In , an American woman and a Japanese man won the Boston Marathon. Still, East Africans dominate the elite long-distance running scene. In , the top six Boston finishers were East Africans. Three of the top four women also were from Kenya or Ethiopia. American Jordan Hasay, who finished third among the women, was the lone exception. Arinze Esomnofu is a Nigerian media professional, content editor and a freelance journalist.
He is currently the country manager for Flashscore Nigeria. Skip to main content. Desisa surged late to grab the lead then withstood a finishing kick from Kitata to win the This article was originally published in Populous Magazine, our biannual publication featuring news and trends from the worlds of sport, entertainment, and major public events.
Find out more, and sign up to receive a free copy, here. Why do East Africans so totally dominate long-distance running events? Here he tells us what he found. In the last three Olympic Games, athletes from Kenya and Ethiopia have won two-thirds of all the gold medals on offer in the running events from m upwards.
So what is the secret? What I discovered during six months of living in their training camps, attempting to keep up on their training runs, and during numerous return visits over the years, was not one big secret, but a whole melting pot of factors, all combining to form the perfect recipe for producing long-distance runners.
Firstly, all the key training centres, such as Iten, Kaptagat and Eldoret in Kenya, and Bekoji and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, are at high altitude, where the thin air makes it harder to run.
This is an obvious benefit, and elite runners from all nations will spend part of their year living at altitude to help improve the capacity of their lungs to speed them along. But the advantages gained from being born and raised at altitude, like most East African athletes, are much greater. Indeed, it is thanks to their upbringing that the East Africans gain the biggest head start.
When I arrived in Iten I thought these stories were perhaps exaggerated or a myth, but on each dawn run, as I ran along the dirt roads, past mud huts and women laden with firewood, I would inevitably be joined by children on their way to school, gliding along effortlessly beside me, carrying bags and wearing sandals or in bare feet.
The year-old Kenyan took nearly a minute off his personal best and broke Kenenisa Bekele's seven-year course record of as he picked up pace after the kilometre mark.
ParisMarathon pic. In the women's race, Memuye ran a time of two hours 26 minutes and 12 seconds after a late surge to seal the biggest win of her career. Memuye finished about three seconds ahead of Yenenesh Dinkesa with Fantu Jimma third as Ethiopians swept the podium. When these runners descend to the relatively low-elevation courses at Boston or Beijing, the thicker atmosphere there would give them, in effect, a sustained oxygen boost. This may help explain why they developed physical traits better suited for running, although it's possible that these features are also due to something called "genetic drift" -- evolution is based on random genetic mutations, after all, so any isolated community will "drift" to certain common traits for no reason other than chance.
Still, there are plenty of high places in the world, and neither Swiss nor Nepalese runners have yet made their big debut.
And the conventional wisdom among trainers is that, although high altitudes can help develop lung capacity, the best way to do this is by sleeping at high elevation and training at low elevation.
These theories seem to say more about how the West sees Kenya than about Kenya itself. But they are deep in the Western understanding. Malcolm Gladwell's ultra-best-seller, Outliers , shows just how deeply ingrained this thinking has become. Talking about the greatness of African athletes can be fraught in the Western world. Generations of American slavery were justified in part by arguments that Africans were "specialized" for physical labor, and whites for mental work, ideas that have persisted in American paternalism and racism through today.
For a white writer like myself or a white researcher or a white anthropologist to talk about the physical attributes of black men and women can echo some of the worst moments in modern history. And there is something distasteful about reducing Africans to the prowess of their best athletes. After all, Kenya's contributions to the world include, for example, great writers , environmentalists , and politicians.
It's hard to talk about the subject without revealing some bias, or giving the impression of trying to explain away their success, or hitting on some still-fresh cultural wound from centuries of exploitation. This may be why definitive answers seem so hard to find, and why we tend to embrace theories that downplay legitimate biological distinctions and emphasize the idea that Kenyans simply work harder.
But this kind of thinking, though clearly well intentioned, is a kind of condescension in itself. We're so afraid of reducing Africans to their physical attributes that we've ended up reducing them to an outdated stereotype: Cool Runnings , the barefoot village boy who overcame. Scientific research on the success of Kenyan runners has yet to discover a Cool Runnings gene that makes Kenyans biologically predisposed to reaching for the stars, or any scientific basis for Gladwell's argument that they just care more.
Most of Kenya's Olympic medal winners come from a single tribe, the Kalenjin, of whom there are only 4.
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