[Taraz]

One of the several issues I have with the book is that the author talks about how it's the athletes with "West African" ancestry that are dominating sprinting but then he gives no explanation of why not a single person from West Africa has won anything. Not to mention the fact that he doesn't account for the fact that the people he says are of West African descent all have varying amounts of West African ancestry. Some of them are half black for example.

And if it's true, as he claims, that blacks with West African Ancestry have the muscle fibers to jump the best, why don't they dominate the jumping events? The high jump, triple jump, and long jump aren't events that are dominated by black people.

Another problem I have is that he claims that he's proven that "the black athlete" is dominating sports as if all black people share a common gene pool. He himself goes on for pages about how the dominant endurance runners are all from a single village in East Africa. This seems to suggest that it isn't "the black athlete" but rather runners from village X that are the amazing ones. And doesn't this really show that race is a bad indicator of genetic makeup? One group of black people is good at endurance but not sprinting and another group is the opposite. That seems contradictory if we can lump them all into the "black" category.

I'm just not convinced. He basically tells us what we already know: blacks dominate sports. What if I told you that poor people make the best athletes? That would be true since the people that dominate basketball and football disproportionately grew up poor. I'm not saying black people aren't the best athletes, I'm just saying that it's very very far from clear that it's because of genetics.