The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

by David Epstein

  Given that the linear build is helpful for endurance running, and that Nilotic people tend to have a linear build, it occurred to me that there should be a wealth of running talent in southern Sudan. But long-distance runners from Sudan are almost absent from international competition. I asked both scientists and track-and-field experts if they had any insight into whether Sudanese runners have been tested for running economy, or why we don’t see Nilotic distance runners coming out of Sudan. Unfortunately, there is no data at all on Sudanese runners, and the consensus among track experts was that, unlike Kenya, which apart from postelection violence has been relatively stable, modern Sudan has been in a constant state of tumult and violence that has curtailed opportunities for athletes.

  In December 2011, I attended the Arab Games in Qatar and spoke with Sudanese athletes and journalists who told me that, among other problems, like travel difficulties, athletes from the southern regions of Sudan (now the nation of South Sudan) had historically been discriminated against and that national sports officers did not enter skilled athletes from that area in past Olympics. Plus, civil war has raged for the better part of a half century in the exact area where the Nilotic people reside, leaving no sports culture or infrastructure whatsoever in southern Sudan. So I approached the question the only way I could think of: looking for south Sudanese running talent outside of southern Sudan.

  The first I ever wondered about Sudanese athletes was when I wrote a story about Macharia Yuot, a runner at Widener University in Pennsylvania who caught my eye by winning the 2006 Division III cross-country championship in Wilmington, Ohio, before jumping on a plane that evening and finishing sixth in the Philadelphia Marathon—his first run longer than twenty-one miles—the very next morning. Yuot had been one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” the largest contingent being from the Nilotic Dinka, who fled the violence that engulfed their homes. When he was nine, Yuot’s town was overrun by the religious civil war that cost two million Sudanese their lives between 1983 and 2005. Rather than see their sons forced to walk minefields in order to clear the way for soldiers, parents bid them flee. So the boys walked the desert, alone. By 1991, some, like Yuot, who survived the soldiers hunting them—and the lions that occasionally carried away a sleeping boy—made it to a refugee camp in Kenya. In 2000, the U.S. government airlifted around 3,600 of the boys to America, and sprinkled them around the country with foster parents.

  The Lost Boys had hardly unpacked by the time they started appearing in local newspaper headlines for their exploits on high school track teams. “Only months after settling in Michigan, two Sudanese refugees are finding that they are among the fastest high school runners in the state,” went the lead of one AP article. Another, in the Lansing State Journal, noted that Abraham Mach, a Lost Boy who had no competitive running experience before arriving at East Lansing High, was the most outstanding performer in the thirteen-to-fourteen age group at the 2001 National AAU Junior Olympic Games, medaling in three events. Mach, who had been living in a Kenyan refugee camp just one year earlier, went on to become an NCAA All-American at Central Michigan in the 800-meters.

  A cursory search of newspaper articles revealed twenty-two Sudanese Lost Boys mentioned for having run well in America in high school, college, or road races. The most prominent Lost Boy runner is Lopez Lomong, who in 2008 was a 1,500-meter runner and had the honor of bearing the U.S. flag at the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. In 2012, Lomong again made the U.S. Olympic team, this time in the 5K. In March 2013, he ran the fastest indoor 5K ever by an American citizen.

  Not too shabby for a group the size of a large high school. And as soon as South Sudan became an independent country in 2011, it had an Olympic marathon qualifier in Guor Marial, who had fled Sudan for the United States and ran for Iowa State. Because South Sudan had not set up a national Olympic committee, and because Marial refused to represent Sudan, he was—following a hefty dose of public pressure on the International Olympic Committee—given special status and allowed to compete in London under the Olympic flag. South Sudan, then, doesn’t even have an Olympic committee, but it has already had an Olympic marathoner.

  All this is, of course, no more scientific than John Manners’s time trial observations. In only slightly more scientific fashion, a few researchers and running enthusiasts have used statistics to suggest that the dominance of East African runners likely has a genetic basis. Anthropologist Vincent Sarich used world cross-country championship results to calculate that Kenyan runners outperformed all other nations by 1,700-fold. Sarich made a statistical projection that about 80 out of every 1 million Kenyan men have world-class running talent, compared with about 1 out of every 20 million men in the rest of the world. (The number would be far more staggering if he focused only on the Kalenjin.) A 1992 Runner’s World article noted, based purely on population percentages, the statistical chances of Kenyan men having won the medals they did at the 1988 Olympics was 1 in 1,600,000,000.

  Those are intriguing calculations, but without context do not shed much light on whether the natural gifts required for world-class running are more prevalent among Kenyans. German teams won the team dressage competition at every Olympics from 1984 to 2008, which, on a strictly population basis, is very unlikely. Still, we can all probably agree that German equestrians probably don’t have dressage genes in greater frequency than is found among equestrians in neighboring European countries. But dressage is not a mass participation sport, so, frankly, any nation that is trying hard—German dressage was partly funded by the horse breeding industry—will do well. Canada produces the most NHL players because Canada invented ice hockey and, really, how many countries even have significant participation in hockey? The answer: not all that many. Or consider baseball’s World Series, which is anything but a world series.

  Plus, for years, the rest of the world was helping Kenya by getting slower. Even before Kenya commandeered the international running scene, the countries that had dominated distance running—Britain, Finland, the United States—were growing increasingly wealthy, increasingly overweight, increasingly interested in other sports, and increasingly less likely to train seriously in distance running. Between 1983 and 1998, the number of U.S. men who ran under 2:20 in the marathon for the year declined from 267 to 35. Great Britain declined from 137 to 17 over the same time period. The American nadir was 2000, when the United States qualified only one man for the Sydney Olympic marathon. Finland, which was the top distance running power in the world between World Wars I and II, when it was a poor rural country, did not qualify a single distance runner in any event at the 2000 Olympics. As Brother Colm O’Connell, a Patrician brother who came from Ireland to Kenya to teach high school in 1976 and stayed to coach elite runners—including current 800-meter world record holder David Rudisha—told me: “The genes didn’t go away in Finland, the culture did.”

  A few countries held steady from the 1980s through the millennium, like Japan, which has between 100 and 130 sub-2:20 men just about every year. Meanwhile, Kenya jumped from a single sub-2:20 man in 1980 to 541 in 2006. (Kenyan marathoners really exploded in the mid-nineties, as the notion in Kenya that marathon training caused male infertility receded, and after Kenya’s sports commissioner, KenSAP’s own Dr. Mike Boit, allowed agents into the country and alleviated travel restrictions on athletes.)

  Here’s the conclusion of Peter Matthews, the track-and-field statistician who compiled those numbers: “In these days of computer games, sedentary pursuits, and driving our children to school—it is the ‘hungry’ fighter or the poor peasant who has the endurance background, and the incentive to work on it, who makes the top distance runner.”

  13

  The World’s Greatest Accidental (Altitudinous) Talent Sieve

  Sugar, some sugar,” he says. I must have looked confused. “You know, sugar. I appreciate.”

  We were standing, the runner and I, in Iten, Kenya, on a dirt track in Kamariny Stadium. But to call Kamariny a s
tadium is to elevate a sandlot to a cathedral. On one side is a wooden bleacher painted sky blue and crooked as rotten teeth. On the other side is a sheer cliff four thousand feet above the Rift Valley floor and eight thousand feet above sea level. Dozens of runners circle the track in interval sessions, as a sheep wanders over the escarpment to graze on the infield.

  The runner I’m speaking with is twenty-four-year-old Evans Kiplagat, and he wants me to buy him sugar. Earlier that Thursday morning, Kiplagat loped six miles to the track, then ran a hard workout. In a few minutes, he’ll embark on the six-mile trip home. If I don’t buy him food, he’ll return hungry to the wooden shed that a local man lets him use on his shamba—a subsistence farming plot.

  Kiplagat’s parents did not own the shamba on which they lived, so when they both died of illnesses in 2001 he couldn’t remain on the land. He is thankful for his current room, “but food is a problem,” he says. Most Tuesdays and Thursdays, Kiplagat jogs to the track and latches on to a training group that includes an athlete like Geoffrey Mutai, a Boston and New York City marathon champion, or Saif Saaeed Shaheen (formerly Stephen Cherono), the world record holder in the 3,000-meter steeplechase who was raised and trains in Kenya but was paid to switch his citizenship to Qatar. After the workout, Kiplagat will log more miles, walking among his friends’ homes to see if anyone has leftover ugali, the doughy cornmeal that rural Kenyans eat every day of the week. If he scrounges up enough food, he’ll go for another six miles in the evening. For Kiplagat, every day is a two-a-day, if not a three-a-day, and that doesn’t count running six miles each way as transportation to and from the track on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

  It is the schedule of a man who burns to run, whose passion is to compete on the highest stage, and to stand atop the podium and weep at his national anthem. Except, that’s not who Kiplagat is.

  “If you could get a job in the military, would you stop training?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “What about a job with the police?”

  “Yes. Any job,” he says.

  Kiplagat would prefer to have a job that would allow him to continue training, but he is content to stop running tomorrow if someone offers him a decent living. He started training in 2007 after walloping his high school friends in a small race. Last year, Kiplagat ran 29:30 in a hilly 10K road race in Kenya, an outstanding time relative to most of the world, but not one that makes him stand out from the Kamariny Stadium crowd. So he’ll keep trying to borrow enough money to travel to Kenyan cities for races so that he can post a time that will attract an agent.

  There are Evans Kiplagats all over Kamariny—about one hundred runners were training at the track the day I was there—striding right alongside world champions. Sporadically, an unfamiliar man will wander onto the track and right away try to keep pace with Olympians. If he holds up, perhaps he’ll come back. If not, he’ll slink back to the shamba. It’s a microcosm of the overall training scene in Kenya: there are few training secrets here—some top runners don’t even have coaches—but there are hordes of runners willing to train multiple times a day, as full-time athletes. In the United States, a top college distance runner usually has to put off making a living for a few years in order to chase a dream. “In Kenya, it’s just the opposite,” says Ibrahim Kinuthia, a former international runner and now a coach in Kenya. There is no career or grad school to delay, and thus no opportunity cost for most rural Kenyans to take a crack at training with the elites.* Given Kenya’s annual per capita income of $800, according to the World Bank, the potential payoff for running success is greater, relatively speaking, than even an NBA contract is for an inner-city American boy. Winning a single major marathon brings a six-figure payday. Even earning a few thousand dollars in smaller road races in America and Europe is a relative windfall for most rural Kenyans. Successful runners quickly become one-man or one-woman economies. In Eldoret, the major city near Iten and Kamariny Stadium, Moses Kiptanui, the former steeplechase world record holder, owns a dairy farming business. He also owns the trucks that transport the milk, and the building in town with the supermarket that sells the milk. The result of these economic incentives is an army of aspiring runners who undertake training plans fit for Olympians, with many falling by the wayside, and those who survive becoming professionals.

  Interestingly, a system that thrives on the hard work of many is fueled by an abiding belief in natural talent. The Kenyan coaches and runners I spoke with almost uniformly said that it was never too late to begin training. If one has talent, they said, then one just needs to start training hard and elite status will come swiftly.

  A number of Kenya’s most luminous running stars have succeeded precisely because they did not assume it was too late. In a hotel in Nairobi I met Paul Tergat, former marathon world record holder and the greatest cross-country runner in history, who told me that he played volleyball in high school and didn’t start running until “between nineteen and twenty, when I started the military. There I met a number of great runners I used to read about, like Moses Tanui and Richard Chelimo. So I trained, and by twenty-one I realized I had the talent.” And by twenty-five he had won the first of five consecutive world cross-country championships.

  The similarity to Jamaican sprinting—or to Canadian hockey, or to Brazilian soccer—is that there is a large number of athletes put in the top of the funnel, and a smaller number who display talent and survive the rigorous training and come out the bottom as world beaters.

  While some of Kenya’s best runners have entered the game very late, for scores of others, training starts very early in life, before they even know it.

  •

  Kenya is particularly harrowing for Yannis Pitsiladis, the University of Glasgow biologist whose passion is collecting the DNA of elite athletes. Given his fear of flying, he drives all over Kenya. Navigating the pocked roads of rural Kenya is like guiding a marble through the game Labyrinth. (Eventually, you’re going to lose.) And yet, for a decade, Pitsiladis has returned to Kenya over and over. As expected from the Kalenjin running hotbed, he and his colleagues have found that individuals with genes that indicate Nilotic ancestry are vastly overrepresented among elite athletes. But, as in Jamaica, the findings that have most affected him are cultural, not genetic.

  Pitsiladis’s work has shown that international-level runners from Kenya are most often of the Kalenjin tribe, most often from poor, rural areas, and very likely to have had to run to school growing up. In one study Pitsiladis conducted with colleagues, 81 percent of 404 Kenyan professional runners had to run or walk a considerable distance to and from primary school as children. Kenyan kids who rely on their feet to get to and from school have 30 percent higher aerobic capacities on average than their peers. World-class athletes were also more likely than lesser athletes to have had to run or walk six miles or more to school. Pitsiladis talks fondly of one ten-year-old boy who was such a proficient runner that he took off at a six-minute-mile pace during a test of his aerobic capacity on a dirt track.

  When I visited Kenya, running up and down the red dust hills of Iten, the epicenter of Kalenjin training, occasionally kids would join by my side, excitedly chirping their favorite English phrase: “How are you! How are you!” On my last run in Iten, a boy who looked about five years old tagged along as I trudged up a long hill. The boy was in ragged sandals and carrying a loaf of bread under one arm. He followed for a few minutes and then slunk under a wooden fence, tugging his loaf of bread behind him, and disappeared. It struck me that there is no such thing as a casual jogger in Kenya, only those who run for transportation, those who are killing themselves in training, and those who are not running at all.

  After that run, I mentioned the bread boy to Harun Ngatia, a physiotherapist who treats Kenyan pros. “When the boy grows up,” he said, “all he will know is running.” His words reminded me of a late-1990s mock charity drive declared on a now-defunct online track-and-field message board: Help Americans co
mpete in distance running by donating school buses to Kenyan children.

  And it isn’t just Kenya. Pitsiladis and a research team found a similar pattern in the world’s second distance running superpower, Ethiopia. As in Kenya, Ethiopian runners tend to come from a traditionally pastoralist ethnic group—the Oromo—and they are also much more likely to have had to run to school than nonrunners, and professional Ethiopian marathon runners are more likely to have had to run long distances to school than professional Ethiopian 5K and 10K runners. Meanwhile, analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of Ethiopian and Kenyan runners shows that their maternal lines are not especially closely related. So there is no single, genetic supertribe of runners that is contiguous from Ethiopia to Kenya. (Ethiopians tend to have more chunks of mitochondrial DNA found in Europeans, possibly reflective of Ethiopia as the original point of migration for all humans outside of Africa.)

  No one has conducted a study of the running economy of untrained Ethiopian children, as the Danish scientists did in Kenya, so it is unknown how the Oromo compare with the Kalenjin in that respect, but it is clear that these two groups both embrace running as a way of life. “You have all these kids running,” says Pitsiladis, “and then a boy or girl sees that they can run faster than the others. You absolutely must have the right genes. You must choose your parents correctly, but you have thousands of kids running and the cream rises to the top. After ten years of work, I have to say that this is a socioeconomic phenomenon.”