Why don’t American distance runners run as fast as they once
did? It
appears to be an instructive interaction of nature and nurture. 

The
decline has been absolute, not just relative to the rest of the world.
From 1965 through 1967, three American high school boys (Jim
Ryun [now a GOP Congressman from Kansas], Marty Liquori, and Tim
Danielson) ran the mile in under four minutes. It didn’t happen again
until Alan Webb did it in 2001. I suspect that what took the air out of
the American middle distance balloon was Kenyan Kip Keino beating Ryun
at Mexico City in the 1500m in 1968. This was at high altitude, where
Keino was at home, so it didn’t seem so bad at first, but then the
Kenyans just kept on winning. A huge boom in recreational distance
running started in America in 1972 when Frank Shorter won the Olympic
Marathon, but it didn’t lead to a new generation of world-class runners.
The top endurance talent must have gone into mountain climbing or
triathlons or bicycle racing or something else where they didn’t have to
compete with the Kenyans.

A reader writes:

When I
was in high school I ran cross country and trained very hard for two
years, managing to secure a spot at the bottom of the varsity team. A
freshman named Abraham moved into the area and he hailed from Nairobi.
He was about 5’10" and 130 lbs- all legs. He was not a runner in
Africa, he played soccer. He didn’t run to school-on the contrary his
parents were rich so he got a ride. Within one month of arrival with
almost no training he was state champ of Virginia in the 5K, beating
18-year olds who had been ‘working hard’ for years, but simply didn’t
have the physical makeup to compete with a prime Kenyan specimen. And
Virginia had a lot of very good distance runners that year.

Something similar might have happened in the 400m, where
white Americans just disappeared. A white American, Mike Larrabee won
the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in a fine 45.15. But at the 1968 Mexico City
Olympics, three black guys won in insane times, led by Lee Evans with a
43.86 (better than Wariner’s time) that stood up until the mid-1980s.
They then capped the Mexico City Olympics by setting a world record in
the 4x400m relay that stood for over 20 years.

As I point out below, the longer the race, the less dominant
African-Americans become. The big break is between 400m and 800m, but
whites still have a fair shot at 400m, unlike 100m, where blacks have
filled the last 48 spots in the the finals going back six Olympics.

Other black guys set unbelievable records at the ’68 Games:
Jimmy Hines 9.95 in the 100m, Tommie Smith 19.83 in the 200m, and, most
famously, Bob Beamon broke the world record in the long jump by two
feet, going 29′-2. (the latter two are better than anybody has done in
the world this year before the Olympics). Of course, all these
performances were boosted by the thin air at 7,300 feet altitude, but
these sprint marks must have been terribly intimidating to fast young
white boys, who decided to go do something else.

Internationally, white guys stayed marginally competitive in
the 400m, with Cuba’s Alberto "The Big Horse" Juantorena
winning in 1976 with a tremendous 44.26, Australia’s Darren Clark
finishing fourth in both 1984 and 1988, and Britain’s Roger Black winning a silver medal in 1996. But in America, top white quarter-milers
almost disappeared, emerging only in the last couple of years with
Wariner, Andrew Rock (on the Olympic relay squad) who ran for a Div. 3
school because nobody would give a white 400m man a college scholarship,
and a couple of decent performers at the U. of Minnesota. It’s a
cliche that U.S. Olympic Trials in the sprints are harder than the
Olympics, and there is some truth to that. 

In the U.S., it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a young
fellow to specialize in the 400m unless he projects out ten years down
the road to be a potential gold medalist. If you don’t have at least an
outside shot at developing into a gold medalist, you probably won’t ever
make the national team as an individual, or even as a relay runner. It
makes more sense to keep your options open and think about trying
something else where the national competition is less stiff.

In contrast, if you are, say, a Pole or a German, you don’t
have to look like a future gold medalist to still picture a fun future
for yourself as a 400m man: traveling the world representing your
country, winning medals in European championships, running in the finals
of the 4×400 relay in the Olympic stadium on global TV, maybe even
winning a medal if Jamaica drops the baton. Occasionally,
one of those nonblacks from another country who stays in the event past
his youth blossoms into a true world-class contender. But, even if he
doesn’t, he can still have an enjoyable career beating a lot of other
non-blacks in his home country. 

In
contrast, non-black 400m men in the U.S. generally wind up being
also-rans, so that (rationally) discourages non-blacks from making an
all-out effort in the 400m. Sure, they’re listening to a stereotype, but
it’s also rational behavior for different groups to specialize in
different specialties. Would you tell your son to choose the event where
he’s more likely to fail just to prove an ideological point?

We may see more white long sprinters in the future in America,
however, because African-Americans have lost most of their interest in track as
their culture revolves more and more around basketball and football.
African-Americans still do very well in sprinting (going 1-3-4 in the
100m on Sunday night), but six months from now I bet that fewer than 10%
of all African-Americans will be able to name the black guy who won the
race (Justin Gatlin) or the black guy who holds the record (Tim
Montgomery-9.78).

Black
colleges made track their spring sport instead of baseball way back in
the early part of the last century because it was objective. If a black
student ran a 9.6 hundred yard dash, you couldn’t say he only did it
because the competition was weak. Thus blacks were well-represented on
the Olympic squad by 1928 and dominant at sprints by 1932. At some
point, however, blacks started to lose interest in track. Today, track
fans are typically European or Japanese nerds who love numbers. It’s
just not that fun a sport to follow unless you like to keep a lot of
numbers in your head.

Sprinting is probably the easiest sport, by far, to excel at
if you have the natural talent — to prepare for winning four gold
medals at the 1984 LA Olympics, Carl Lewis only worked out eight hours
per week. You always hear that the reason the 100m dash is
dominated by blacks is because only poor people would do all the brutal
work it takes to win, but that’s just flapdoodle. Sprinting doesn’t
require endurance. Even the long sprints don’t take much work: to win
the 200m and 400m in 1996, Michael Johnson admitted to working out less
than 12 hours per week.

Sprinting
isn’t big money, but it is easy money, so it will always attract those with God-given speed, but
African-American athletes with other talents will probably avoid track.
Back in the late 1960s, O.J. Simpson and the rest of the USC football
team spent their springs running track, setting a world record in the
sprint relay in the process, but these days, they’d be working out for
football year round.