Fastest race not always the winner

This article will come to an end but not to a conclusion. Too much of a minefield to be tiptoed through here. The issue of the dominance of the black athlete will be the unspoken sub-theme of the coming Olympics. For an event which spends so much time celebrating its own diversity, universality and rainbow colouring, the Olympic movement spends curiously little time trying to understand why certain people win certain events.

Should it? Even as a matter of academic interest?

The world is still racially troubled and the black profile is nowhere nearly as pronounced as in the field of sport. Ninety-five per cent of the track medals in the next fortnight will go to black athletes, and in the United States the professional basketball and American Football leagues, the NBA and the NFL, are 80 and 70 per cent black respectively.

No white man won a golf major this year. In tennis, the Wimbledon and US Open women's champion is black. Name three white boxers you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley? Black sporting success is the only field of endeavour where black people are positively misrepresented as a proportion of the population. Just start in sports administration if you want proof of how all white the rest of the world is.

How has it come to pass? Whites suffer the lazy stereotypes applied to blacks in all other walks of life. Can't run. Can't jump. Can only make some teams as a token sop to redneck bigots. For the black athlete the sharp end of the same stick is the assumption that he is a natural athlete, as unavoidably athletic as his forefather was rhythmical to a previous generation of whites.

Is there a reason for the gulf in sporting achievement and is it sociological or physiological? There are plausible explanations down both paths. Whites, by virtue of their economic supremacy, have a greater plurality of diversion available to them. Just more things to do. In the end, too, everyone sports sport mean that one is alarmed by black athletes dominating sport? Does discussion of a genetic difference imply that society needs a way to rationalise the black presence by dismissing it as somehow unfair, or divinely gifted? Does examining the black presence in sport suggest that you have a problem?

The often crudely-addressed question as to why blacks have not done well in swimming also pushes us into the dangerous territory of the nature versus nurture component of the argument. Any discussion of race in sport touches on genetics, pitting those scientists who theorise that blacks have heavier bones and lower body fat against those sociologists who point to ghettos and ask pointedly if you can see many swimming pools.

The lonely isolated success of Anthony Nesty, the bronze medallist in Barcelona in the 100m butterfly, must be measured against the failure of countless urban US projects to produce successful black swimmers. Pretty soon the arguments of one side are used to denigrate the achievements of black athletes.

The genetics argument comes freighted with too many permutations and undercurrents to be purely scientific. It is tempting to steer clear of it altogether or to investigate why Swedes are good at skiing. The black intellectual response to musings on such matters is succinct. If you are arguing that whites are further evolved and that blacks, because of their achievements in sport, are closer to the being animals, you are making veiled implications of mental inferiority while diminishing our other achievements. What is your next point?

Appearances play a part. A group of white students were lined up and asked to jump and tip a basketball hoop. Then they were asked to repeat the same exercise with black students present. Significantly fewer could. A similar thing happened with running. They felt mentally inhibited.

There is a danger of being lazy in one's thinking on the issue. All sports are no more the same than all black people are the same. The question is no more a black and white issue than it is a global issue. Why are Asians, the world's biggest population grouping, so poorly represented at the top levels of sport?

The black American writer Gerard Early points out, for instance, that black domination in American Football and basketball is explained simply by the presence of the one institution that runs through all black lives. School. With academic horizons impaired for reasons of economics, class, and, in many cases, tradition, black kids channel themselves and their energy into sport.

Golf and tennis on the other hand are family-oriented sports. White-dominated at an organisational level, the breakthroughs by Arthur Ashe, the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods all have one thing in common: unusually supportive and aware parents.

The black dominance of distance running has different cultural explanations in Kenya than it does in Ethiopia or Morocco. Just as we Irish are generally not a tall people, some groups in Kenya are genetically disposed to having less lactic acid build-up and better muscle enzymes than others, while Ethiopians attribute their success to living at altitude and to a maize-based diet.

The common thread is hard work and the happenstance of existing in a time and place which grants the chance to seize an opportunity. The Williams sisters work hard at promoting public-court tennis in the inner cities. Haile Gebrselassie brings the best kids in Ethiopia to train with him at higher altitudes. Boxing has the longest list of unbroken black involvement and has always recruited from the tough parts of town.

John Hoberman, a Texan academic who has written persuasively and brilliantly on the issue of drugs, has made a controversial contribution to the debate on race in athletics entitled Darwin's Athletes: How sport has Damaged Black America. He dismisses what he sees as the genetics wheeze and says that sport has contributed to the ghettoisation of black society by restricting black role models and channeling black energy so well. It's the national sedative, so don't knock it.

There is the belief which was often expressed by Jackie Robinson that athletics was the shortest path to individual equality; athletics, in the last few decades at least, being the purest meritocracy. There is the theory also that hunger drives like little else. Derartu Tulu was a shepherd in Ethiopia who only discovered that she could run quickly when she was 16-years-old.

What is perhaps more striking today than the dominance of black athletes is the neutered apolitical nature of those athletes. Since the famous clenched-fist salute of Carlos and Smith in Mexico 1968, has nobody been angry?

There must be disappointment about the influence of the success, often hugely rewarded in monetary terms, on broader society - anger at the fact that for an Ethiopian child running for rich white sponsors is still one of the few ways to get rich. For a kid in the Bronx shooting hoops is what buys a degree.

White society remains, as ever, tolerant of the notion of blacks as entertainers. Jesse Jackson rails against the fact that silicon valley devotes so little money into tapping into the abilities of black youngsters compared to basketball colleges and football teams.

Maybe that's the conclusion. We have been having the wrong discussion.