With Christie, his sheer confidence often seemed to take him past opponents who were, on paper, faster. Self-belief works to expand the sense of the possible. You can see its effects take shape in the clusters of top athletes that seem to form at certain times and places. Is it not possible that as well as inspiring each other to greater feats, Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram also gained a psychological edge over their opponents, who may have not been able to block out the popular wisdom that Britain, in the s, was the home of middle distance running?
The first Briton to beat Linford Christie in the metres, to end his decade-long reign, was Ian Mackie, a white Scot. How does he feel competing in an event in which he is expected to lose because his skin colour testifies to his limitations?
As far as I'm concerned, whoever trains the hardest gets to the line first. The subject, he says, never comes up. Of course, that doesn't mean that black athletes don't think about it, if only in an unconscious sense.
Either way, Mackie is unfazed. I may be a freak, I don't know. You can never tell what's going to happen in the future. Hopefully there will be a white athlete that breaks the world record and, hopefully, I'll be that athlete.
It was assumed by many managers, coaches and, infamously, chairmen that black players lacked stamina, disappeared in the winter and, when it came down to getting stuck in, didn't 'fancy it'. The situation has improved dramatically, so that England have been represented by a black captain Paul Ince and black players have established themselves at every top club. At least at the player level, the game, unlike, say, rugby union, now looks genuinely democratic and egalitarian.
Although no expert on what he would call soccer, Entine has studied the figures and discerns a disproportionate presence of black players in the Premiership - he states that blacks, who make up one fiftieth of the country's population, account for one fifth of top footballers. From this, he deduces that genes play a vital role.
But if it's hard enough proving or disproving the argument in the clear-cut forum of athletics, then it's near impossible to do so with the applied athletics and mixed skills of football. First, the apparent over-representation of black players is easily explained by other factors. Football has always been a working class game and one that stems from the inner city. The black population in this country is largely working class and tends to be concentrated in the inner city.
Added to that, the racism elsewhere in society that may discourage black participation could help direct young blacks towards the relatively meritocratic environment of football.
That said, Entine suggests that, just as blacks have come to monopolise the 'explosive speed' positions in American football - running back and wide receiver, for example - so increasingly will the offensive positions in football proper - strikers and wingers - come to be filled by black players.
Chris Kamara, the former player, manager and now Sky football analyst disagrees. It is conceivable that genes that evolved in population groups in Africa tens of thousands of years ago have been spread, unevenly, along ethnic lines.
Population movements are now much greater and quicker, so much so that the very concept of delineated race is swiftly becoming an anachronism Tiger Woods, for example, is a mixture of African-American, American Indian, Chinese, Thai and Caucasian. Just 15 or 20 years ago Finns were seen as the great distance runners.
When Roger Bannister crashed through the four minute mile, he was in a state of exhaustion, and the world in a state of shock. Forty five years later, Hicham El Guerrouj finished the same distance more than 16 seconds faster, or over metres ahead, and scarcely out of breath. However rigid and formed things seem to be now, it's as well to remember that they also change.
To reach definitive conclusions, still less long-term projections, on race and racing over such an infinitesimal section of history as the last 30 years is a business fraught with many risks. All the same, science is there to investigate probabilities.
And as sportsmen and women move nearer the limits of the possible, the probing role of science grows ever more invasive. In football, for instance, players are now analysed and checked for everything from dietary intake to metabolic structures and musculature growth. That science should explore every factor but race is perhaps an unrealistic wish.
It's for the rest of us - participants and fans - to ignore race, or rather not be contained by it. For the history of sport shows that when you near the limits of the possible, those limits tend to recede, naturally.
Search The Observer. Printable version Send it to a friend Clip. Suppose that my psychology, my economics, and my politics are predicated on an irrational hatred of Oriental peoples. Finally, suppose that, in the service of my psychological, economic, and political needs, I claim that the peoples of the Orient are shorter than the people of the United States and that they are so for genetic reasons. Would the irrationality of my needs cast doubt on the correctness of my claim?
Goldberg, S. Report bugs here. Employers were using skin colour as a marker for employment potential, despite the fact that the candidates' CVs were identical.
But that's not all. The researchers also found that although high-quality "white" candidates were preferred to low-quality "white" candidates, the relative quality of "black" CVs made no difference whatsoever. It was as if employers saw three categories - high-quality white, low-quality white and black candidates.
To put it another way, the subliminal assumption that causes us to think that black people are all the same has powerful real-world consequences.
For many economists, this assumption, which gets under the radar of our conscious thought, explains why black people still lag behind white people in economic development more than four decades after the introduction of race-relations legislation.
Recognising that we have these biases is a good place to start in trying to combat them. And a good way of tracking progress is to watch a m final and see whether we fall into the trap, when seeing eight contestants with black skin, of inferring that black people are naturally better sprinters. Logically flawed.
Florence Griffith-Joyner was hugely successful - but generalisations tell us little. Labelled box. Does it mean a hypothetical average black person is faster than a hypothetical black person?
Well, that's meaningless because I don't know how you'd find the hypothetical average person. Does it mean the ten fastest black people are faster than the ten fastest black people? This is, I think, close to what people mean when they say something like that. But the problem with that, is it's statistically nonsensical to characterize a group of a couple of billion people by its most extreme members.
What we're looking at here in the best athletes is essentially occupational overrepresentation. There are a lot of reasons why people are attracted to sports as a vocation. For example, in boxing, there's an overrepresentation of blacks. There's also an overrepresentation of Hispanics in boxing. It's a consequence of the opportunities open to the particular group in question. And where most avenues to upward mobility are closed to you, you're going to gravitate to something that seems just as low a probability of success as anything else.
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