of millions of people who live their lives at high altitude. Mexico City, many cities in America, east Asia, and the Andes. Yet Mexicans are not dominating long distance running.
As for a cultural explanation, well, there’s a lot of people living in the West who’d do just about anything to succeed at sports. Kids run here, too. As for living outdoors, half the world grows up in places where you’re outdoors a lot, including lots of other places in Africa besides Kenya. I know of no correlation there with high-level performance.
Rather it is the reverse. The people who win medals at high-level events are people who have trained since an early age. The US wins medals disproportionately in large part because we have the wealth to pick out our genetically most gifted athletes, early, and train them.
The Kenyan dominance in distance running is surprising exactly because it is a poor nation, and presumably cannot harness most of its most extreme genetic running talent to train for the Olympics. Imagine if they could!
Regarding the comparison to Swedes, here’s the piece that was published in Science:
www.jonentine.com/reviews/AAAS_peeringUnderTheHood.htm
(You can also get it on Science’s site, but it’s a pay site.)
Quoting it:
It’s genetic. Uh oh, people might be unequal!
Comment by Dr. Kenneth Noisewater —
February 1, 2006 @ 3:46 pm
Easterbrook is a pedantic douchebag. Despite the imprecise language used when ”announcing” contracts, it’s not like these players aren’t aware of the exact ramifications of what it is they’re signing. They hire people to negotiate these things and they know EXACTLY what they’re getting into. The real measure of worth in the NFL is the proportion of salary to signing bonus and smart teams are careful in who they give hefty signing bonuses to.
Comment by Ray —
February 1, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
If you think that Kenyans are better runners because their genetics means that they have less flesh oin the lower legs and more of enzyme X than Danes, surely the better way to test this is to measure the calves of Danish and Kenyan _babies_, and test _their_ enzyme levels. Otherwise how do you know that the legs aren’t thinner because of the effects of high-altitude training, and this also produces more enzyme X?
Comment by Steve —
February 2, 2006 @ 1:45 pm
Easterbrook is a pedantic douchebag.
And one whose reporting has turned into steaming crap in the past few years. He used to do great defense budget analysts and NASA muckracking; now we get musing about what if the twelve dimensions actually included a God dimension, man, like in that one episode of Star Trek that the atheists don’t want to talk about, can you pass the chips, dude? (And his football schtick has gotten old, too, although I’m a baseball guy, so I might not get a vote. These struck me as pretty accurate, though they weren’t as good as PAY RICKEY.)
Comment by david —
February 2, 2006 @ 6:54 pm
The desire to make it nature is really weird to me. They are Kenyans — it’s a country, not a race. Focus, people. Why no talk about the genetic advantage of the Moroccans along these lines too? Spoils that really black people must be more physically gifted so that’s why it’s okay to resent them feeling, I suppose.
Comment by colin roald —
February 3, 2006 @ 1:28 pm
The desire to make it nature is really weird to me. They are Kenyans — it’s a country, not a race.
If the unattributed bit Leonard quoted, ”men from a single tribe earn three-fourths of Kenya’s medals,” is correct, then it is a race. It’s simply a fact that there are physical differences between races: for example, Nordics generally produce less melanin than other races. Dinka tend to be taller than Pygmies. Chinese are much more likely to have epicanthic folds. Physical differences between races are facts, and it is hardly a giant leap from there to the idea that maybe such differences have an impact on performance in various physical activities.
The people worth listening to aren’t studying Kenyans because they want to find a reason to resent them. They’re studying them because it’s a genuine open question, what the components of Kenyan distance-running dominance are.