Black Diamonds SHINE

NO one will ever run as fast as a cheetah or dive as deep as a whale, but the achievements of elite athletes will continue to astonish us.

But what is more astounding is that every running record from the 100 metres to the marathon is held by an athlete of African ancestry.

However fastidious it makes some commentators to talk about this, there is absolutely no doubt that race - or more accurately ethnicity - is a huge factor in the world of elite athletics.

It is amazing that not one single white man has ever run 100m in under 10 seconds.

For nearly half a century, every men's sprint record has been held by blacks and it is a racing certainty that no non-black will win a major 100m or 200m title or set a record in these events again.

The last white sprinter to win Olympic Gold was the Briton Alan Wells, in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which the Americans had boycotted.

Wells's time - 10.25 seconds - was the slowest winning time since 1956. But it isn't Usain Bolt's skin colour that is important; it is where precisely his ancestors originated.

All the world's fastest men are not only black, but are almost always ultimately of West African origin: meaning actual West Africans, Americans (who may be the descendents of slaves from that part of Africa), Caribbeans
or black Britons.

William Aiken, a Jamaican doctor, has stated that the fact Jamaicans in particular excel at sprinting is a legacy of them being descended from the ‘fittest of the fit slaves'.

This is a theory espoused by superhuman Usian Bolt himself in a BBC interview, when he said: "I think over the years what makes Jamaica different is because of slavery really ... the genes are really strong."

Probably more important is that West Africans have certain physiological advantages. One theory is that they are more likely than most ethnic groups to possess a high percentage of 'fast twitch' muscle fibres in their bodies - the reasons for which have been lost in the mists of evolutionary time.

These fibres allow an explosion of power, enabling muscles to convert sugars in the blood into movement in the shortest possible time.

Preliminary findings of genetic data suggest that 70 per cent of Jamaicans have the "strong" form of the ACTN3 gene - which produces a protein in their fast-twitch muscle fibres that has been linked to increased sprinting performance.

Similarly, for so many marathon winners to have come from the same sliver of highland East Africa cannot be down to chance alone.

The people of the highlands of Ethiopia and Kenya are often tall, slim and have a large lung capacity.

Hence, it is not altogether surprising that this population produces a lot of good long-distance runners (although they are not gifted sprinters).

There is another reason people are getting faster - the growth in human population. Simply, with more and more people alive, the chances of a record being broken increase all the time as the pool of talent increases.
And as time goes on, the chances increase of ‘outliers' popping up - people who are simply in a different league to everyone else in their discipline.

Last year, a Stanford University specialist in animal locomotion, Mark Denny, published a study in The Journal Of Experimental Biology in which he compared the running performance of humans and that of two other species - dogs and horses (which, like us, also take part in races).

He found that speeds among the top racing greyhounds and equine thoroughbreds plateaued in the 40s through to the 70s, whereas human males continued to get faster, possibly as a simple result of population increase.

He believes that male sprint performance will level off at about 9.48 seconds.

Runners of West African descent - which include Jamaicans as well as most African-Americans - seem to be built for speed. In 2004, they held all but five of the 500 best times in the 100-metre dash.

Interestingly, we may already have seen female sprinters start to plateau. The current world record of 10.49 was set by Florence Griffith-Joyner of the US back in 1988.

Long-distance records probably have some way to fall. The two-hour barrier in the marathon has become the 21st-century equivalent of the old four-minute mile.

Currently the record stands at two hours three minutes and 59 seconds, set by Ethiopian, Haile Gebrselassie in Berlin last year.

In percentage terms, that last four minutes or so represent far less of a barrier than Bolt's demolition of his own 100m (9.58s) and 200m (19.19s) records at Berlin 2009.