No proof sporting success is genetic according to academic

FOR a self-confessed "failed volleyball player", Yannis Pitsiladis has made quite a success of his sporting career. In fact, in terms of worldwide impact, he is now arguably more influential than anyone else in Scottish sport. The Glasgow University lecturer can walk unnoticed down Byres Road, but is instantly recognisable in parts of Jamaica, Kenya, and Ethiopia: the parts where some of the greatest athletes on the planet live and work.

His mission, begun a decade ago, was to find out if there was a scientific basis to a presumption that was becoming increasingly widespread: that sporting success is in the genes. That blacks are innately superior at sprinting and endurance running, for example, while whites have a racially inherited advantage in swimming.

When he set off to collect DNA samples from as many of the world's leading sportsmen and women as possible, the Greek academic thought he would be able to clarify matters; that sooner or later he would find the genetic differences that give Jamaican sprinters or Ethiopian marathon runners the edge over their Caucasian rivals. But instead of getting clearer, the picture has become far more muddied. Now, far from isolating any genes which may influence racial differences in sporting prowess, he is increasingly convinced that such genes do not exist.

"We started because students would ask during lectures: 'Why do these phenomena exist? Why can't whites run? Why are all the top basketball players in the NBA black?'," Pitsiladis explains. "And if you look at the research a decade ago, you'll find statements in the literature that it must be genetic; that Kenyan distance runners, for example, must have the proper genes.

"Until I started, not a single African's genetics had been looked at from the point of view of performance. No black athlete had given DNA and had their genes looked at. All the knowledge we thought we had about genetics and performance was based on an assumption.

"So Pitsiladis thought he'd put his rucksack on, go around the world and try and find some of these guys. And collect some DNA, which no-one had even bothered to do before.

"I thought it was going to be a confirmatory analysis - find these guys, come back, look at these genes, find the ones that are important and yippee we've got a solution. So now we have the only athlete bio bank of this quality anywhere in the world, and a decade on, we're still trying to find any kind of genetic explanation for what we are seeing on the running track."

As he worked in Africa and then the Caribbean, Pitsiladis realised there was a central aspect of the notion of inherited superiority that just did not make sense.If being black gives you an athletic advantage, surely those who are 'less black' - with a mixed racial inheritance - will have a smaller advantage? His studies suggested that was not the case.

"Genetically, Ethiopia is made up almost equally of African, Eurasian and the rest. That's historical. If African, and therefore black, is what is required, Ethiopia was the perfect place to do the study.

"Looking at mitochondrial genes (from the mother] and Y-chromosome genes (from the father] we can say how African or non-African you are. My simplistic, very naive question was would the top runners from Ethiopia have an African background greater than that of the general Ethiopian population? So we collected samples from the general population and from the athletes.

"The idea was that 'Africans' would be a majority of the athletes. We didn't find that. There were individuals within the Ethiopian Olympic team who had genes more frequently found in Europe. So that dispelled that myth.

"Then we went to Kenya. Although we refer to an East African running phenomenon, the Kenyans are very different to the Ethiopians - they are very, very African. There again we didn't find any major differences between the athletes and the general population.

"Then when you look at the sprinters it becomes even more interesting. We looked at the Jamaican athletes. We find that 99 per cent of the Jamaican athletes are African. We did the same study looking at the best US sprinters, and found roughly ten per cent was non-African.

"That was from the mother's side, and there haven't been many white mothers in those athletes' family trees. Now we're looking at the father's side.

"If African is the important bit, there has been some mixture from the father's side in Jamaica and in the US, so they're diluting their African inheritance. But they're not. It's the Jamaican sprint phenomenon, not the Nigerian one. The Nigerians are still very good, but although the Nigerians are more African on both sides (mother and father], it's the Jamaicans who have the greater success. And that gives me more ammunition for disputing the stereotypical race myth."

Client confidentiality means that Pitsiladis cannot reveal the names of the athletes whose samples are stored in his bio bank, but he is happy that he has a significant percentage of the sports stars who matter. He knows that only by testing many more athletes could he come close to a definitive proof that racial inheritance does not guarantee success or failure in a given sport, but he is convinced nonetheless that all his work so far points to that conclusion. "Those who critique my work would say you're never going to find the genes for sprinting, because to find them you would need to have 100,000 sprinters like Usain Bolt, 100,000 sprinters that are Caucasian, look at their genes, and then you could find something. That can never happen.But some individuals are so key, so whenever an exceptional athlete appears, especially if he is non-black, I'll try and look at his genetics."

So what is the key to sporting success? Some genetically inherited ability is important - tallness and long legs, for example, are useful attributes if you want to be a sprinter - but Pitsiladis thinks that our habit of noticing the colour of successful athletes' skin can blind us to something else they have in common. That when we see Kenyans finish one-two-three in the steeplechase, we notice they are black, all right, but do not take into account more relevant environmental factors.

"When I go out to Ethiopia, Kenya, Jamaica, it's so obvious. Wherever you look there are people running, and the African way of life. My children live less than a mile from school - we drive them. In Kenya, a five-year-old will run to school. When we test them, they are fitter than some of our athletes. How can it be genetics?

"If I was the performance director of UK Athletics, I would get someone like me to come down and speak to the young aspiring athletes. I would say to them - all of them, including the white kids - 'Go into sprinting. Don't worry because you're white. It's got nothing to do with the colour of your skin'.

"But what I would say in addition, which they may not want to hear, is that what appears to produce the quality guys assuming they have the right genes is how hungry they are. And often that is dictated by how hard their living conditions are.

"Glasgow historically has been successful at producing boxers, for example. Why? Because there are some rough areas of Glasgow that produce the talented boxers - not the West End. That's common sense.

"Most of my efforts have been in athletics, but we're finding the same thing in swimming. In fact it appears that in swimming genetics has even less of an important role than socio-economics. In Jamaica and Kenya how many swimming pools do you find?

"Or, to go back to track and field, Usain Bolt is incredibly gifted, sure, but he trains incredibly hard. He doesn't wake up in the morning and say 'I'm going to sprint in the Olympics'.

"Or another good example is Kenenisa Bekele, one of the greatest distance runners of all time. The amount of training these guys do, how hard they train, is what differentiates them.

"It's phenomenal. Every hour of the day is related to how they can train harder, nothing else. And the training these guys do daily - I would argue that the majority of Western athletes wouldn't do as a performance, let alone as a training exercise.

"On a track in Kenya, say, you have a great number of Olympians and major athletes all there at one time. They're all watching each other and pushing each other all the time. Some of them are earning lots of money, but they're living in camps with no electricity, no water, that are horrible, dirty, awful."I remember saying to one of them 'Why are you staying here? This is a pretty awful place.'

"He said: 'See that beautiful house up there on the mountain? That's my house. If I live there I'll become fat. Here, I'm sharing a room with a 17-year-old who wants to kick my backside. I'm not going to let him do that.'

"And he stays hungry."