How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford

Author:Adam Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Black Power

The last White man to win the hundred-meter final at the Olympics was Allan Wells in 1980. It was the Moscow games, and owing to the intensity of the Cold War, the US had boycotted, and their elite sprinters were absent. Including Wells, there were five White men in that starting lineup, as well as two Cubans and a Frenchman of African descent. The bronze medal was also taken by a White man, Petar Petrov, a Bulgarian whose personal best was 10.13 seconds. Though unknowable, it is likely that had US athletes been present, Wells, a Scot, would not have made the final eight, as his personal best was 10.11. Not only was this the last time a White man won the Olympic hundred meters, it was the last time that White men competed in the final and the last race in which the winning time was above ten seconds. Since that pistol fired in Moscow in 1980, fifty-eight sprinters started the hundred-meter final. As I write these words, more than a year ahead of the COVID-19-delayed Olympics in Tokyo set for 2021, I can say that I’m confident that the winner will again be a dark-skinned man of recent African descent.

The men’s hundred-meter final in the Olympics is the most prestigious race on Earth. Every four years, it is the formal measurement of the fastest a human can run over the shortest agreed distance, on the biggest stage available, and billions look on. The huge growth in the popularity of sport in the modern era, combined with global mass media, has meant that we can see people of every nation, every color and creed, compete in myriad competitions. The Olympics holds principles of international unity at its heart. Those iconic five interlocked rings on the Olympic flag represent the five continents—Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas. The colors of the rings in the modern era are now nonspecific, though prior to 1951, Europe was explicitly linked to the blue ring, Australasia with the green, the Americas red, Asia yellow, and Africa black.

There are noble principles at the heart of modern sporting contests. The Olympic motto is Faster, Higher, Stronger, and it is a spectacle to showcase talent, hard work, healthy competition, and the struggle not for victory but simply to have taken part. As viewers, we see great entertainment in people at their physical zenith locked in the drama of intense conflict bound by strict rules.

However, these honorable values mask a lot of inequity. In sport, there is vast inequality of opportunity and thus of outcome. Not everyone has access to the same facilities and riches required to be successful in sport. Not all children have parents or caregivers wealthy enough to be able to sacrifice hour upon hour, day after day so that they can put in the training required to compete. Not all countries have the same cultural interests in specific sports. And as for the fundamental biology, sport, far from being a great

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