The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (20 page)

Pitsiladis—the gene hunter who collects DNA from world-class sprinters—argues that such a theory could not hold true because of the tremendously diverse genetic background of African Americans and Jamaicans that shows they aren’t some genetically monolithic block.
But they do have the traits in question—significant prevalence of sickle-cell trait and low average hemoglobin—in common, so the issue of general genetic diversity is irrelevant. Africans are, on average, much more genetically diverse than Europeans. But with respect to certain genes, like the ACTN3 sprint gene variant, they can be more homogenous. So genetic diversity in itself does not imply that an ethnic group cannot share a common trait, as many certainly do. As Yale geneticist Kenneth Kidd said of African Pygmy groups: they are among the most genetically diverse people in the world, and yet they share the trait of diminutive stature that will prevent them from dominating the NBA.

Because I could not follow up with Cooper himself, I decided to follow up on his work to see if any evidence had emerged that might affirm or dismantle his theory since it was published. First stop: do athletes with sickle-cell trait perform any differently in explosive sports?

French physiologist Daniel Le Gallais, former medical director of the National Center for Sports Medicine in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, posed that question long before Cooper. About 12 percent of Ivorian citizens are sickle-cell carriers, and in the early 1980s Le Gallais noticed that the top three female Ivorian high jumpers (one of whom won the African championship) became abnormally exhausted during workouts. Le Gallais tested the athletes and found—“surprisingly,” he wrote in an e-mail—“these three athletes were sickle cell trait carriers, despite originating from different ethnic groups in the country.”

Le Gallais later coauthored studies that screened for sickle-cell trait in elite sprinters and jumpers. In 1998, he reported that nearly 30 percent of 122 Ivorian national champions in explosive jumping and throwing events were sickle-cell trait carriers, and that they collectively accounted for thirty-seven national records. The top male and female in the group were both sickle-cell carriers. In a 2005 study of sprinters from the French West Indies who made the French national team, about 19 percent of the athletes tested were sickle-cell carriers, and they accounted for an outsized proportion of titles and records held by the team.

“What is my standpoint currently?” Le Gallais wrote me. “Studies have clearly shown that athletes with [sickle-cell trait] were less numerous than non-SCT athletes in long endurance races. In contrast, athletes with SCT are more numerous in jumps and throws. . . . The oxygen transport system impairment explains the poor performances in long distance races. On the contrary, we don’t know the cause of their advantage in jumps and throws.”

As for whether low hemoglobin in itself might prompt a switch to more fast-twitch fibers, there is evidence that it can in rodents. A UCLA study of mice that were put on iron-deficient diets showed a drop in hemoglobin and displayed a shift of type IIa fast-twitch muscle fibers to type IIb “super fast twitch” muscle fibers in their lower legs. In another study in Spain, rats were made to have low hemoglobin through periodic blood draws, and a shift to a higher proportion of fast-twitch fibers occurred in their lower legs. But no one has conducted such a study in humans, and mice have a greater ability to swap muscle fiber types than humans do. Plus, that is a developmental effect within the lifetime of a mouse, not an evolutionary one caused over generations by changing genes.

And that is all the science there is. A single mouse study and a single rat study demonstrating in rodents that low hemoglobin can induce a switch to more explosive muscle fibers. No scientist has attempted to test Cooper and Morrison’s idea in humans, so there are simply no human studies at all.

•

Several scientists I spoke with about the theory insisted that they would have no interest in investigating it because of the inevitably thorny issue of race involved. One of them told me that he actually has data on ethnic differences with respect to a particular physiological trait, but that he would never publish the data because of the potential controversy. Another told me he would worry about following Cooper and Morrison’s line of inquiry because any suggestion of a
physical advantage among a group of people could be equated to a corresponding lack of intellect, as if athleticism and intelligence were on some kind of biological teeter-totter. With that stigma in mind, perhaps the most important writing Cooper did in
Black Superman
was his methodical evisceration of any supposed inverse link between physical and mental prowess. “The concept that physical superiority could somehow be a symptom of intellectual inferiority only developed when physical superiority became associated with African Americans,” Cooper wrote. “That association did not begin until about 1936.” The idea that athleticism was suddenly inversely proportional to intellect was never a cause of bigotry, but rather a result of it. And Cooper implied that more serious scientific inquiry into difficult issues, not less, is the appropriate path.

Cooper and Morrison’s hypothesis, that reduced oxygen-carrying capacity induced a shift to more explosive muscle properties, was never intended as simply a “black” phenomenon. Even if the hypothesis is correct, there is still tremendous physiological variation within any ethnic group, and Cooper and Morrison were theorizing about a set of black athletes with very specific geographic ancestry.

On the side of Africa opposite the ancestry of sprinters, and by the serendipity of geography, a different faction of the world’s greatest athletes were spared potentially endurance-harming genetic adaptations. They live at altitudes where the mosquitoes are scarce, and so are malaria and the sickle-cell gene.

Those black athletes came to dominate in an entirely different realm.

Can Every Kalenjin Run?

E
very summer, John Manners returns to Kenya, and every July—after the 1,500-meter time trial—there are tears. Most of them stream down the cheeks of the kids who just ran. But, says Manners, “some of the tears are mine. It’s a pretty emotional business.”

It’s hard to imagine Manners sad. His eyes glitter under a newsboy cap. Together with his pointed white goatee and his buoyant walking stride, the eyes lend a puckish delight to his conversations.

The 1,500-meter race that makes Manners cry is the capstone of a unique college application process for sixty or so impoverished Kenyan kids each year, and Manners and his KenSAP program have to leave all but a dozen of them behind.

Begun in 2004, KenSAP—the Kenya Scholar-Athlete Project—is the brainchild of Manners, a New Jersey–based writer, and Dr. Mike Boit, a bronze medalist for Kenya in the 800-meters at the 1972 Olympics and now a professor of exercise and sports science at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. The idea is to get top Kenyan students from the western Rift Valley Province into premier colleges in the United States.

Each year, Manners peruses the list in the newspaper of the highest scorers on the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exam—a high school exit exam that accounts for 100 percent of the
college admissions process in Kenya—for names of students with the best marks in the western Rift Valley. He also goes on local Kass FM radio and solicits applications from students who scored an “A plain,” the highest possible mark. Still, recruitment has challenges. “Because the program’s free,” Manners says, “some of the [applicants’] parents assume it’s a scam.”

Manners invites selected students who complete an application to the High Altitude Training Center, in the Rift Valley town of Iten. There they are interviewed, and then made to run a 1,500-meter race at an altitude around 7,500 feet. All of the students have succeeded in high school despite coming from destitute rural families. The majority are boys—the patriarchal nature of Kenyan culture affords girls less opportunity to prepare for the KCSE exam—and some come from tiny subsistence farms and attend school in classrooms with mud or stone floors. All have both the academic skill and the college-essay fodder to knock the argyle socks off East Coast admissions officers. After the interview and 1,500, Manners confers with Boit and a group of American instructors and local Kenyan elders, and within hours reads aloud the names of the kids who are accepted. That’s where the tears come in, from those who missed the cut.

The dozen kids KenSAP accepts undertake two months of intensive SAT prep and college application work. Thus far, the KenSAP plan has worked brilliantly. Between 2004 and 2011, seventy-one of the seventy-five students accepted by KenSAP gained entrance to U.S. colleges. Every Ivy League university has had a KenSAP kid. Harvard leads the league with ten, followed by Yale at seven, and Penn with five. Others have gone to prestigious liberal arts colleges, on the order of Amherst, Wesleyan, and Williams. “I love NESCAC,” says Manners, referring to the New England Small College Athletic Conference. “We’re very strong in NESCAC.”

The 1,500-meter time trial is, obviously, an unprecedented piece of a college application process. Kenyan kids who score an A plain usually come out of government-supported boarding schools, and
most have no running experience at all. In a letter sent to KenSAP applicants months before the interviews, Manners explains that there will be a running test, and that they should dress accordingly. And yet, without fail, some boys will show up in long pants, and a few girls in calf-length skirts and pumps.

Manners’s hope with the 1,500 is to find undiscovered athletic prodigies with the running chops that will persuade an American coach to put a word in with the admissions committee. “We’re looking for everything we can to strengthen an application,” Manners says. If a kid with no running background shows promise, Manners will contact college coaches to see if any might be interested.

If forcing the academic all-stars of a geographic sliver of East Africa to run a 1,500-meter time trial on a dirt track at 7,500 feet seems a little strange, well, it is. Imagine a college admissions counselor taking the American kids who scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT and lining them up for a time trial.

But then, this is no random geographic sliver.

•

In 1957, when Manners was twelve, he moved with his father from Newton, Massachusetts, to Africa. Robert Manners, an anthropology professor and founder of the anthropology department at Brandeis University, had intended to study the Chaga people of Tanzania. But another anthropologist beat him to it, so Manners ventured west to the Rift Valley of Kenya to study the Kipsigis, a traditionally pastoral people who are a subgroup of a larger tribe, the Kalenjin. The Kipsigis held fiercely to their traditional culture in the face of British colonization, which lasted until 1963.

Robert Manners found a house in Sotik, in western Kenya, surrounded by tea and cattle farms, and at an altitude of six thousand feet. There was one mud street, enclosed by verandas over raised sidewalks, like a town from the Old West. In short order, John Manners became like any other Kipsigis child, speaking Swahili and running two to three
miles to school with his friends so they could avoid being caned for showing up late. He also attended his first track meet, as a spectator.

As was the case in Jamaica, British colonialism imported the sport of track and field. The Kenya Amateur Athletics Association was founded in 1951, and by the time the Manners family arrived, regional track meets—on dirt or grass tracks—were common. At one of the first meets Manners saw, in seventh grade, he was delighted by the stellar performances of Kipsigis runners—
his people
.

In the fall of 1958, Manners returned to Massachusetts for eighth grade, but his fascination with track and field, and with Kenya, remained. In the 1964 Olympics, just the third ever in which Kenya competed, a Kipsigis runner named Wilson Kiprugut won bronze in the 800-meters. Four years later, in the altitude of Mexico City, Kenya was the dominant distance running power, winning seven medals in middle- and long-distance events. The very same month of those Olympics, Manners, having just graduated from Harvard, was in upstate New York training for the Peace Corps. “I saw the names of the Kenyan runners who were winning those medals,” Manners says, “and I saw that almost all of them were Kalenjin.”

Manners was exhilarated by the success of Kenyan runners, as it defied stereotypes held by British colonialists. “The conventional wisdom was that blacks could sprint, but that anything that required tactical sophistication, or discipline, or training,” he says, “this was the white man’s province.”

With the Peace Corps, Manners returned for another three years to the western Rift Valley in Kenya, where locals still remembered him and his father. In the early 1970s, a few Kenyan middle- and long-distance runners began to show up on American college campuses, and Manners started writing about Kenyan running. In 1972, he coauthored an article for
Track & Field News
: “Basically, the piece said that coaches in America are wondering whether there are more great runners back there in Kenya,” Manners says. “And our answer was: Thousands!” Particularly among the Kalenjin.

The 4.9 million Kalenjin people represent about 12 percent of Kenya’s population, but more than three quarters of the country’s top runners. In 1975, in a footnote to a chapter he contributed to
The African Running Revolution
, a book compiled by
Runner’s World
magazine, Manners raised an evolutionary theory of Kenyan—and specifically Kalenjin—running success that remains controversial today.

Manners wrote that a part of traditional life for Kalenjin warriors was the practice of cattle raiding. Essentially, it entailed stealthily running and walking into the land of neighboring tribes, rounding up cattle, and escorting them back to Kalenjin land as quickly as possible. Cattle raiding was not considered theft so long as the raiders weren’t filching the cattle from the same subtribe within the Kalenjin. “The raids were conducted largely at night,” Manners wrote, “and sometimes ranged over distances as great as 100 miles! Most raiding parties were group ventures but each
muren
[or warrior] was expected to at least do his share.”

A
muren
who brought back a large number of cattle from a raid was hailed as a courageous and athletic warrior and could use his cattle and prestige to acquire wives. In a footnote, Manners wrote that, insofar as successful cattle raiders had to be strong runners to hustle captive herds to safety, and the best cattle raiders accumulated more wives and children, then cattle raiding could serve as a mechanism of reproductive advantage that favored men with superior distance running genes. In the next breath of the very same chapter, though, Manners seems to doubt the suggestion as soon as he raises it. “The idea just occurred to me, so I just put it in,” he says now.

But over the years, as he has continued to study Kalenjin running, and to interview Kalenjin runners and elders, he has come to regard the idea as much less fanciful—in part because other “hot spots” of endurance running talent have materialized in East Africa, and the athletes responsible are also from traditionally pastoralist cultures that once practiced cattle raiding.

In Ethiopia, the world’s second distance running superpower, the
Oromo people make up about one third of the country’s population but the vast majority of its international runners. The Sebei people of Uganda—who live just across Mount Elgon from Kenya—account for essentially all of that nation’s top distance runners and include Stephen Kiprotich, who won the 2012 London Olympics marathon. The Ugandan Sebei are actually a subgroup of Kenya’s Kalenjin.

•

In a converted attic storage room, under the slope of the roof on the third floor of his house in Montclair, New Jersey, Manners has his office. It’s the kind of eruption of paper and maps that one might find as the parent of a brilliant twelve-year-old who has been quietly making plans to visit Mars. Files, books in stacks, books on shelves, maps. Giant maps, affixed to the slanted ceiling, dotted with meaningfully placed tacks.

The maps show the specific districts of western Kenya from which runners flow forth en masse. Beside the maps sit every
Association of Track and Field Statisticians Annual
published since 1955. The ATFS is a volunteer group of track stats junkies, and many of the
Annual
s are long out of print. “I had to buy some of them from collectors,” Manners says. He also has nearly every
African Athletics
annual ever published, as well as a complete collection of
Track & Field News
dating back to 1971.

Manners has catalogued the specific geographical distribution and tribal membership of Kenyan runners—often by asking the runners in person—to a greater extent than any other human being alive. Along the way, he has collected staggering anecdotes of gifted Kalenjin runners.

Like the one about Amos Korir, who was supposed to compete in pole vault at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania when he arrived there in 1977. But upon seeing how much better the other vaulters were he fibbed to the coach, claiming to be a runner. Korir was thrust into the 3,000-meter steeplechase—a race just
shy of two miles that includes hurdles—and in his third-ever attempt at the event won the national junior college championship. Four years later, Korir was the third-ranked steeplechase runner in the world.

Or the one about Julius Randich, who arrived at Lubbock Christian University in Texas a heavy smoker with no competitive running background. By the end of his first year, 1991–92, Randich was the national small-colleges (NAIA) champion in the 10K. The following year, Randich set NAIA records in the 5K and 10K and was named the outstanding athlete in any sport in the NAIA. Kalenjin runners became all the rage among NAIA coaches, and several others would win the 10K national championships after Randich, including his younger brother Aron Rono, who won it four straight times.

And then there’s the one about Paul Rotich, perhaps the most famous of Manners’s anecdote collection. Rotich, the son of a prosperous Kalenjin farmer, arrived at South Plains Junior College in Texas in 1988, having lived a “comfortably sedentary” life, as Manners describes it. Rotich, a stout 5'8" and 190 pounds, quickly burned through most of the $10,000 his father had given him for two years of living expenses and tuition. “But rather than return home in disgrace,” Manners wrote, “Paul . . . decided to train in hopes of earning a track scholarship.” Rotich trained at night to avoid the embarrassment of being seen. That concern would be short-lived, as he made the national junior college cross-country championships in his first season. He went on to become a ten-time All-American in cross-country and indoor and outdoor track. As Manners reported, when Rotich returned to Kenya and detailed his running exploits to a cousin, the cousin replied: “So, it is true. If you can run, any Kalenjin can run.”

Manners does not think that
any
Kalenjin can be a great distance runner, but he does believe that the proportion of people who will become extremely fast middle- and long-distance runners extremely quickly upon training is significantly higher among the Kalenjin than it is among other tribes in Kenya, or among other peoples throughout the world.

Consider this: seventeen American men in history have run a marathon faster than 2:10 (or a 4:58 per mile pace); thirty-two Kalenjin men did it just in October 2011.
*
The statistics that describe Kalenjin distance running dominance are endless, and often so outlandish as to be laughable. For example: five American high-schoolers have run under four minutes in the mile in history; St. Patrick’s High School, in the Kalenjin training town of Iten, once had four sub–four milers in school at the same time. (Conversely, the Kenyan record in the 100-meters, 10.26 seconds, wouldn’t even have made the bare minimum standard to participate in the London Olympics.) Wilson Kipketer, a former St. Patrick’s student who became a Danish citizen and held the 800-meter world record from 1997 to 2010, does not hold his own high school’s record. (That distinction belongs to Japhet Kimutai, who ran 1:43.64.)