The topography explains it all. https://geology.com/articles/east-africa-rift.shtml
tl;dr The people of that area in East Africa naturally live close to sea level, however there are easily accessible elevations changes that distance runners have trained on for probably centuries. It turns out that training at high altitudes and recovering at low altitudes provides a tangible and demonstrable advantage compared to just single elevation training.
This can’t be the whole story, otherwise we’d see places like Chile, Peru, and India competing too
India? the sea and the himalayas are too far apart to compare.
Those Ethiopian and Kenyan runners live and train at high altitude, when they compete at lower elevations where there’s more oxygen, they have a dramatic edge over other runners.
I’d wager we would see the same effect if athletes from Bhutan, Nepal and/or Tibet decided to compete in long-distance running.
This is why the US Olympic Training Center is in Colorado.
Genetically I imagine the Africans have a more advantageous stride than the Asians?
Not to say the biomechanics are equal, but Cheptegei the current 10K record holder is 5’6” / 1.67m. So it’s not like an Usain Bolt situation. And for the marathon, Mo Farah is 5’9”.
I remember hearing during the Olympics them actually talk about how much of a freak Bolt is to be so tall and so fast. Most runners are on the shorter side. For those that watch the NFL you’ll know that being tall and fast is what makes people DK Metcalf such a freak of nature when sprinters are actually usually smaller, like Tyreek Hill. It’s less about stride length and more about power put into the ground which is easier for shorter legs.
If you watch Bolt run you’ll notice he doesn’t actually hit his peak until way after the other runners during the 100m. He has said before iirc that he’s actually a more natural 200m runner rather than a 100m runner. On the 100 he barely gets to his top speed before the finish. That’s what makes his 100m records truly so phenomenal, he’s not really built for that race but was still so much faster than everyone else on the track.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a runner from Nepal being Asian and therefore statistically likely to be shorter than someone born in Africa, could be a record breaking runner. Of course this is all about sprinting but over longer distances the longer lankier bodies prevail, better momentum.
tldr: short legs go zoom, long legs go long.
Africa is more diverse than the rest of the world put together.
Which particular Africans are you referring to?
the ones in America are ethnically the same ones in Africa
Sorry to be the guy that brings controversial issues to this thread. But this kind of thing is exactly why the “trans women have a biological advantage in sports” argument holds no water. (Other than the fact its almost entirely untrue)
People from this region have a biological advantage in their sports, several orders of magnitude more of an advantage than trans women have. But no one is calling for these people to be banned from sports.
Also a region with good coffee. There must be a correlation…
Crazy that most of them come from the same place as our earliest ancestors from 200.000 years ago. Must be a magical place.
Hasn’t there been an older skeleton found in Morocco now?
Would explain the three dots there.
No it wouldn’t
Yea but imagine if it did
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