The Chinese did take up swimming in a big way, and won lots of medals at the World Championships (back in the 90s?); they were touted to be the next big thing. Until the women all started failing their doping tests. They seem to have given up now.
Nepal does have extraordinary endurance athletes, just not for Olympic sports: the Sherpas that haul everyone else up the Himalayas are Nepalese.
Do you really think the Chinese ‘gave up’? No way they just gave up on a big olympic sport like swimming, well maybe you are joking. They had to give up the drugs (very likely EPO and others, boosting level of red blood cells to allow them to carry more oxygen) which provided the artificial boost they needed to compete with Caucasians in the sport. I also remember in the 1990s some unknown Chinese middle/long-distance runners at the time also beat our Olympic gold medal woman’s hope, still pisses me off, the story was the coach was feeding them snakes blood 
. The two medallists from China disappeared after that.
bababa: Well that’s what I mean. Those Sherpas are obviously ridiculously fit, yet they’re not a presence at the Olympics. Why?
I’ve got that book sitting on my shelf. If we ship it out one of you guys is welcome to it after I’ve read it, but you might be waiting a while!
I’d say the diversity of nations who excel in particular sports has a lot to do with the pool of potential candidates in any one country. What chance does Nepal have in producing Olympic swimmers when there are (at a guess) very few swimming pools in Nepal? In Hungary (i.e. former communist state) Olympic swimming pools are widely available.
Our constant shame in the UK is our inability to produce Wimbledon winners, and there has been a lot of work done promoting the sport to children in order to work ahead and fix this problem. Up to about 50 or 60 years ago tennis was much more popular as a middle class sport and it was fashionable to have a tennis court in your grounds, but it’s gone out of fashion and the tennis champions have disappeared with it.
Also, very often a country’s ability to produce Olympic competitors is directly related to the amount of money said country is willing to put into promoting the sport at ground roots level. Olympic athletes here constantly used to bemoan the lack of governmental support and say they have to rely on corporate sponsorship. Others have said how they both work to support themselves and train ridiculous numbers of hours a week.
I recall reading too, as a parallel example, how Finland is now producing a disproportionate amount of world class musicians for such a small country and that this is due to the educational focus on music (they have lots of music-based schools and lots of after-school music tuition available).
That’s pretty simple. Genetics play a part but an extremely large part is the sports training that an athlete receives while growing.
Examples
American women are relatively dominant (especially in team sports) because the US enacted title IV in the 70’s which dramatically increased sports funding in junior high and high school sports for women.
Blacks in the US suddenly didn’t become less genetically adapted for baseball. They have simply stopped playing baseball as kids. It was common in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s for kids to play in the sandlot (open urban space) with any kind of stick and ball. Now they rarely play baseball.
What sport do blacks plays in the US? They play basketball everyday. this is of course a generalization but it’s also relatively true. And the blacks dominate basketball because of it.
Who dominates baseball? Whites that have grown up playing in expensive leagues since they were 7. And wait for it. Wait for it. latin blacks (dominican, cuban, venezualan, columbian, puerto rican, etc…) that play baseball everyday as kids and enter baseball academies at a young age also dominate baseball currently.
It’s not because of a genetic difference between latin blacks and american blacks. It’s simply due to the exposure and training that they receive as children. And this is true even among different races although there is undoubtedly some advantage due to genetics.
Petrichor: How much funding goes into running for East Africans? I just find it interesting that the Chinese can’t compete in swimming. There’s obviously tons of funding for sports in China and they had a good crack at it a few years ago (until they were caught doping), so I wonder what’s going on there.
Abacus: Again though, I would have thought that there’d be a fairly high transference in fitness from being a porter in the mountains to long distance running and that of all sports, running probably requires far less active coaching than many others that have a very high skill component. I just wonder what’s going on in that situation. If East African nations can produce top class runners, why not Nepal or Peru?
It still comes down to running at a young age. I’ve been to Peru and I never saw anyone running. Same as Nepal I’m guessing. IF they started running (and I’m talking about a significant portion of the population) like the kenyans then you would get some great runners in those countries. But instead you get elite porters because that is what they start training to do when they are teenagers.
The problem with China is that there is funding at the top for sports (only for the seemingly elite child athletes) but most of the population doesn’t play any sports as children and are malnourished. Without thinking of all the reasons/issues, if china had the same child nutrition and athletics programs as the US then its sheer numbers would lead world sport domination. But an overwhelming majority of the population grows up malnourished playing no sports.
Abacus: Maybe rightly so regarding the Sherpa porters. I was just wondering about what sort of transference there might have been.
Sure, most of the Chinese population is malnourished and doesn’t do sport. China still manages to dominate in particular sports though, so your points obviously don’t affect those successes. Why? Why not swimming then, especially given that swimming is a sport where an athlete can win multiple medals (so there’s big bang for the training buck)? They were clearly trying to make moves into swimming a few years back, so there must be some level of will there.
Well, I did say, very often it’s related to the amount of money a government puts in, not always! But think of the Tarahumara, the Running People of the Copper Canyons in Mexico. No Olympic athletes produced by them yet they have the same culture of long distance running of the East Africans, if not to a greater extent. But they’re essentially and through choice cut off culturally from the rest of the world and very poor in our terms. I don’t know what the financial situation is for East Africans, but someone somewhere is encouraging them to compete and at least paying their airfares. Contrary to popular Western media’s image of Africa, they aren’t all starving in the desert.
But I also agree partly with Abacus. In India, Pakistan and the West Indies cricket is the sport of the street, just as soccer is here. If someone is born with the physical capability to be a champion, they still need to be in an environment to learn the sport, then have the opportunity to have their passion supported so they don’t have to spend time earning money to live. I think genetics plays a role, but it isn’t the whole picture by any means.
What’s the cultural attitude towards swimming in China? I read in the last Lonely Planet that it wasn’t wise to swim in deep river holes in front of Taiwanese people because they can think that if you can do it, they can too, and lots drown each year. Here in the UK swimming is a national curriculum PE activity. Swimming lessons are over-subscribed at local pools. I’d say it’s only about 10% of children who don’t ever learn to swim at least enough to keep themselves from drowning in a swimming pool. Is the same true in China and Taiwan? (This is actually a practical question for me too as I want to find a swimming club for my son when we come out in the summer.)
Petrichor: Anecdotally, a very significant percentage of people in Taiwan can’t swim. My wife can swim very basically, but is terrified of water. One of the worst decisions I ever made with her was letting her do the Sun Moon Lake swim with me and my friends in 2008. She told me she could do it, and I didn’t know she was scared of deep water until the event. She freaked out at the start as soon as she couldn’t touch the bottom. Then, we were getting passed by little kids and geriatrics, so about 1km in, I tied her buoancy device to mine and towed her the remaining 2.2km or whatever it was. Holy shit. We did a scuba diving course at the beginning of last year and she was freaking out, but she eventually got over her fear and loved the diving. That said, I don’t think she’d be able to just go swimming now.
Even still, this misses the point. How many people in Romania or Bulgaria can lift 100kg over their heads? Yet they have produced plenty of freakin’ amazing lifters. How many people in China can do an iron cross? Shit, how many can even do one pullup in the park? Yet how do they produce their gymnasts then? How many have access to firearms? Yet didn’t they make a move into shooting at the past couple of Olympics? I thought that was weird. I thought every medalist would surely have been a possum hunter from Arkansas or one of those vigilantes patrolling the Mexican border or something of the sort.
China takes the opposite approach to the US (and western nations) in producing their athletes (similar to the USSR in the 70’s and 80’s). In the US most kids have access to sports (not all sports but sports in general) and adequate funding for the basics (for instance the inner city has basketball courts everywhere and they produce basketball players). China instead selects supposedly elite child athletes and they go to boarding schools where they have the best nutrition and coaching. So the US ends up with the best Olympic program due to massive numbers of athletes to choose from (biggest developed country and tons of money spent on youth sports). China due to huge basic country differences catches up with better training for a select few.
The East Africans are able to exploit their genetic advantage by youth programs and races throughout their countries. Running is an extremely cheap sport to compete in (and to organize races locally) until travel becomes involved. But many are trained and only the elite get the funding to travel.
Abacus: Define best Olympic programme though. The IOC ranks nations based upon total number of gold medals. China won the gold medal count at the last Olympics. If, on the other hand, we look at a system based more upon widespread participation, then countries with large populations (meaning both the U.S. and China) typically do not fare as well on a per-capita gold medal basis.
Anyway, again, none of this answers my question. If China runs an elite programme, and they have previously tried to target swimming, why have they failed to become even remotely close to other nations in swimming? They’ve managed to do so in other sports. Surely, producing great swimmers should be approximately as easy or difficult as producing great athletes in other fields. It obviously wasn’t for lack of trying or funding.
Guy I T, your wife seems to make up for lack of skills with guts plus a certain amount of recklessness (and a clear trust in you to help her out).
If you look at this http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/medals?discId=39 you’ll see that China didn’t do so badly. Not great, I admit, but it isn’t like they didn’t get any medals. What does stand out is that the rich Western countries dominate.
It isn’t possible to answer your question without good knowledge of what actually goes on in the Chinese government’s sports programme. Who knows? Maybe swimming isn’t as prestigious as gymnastics? Maybe if you’re going to prepare your child to compete for a place in a training programme it’s a lot harder to get them started in swimming because there aren’t many swimming pools in rural China? Could be lots of reasons.
Look how badly Russia is doing now in the Olympics compared to the Communist era, when there was a huge governmental push to show the rest of the world how Communism was the perfect way to run a society.
I answered this question already…drugs. They need drugs to make up for the average lack of genetic advantage.
theregister.co.uk/2006/08/25 … _swimming/ (Let’s look at the issue of what actually makes a good swimmer!)
When they had drugs to make up the deficit (think East Germany/Romania/USSR/China) they perform equally or outperform. It wasn’t the so called hot housing that was key. But as soon as stricter drug testing comes in many of their top talents in these disciplines disappear.
When it comes to the olympics you are competing with the atheletes with the best genetic advantage and the best training the world over, the tiniest advantage will mean the gold or nothing. The illegal drugs gave them that advantage that 1000s of hours of training could not.
To mention hot housing again, it only works partially, they use other methods to boost their medal counts like drugs and underage participation such as in gymnastics.
I’ve never said that genetics wasn’t part of the equation. My main point has been that a country or race of people can have genetics that give them a small advantage but without youth training they won’t produce great athletes.
Abacus you’ve made some good points through this thread and it is true that we don’t know their selection criteria for swimmers in China, but all else being pretty much equal, you cannot squeeze apple juice out of an orange. Meaning its the genetics that’s gives the extra boost between winner and loser.
Your point above alludes the ‘hidden Olympians’, people with genetic propensity for greatness in a sport that has not be utilised. The situation in China is most likely reversed, and that is why they struggle with olmypic medals for swimming, they are swimming against the genetic tide.
Look at Tour De France winners, if we discount drugs (a big if), surely genetics is the key (remember genetics is not only heridetary, your genes can be altered subtly as you age, something may have happened with Lance Armstrong following his chemotherapy, that is if he didn’t take drugs). As these Tour de France champions win a complex and long endurance race year after year, are we to think that this guy year after year is training better than everybody else…I think not!
If that was true you would expect to see the taller nations dominating the swimming. According to your chart (this chart, I mean this chart 
http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/publish/height-chart.shtml, the tallest nations are the Scandanavians and the Dutch. How many medals did they get?
Why a small advantage? Perhaps the training gives them a small advantage and the genetics a big one. It would depend on the genetics of all the athletes competing. If there was a great genetic disparity then a great superiorty in training would be required to make up for that by those genetically inferior for that field of study or practice.
This is all obvious is it not? 
Most potential is a result of G*E interactons and modern genetists accepts this. Very little is determined solely on environment and very little solely on genetics. Get individuals with the best genetic potential coupled with the best environment and you have a winner; I don’t see where there is any disagreement in this?
For example look at the latest UFC light heavyweight winner (john bones Jones). Three years of training and he destroys and dominates a man called Shogun who has many many years experience behind him with some of the best training the world can offer. It looked like a man fighting against a child.
Your example is terrible. He was a national JUCO (2 year colleges) wrestling champion. That is the kind of athletic training that I’m talking about at a young age and it shouldn’t be a surprise that those skills transferred to mixed martial arts.
Without some sort of athletic training in adolescence it will be very unlikely to be an elite athlete. Genes no doubt plays a small part but if a race has a big enough population (for example China or even the US) there are potentially elite athletes in every sport. Take Yao Ming for example.