Thaindian News

Washington, July 12 (IANS) The swiftest sprinters tend to be of West African ancestry and the faster swimmers tend to be white.
A study of the elite athletes over the past 100 years reveals these two distinct trends.

Not only are the athletes getting faster over time, but there is a clear divide between racers in terms of body type and race, reports the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics.

Last year, a Duke University engineer explained the first trend - athletes are getting faster because they are getting bigger.

Adrian Bejan, professor of engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, now believes he can explain the second trend.

Bejan and co-authors Edward Jones, doctoral candidate at Cornell University and Duke graduate Jordan Charles, argue that the answer lies in athletes’ centres of gravity, said a Duke University release.

That centre tends to be located higher on the body of Africans than whites. The researchers believe that these differences are not racial, but rather biological.

“There is a whole body of evidence showing that there are distinct differences in body types among blacks and whites,” said Jones, who specialises in adolescent obesity, nutrition and anthropometry, the study of body composition.

“These are real patterns being described here — whether the fastest sprinters are Jamaican, African or Canadian — most of them can be traced back generally to Western Africa.”

Swimmers, Jones said, tend to come from Europe, and therefore tend to be white. He also pointed out that there are cultural factors at play as well, such as a lack of access to swimming pools to those of lower socioeconomic status.

It all comes down to body makeup, not race, Jones and Bejan said.

“Blacks tend to have longer limbs with smaller circumferences, meaning that their centres of gravity are higher compared to whites of the same height,” Bejan said.

“Asians and whites tend to have longer torsos, so their centres of gravity are lower.”

Bejan and Jones cite past studies of the human body which found that on average, the centre of gravity is about three percent higher in blacks than whites.

Using this difference in body types, the researchers calculated that black sprinters are 1.5 percent faster than whites, while whites have the same advantage over blacks in the water.

The difference might seem small, Bejan said, but not when considering that world records in sprinting and swimming are typically broken by fractions of seconds.

This analysis was supported by the National Science Foundation.