Analysis: Kenyan Runners -- What's Their Secret?

By STEVE SAILER, UPI National Correspondent

 
 WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 (UPI) -- In Sydney, Kenyans try Friday for their
seventh straight Olympic gold medal in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, that
odd track event that combines distance running, hurdling, and splashing
through water. Excluding the two Olympics they boycotted, the Kenyans
haven't lost this event since 1964. Why do Kenyans perform so
extraordinarily well in the steeplechase and other endurance races?
Is their secret that they all ran to school as children? Is it growing up at
high altitude? Is it something they eat? What about their training and
coaching regime? Or, disturbing as this may sound to many in this racially
sensitive era, do Kenyans also tend to enjoy some kind of physiological
advantage over the other peoples of the world?

 Whatever the cause of Kenyan superiority, no one can deny it. Although two
swift Moroccans have emerged to offer the first serious challenge to Kenyan
domination of the steeplechase in years, runners from this East African
nation still account for 91 of the 100 best times ever.

 Kenyans appear to be at their best at the 3,000-meter length, but they
also excel at other distances. They've won a few Olympic medals in the 400
meter sprint, but they don't hit their stride until 800 meters.

 Kenyan-born journalist John H. Manners, who has trained in the Great Rift
Valley with many of top Kenyans, is writing a book called "The Running
Tribe." He calculates that from 800 through 10,000 meters, this country of
only 30 million (0.5 percent of the Earth's population) wins about half of
all the Olympic and World Championship medals for men's distance running.

 In Sydney so far this week, Kenyan veteran Paul Tergat finished a close
second to the great Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie in the 10,000 meters. World
record holder Wilson Kipketer, a Kenyan running for Denmark, earned a
disappointing silver medal in the 800 meter race.

 The Kenyan record in the marathon is more mixed. They have yet to win
Olympic gold. Still, having captured ten straight Boston Marathons, they
certainly have the talent.

 Even more remarkably, men from a single tribe earn three-fourths of
Kenya's medals. The three million Kalenjin make up only one tenth of Kenya's
population, and just .0005 percent of the world's. Yet these highlanders
from the Great Rift Valley win about three-eighths of international men's
distance running prizes. Within this region, the half million people of the
Nandi district win one fifth of the globe's medals!

 In 1990 physiologist Bengt Saltin, currently director of the Copenhagen
Muscle Research Center, took part of the Swedish national track team to St.
Patrick's Academy in Iten, Kenya to race the world's greatest high school
track team. The local kids repeatedly trounced the champions of track-mad
Sweden. Dr. Saltin estimates there are at least 500 schoolboys in the region
who could beat Sweden's best man at 2,000 meters.

 Based on the results achieved by the finest Kalenjin runners, Berkeley
anthropologist Vincent Sarich, the co-founder of the field of genetic
anthropology, statistically estimates that the average Kalenjin could outrun
90 percent of the rest of the human race.

 The Kalenjin are only the most spectacular example of the trend toward
"athletic hotspots," a term coined by author Jon Entine in his recent book,
"Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk
about It." In the 5,000 meters, for example, the globe's two hotspots are
the highlands of East Africa and the Atlas Mountains region of Northwest
Africa. Kenyan runners hold 48 of the 100 best times ever, nearby Ethiopia
holds 18, and Morocco 23. Of the ten times credited to wealthy "first world"
nations, six actually belong to African immigrants.

 In contrast, the hotspots for sprinting are almost anywhere people of West
African descent live. In Sydney, for the fifth consecutive Olympics, the
eight men who reached the finals of the Olympic 100 meter dash -- the race
that determines the World's Fastest Man -- were all of predominantly West
African origin. Going back to 1984, the last 40 finalists have all been
blacks from West Africa or its Diaspora.

 Arguably, greater equality of opportunity should have brought greater
equality of results. That's indeed the way it worked in the first half of
the 20th Century. When the modern Olympics began, whites monopolized all the
races. But by 1932, growing equality of opportunity had nicely integrated
the six finalists in the men's 100 meter dash: three whites, two
African-Americans, and a Japanese.

 Yet by 1984, the 100-meter finals had become a reverse of the all white
races of the old "Chariots of Fire" days.

 Similarly, whites won all the steeplechase medals until 1968, when an
untrained Kenyan named Amos Biwott, using a comically rustic hurdling style,
stunned the track world. Observers expected that Biwott's win would herald a
new era in which a wider variety of peoples would take their turn on the
steeplechase medals' podium. Instead, it opened the Kenyan Age.

 Frank Shorter, America's marathon gold medallist in 1972, sums up: "The
record-holders used to be athletes from industrialized nations who had
access to technology and financial incentives. ... The Africans finally got
a level playing field. Then, the game was over."

 Not all white runners agree. Pointing to his 1992 gold medal in the
African-dominated 5,000 meters, Dieter Baumann of Germany argues, "We
Europeans are just as good as them and no less suited for distance running."
Unfortunately, Baumann's case for white biological equality in distance
running lost some credibility recently when he tested positive for steroids
(He insists that some scoundrel spiked his toothpaste with nandrolone.).

 Why do Kenyans run so fast? One charming and popular suggestion is that
Kenyan talent stems from their all having had to run to school. There are a
few problems with this idea, however. Joe Sang, a Kenyan researcher, asked
20 international runners if they ran to school as kids and 14 said no.

 Recent TV shows have attributed Kalenjin endurance to their eating a lot
of the "complex carbohydrates" favored by sports scientists. Manners
replies, "There is no question that the Kalenjin do live on a starchy diet.
But then, so do most Third World peoples. Starch, after all, is what
subsistence farmers produce."

 Living at high altitude definitely helps. Kalenjin country averages 6,000
to 7,000 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level. Many world class runners in
the Western world move to high altitude locations to train. They find
themselves stronger when they return to the abundant oxygen of sea level to
compete.

 Still, this factor can be overblown. Worldwide, there are scores of
millions of people living at similar or higher altitudes in the American
West, Mexico, the Andes, and Central Asia. Yet, combined, they win fewer
distance medals than the half million residents of the Nandi district.
Mormons, for example, tend to live at high elevations in America's Great
Basin, but Mormonism is not known as the "running religion."

 Further, training high probably isn't the perfect regimen. The latest
thinking among sports scientists is that endurance athletes should sleep at
high altitudes but train at low altitudes. Thus, European cross-country
skiers have taken to sleeping in special motor homes that are depressurized
to the oxygen level found at 11,000 feet.

Nonetheless, the land of the Kalenjin is a wonderful place to run. Manners
says: "When you combine 2,000 meter elevations with equatorial latitudes,
you get an ideal climate for sustained outdoor activity- - comfortably warm
days, cool nights, low humidity. It is a land of beautiful green hills."

 In fact, the countryside rather resembles summertime in rural England,
where lads running cross country from one village's church steeple to
another invented the steeplechase.

 "Compared with other African countries," Manners says, "Kenya is fairly
well supplied with basic necessities. Malnutrition is rare, infant mortality
is among the lowest in Africa, life expectancy and literacy among the
highest." Nonetheless, Kenyans can't afford depressurized Winnebagos or the
hundreds of other expensive tricks sports scientists have concocted for
athletes from wealthy lands.

 Many argue that the Kalenjin secret is in their training regimen, which
violates most tenets of sophisticated Western thinking. As Christopher
McDougall writes in Outside Magazine, the Kenyan style "mandates a
combination of huge mileage, relentless race-caliber intensity, and an
every-man-for-himself attitude," combined with "a ruthless process of
elimination that leaves many promising runners injured or demoralized." He
goes on, "But it seems the more the Americans study the Kenyans, the slower
they go: American marathoners are running worse than they did 25 years ago."

 So perhaps Kenyans don't run faster because they train harder so much as
they train harder hard because they can run faster. The most famous Kalenjin
runner of them all would agree. Kip Keino introduced the world to Kenyan
runners during the 1968 Olympics when he buried the legendary American miler
Jim Ryun in the 1,500 meters. Keino argues, "We are natural athletes. Most
of our runners are naturally born athletes. We have only to work on
improvement, the technical part of it. We feel that running is our blood."

 Manners theorizes that running got into their blood through a Darwinian
process. Although most Kalenjin are farmers now, their traditional
livelihood had been herding. As "horseless cowboys," they had to run down
stray cattle on foot. The faster the runner, the bigger his herd, the more
wives he could afford to buy, and therefore the more descendents that
carried on his genes.

 For fun and profit, the Kalenjin enjoyed nothing more than long-distance
cattle-rustling. A group of youths would raid a distant tribe and try to
hustle their steers home. The fastest runners brought home the livestock,
earning the affection of the local maidens. The slowest runners ended up
with spears in their backs and no descendents.

 We know that herding can cause rapid human evolution, since adults tend to
be lactose tolerant mostly in ethnic groups that have a tradition of tending
dairy cows, such as the Kalenjin or the Scandinavians. So, Manners' theory
is not scientifically implausible.

 Still, Bowdoin College anthropologist Scott MacEachern, who has worked in
the Great Rift Valley, is unimpressed. "Why do some neighboring populations,
especially those in similar environments and practicing even more
specialized cattle herding, not produce Olympic champions? Why do other,
totally unrelated, farming populations like the Kikuyu and Kamba produce so
many fine runners?"

 Further, no one has ever found any genes that make Kalenjin faster
runners. Despite all the hype about the completion of the Human Genome
Project, we still have no idea what the vast majority of genes do.

 In the meantime, Manners' offers what he admits is purely anecdotal data
supporting his thesis about the genetic aptitude of the Kalenjin. He has
collected a dozen examples of ``Kalenjin men in their 20s who had never
thought of themselves as runners at all until they wound up in circumstances
that more or less obliged them to take up the sport." Typically, they had
fooled American college track coaches, who assume all Kalenjin are great
runners, into giving them scholarships. Once they arrived at their American
schools, however, these nonrunners had to make the track team or be sent
packing.  Manners contends, "In each case, what happened when they started
training is quite remarkable."

 One young Kalenjin student named Paul Rotich, however, had never even
intended to masquerade as a runner. His father was too prosperous for him to
bother. And at 5'-8" and 190 pounds, the 22 year old was too heavy to
pretend. Unfortunately, in his first year at a Texas junior college, Rotich
blew the money his father had given him to see him through two years. To
avoid returning in disgrace, he decided to get a track scholarship.

 Manners recounts, "He began training -- running at night because he was
embarrassed to be seen lumbering around the track." Somehow, he made the
cross-country team that fall. He improved so fast that he won a scholarship
to a four year college. There, Manners concludes, "He earned All-American
honors ten times in cross-country and various track events. When he went
back to Kenya and told his cousin what he had done, the cousin replied, 'So,
it is true. If you can run, any Kalenjin can run.' "
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Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
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