Here's the kind of statistic that nobody else counts: on NBC's list of 208 American Olympic medal winners, I find five Spanish surnames, or 2.4%. That's compared to approaching 20% of the relevant age cohort is Spanish-surnamed.
1. Leo Manzano won the silver in the men's 1500m run, which is traditionally a glamor event
2. Women's water polo veteran Brenda Villa won a gold -- As a loyal California, I've tried hard to like water polo, but it's not much of a TV sport, to say the least.
3. Marlen Esparza won a bronze in women's boxing - no comment
4. Danell Leyva, a Cuban, won a medal in men's gymnastics all-around, which is cool. Men's gymnastics is awesome (here's Epke Zonderland's triple release routine), although it lacks the car-crash fascination of women's gymnastics.
5. Amy Rodriguez, who is a Cameron Diaz-style half Cuban, won a gold with women's soccer.
A bunch of other medal-winners with non-Hispanic surnames are part Hispanic, such as swimmer Ryan Lochte, whose mother is Cuban, and basketball player Carmelo Anthony whose mother is Puerto Rican. But, if you sum up all the fractions, it comes out to about the same thing as just counting surnames.
This is a particularly low percentage because Californians are traditionally so over-represented on the U.S. Olympic team.
Anyway, this points out a theme that I've been bringing up for a decade or more, which is the remarkable lack of high achievers among the Hispanic Tidal Wave.
Spanish surnamed Mexican medal winners: 29 (21 gold, 5 silver, 3 bronze)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand African-Americans won more than a quarter of the gold medals won by the USA. In:
ReplyDeleteAthletics
Basketball
Boxing
Gymnastics
Tennis
Wrestling
A black american was also part of a gold winning relay team in swimming.
Hispanics do not always have Spanish surnames.
ReplyDeleteMexico won 7 medals in this Olympics : 1 gold, 3 silver, 3 bronze. The gold came in the sport that Hispanics care the most about by far: Soccer or International Football. That the win came over perennial favorites Brazil was icing on the cake.
ReplyDeleteSo how the hell has this wave of mediocre population manage to totally screw over the good ole US of A? I'd really like to see what this nation (or at least this land mass) looks like one hundred years from now.
ReplyDeleteI am sure that illegal immigrants in the US will excel and contribute in more economically important areas, like Computers or Space technology or Oil Exploration, and so forth.
ReplyDeleteRanking the Olympic medalists by their surnames, the big winners are:
ReplyDelete1. Anglo
2. Slavic
3. Chinese
The white-majority Anglosphere (US, UK, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, IRELAND) won 89 of the 302 gold medals awarded.
ReplyDeleteThe former Soviet Bloc won 65, but that does not include the erstwhile Olympic power East Germany which no longer exists.
The Eurozone nations won 40 golds, China 38.
The Muslim nations together won 18 golds while Hindus won zero.
Africa won 11 golds while the Caribbean nations together won 13.
Latin America, minus the Caribbean, won 7 gold medals of which Brazil won 3.
Univision reports Mexican reaction to their epic soccer win:
ReplyDelete"México paralizado por victoria olímpica"
Why work when you can celebrate?
Counting only golds is stupid. In most events, the difference between gold, silver and bronze is well accounted for by a statistical noise. E.g., Canada may have been simply unlucky this year (1 gold, 17 others).
ReplyDeleteHomos have a sexual identity but chose a label that isn't sexual: gay.
ReplyDeleteSo, maybe race-ists should have a label that isn't directly related to their views. How about 'Real'?
Funny... in the past homos were in the closet and blackmailed about their gayness, but today closet race-ists are blackmailed by Jews and gays.
The biggest losers by far in the Olympics continue to be the nations of the Indian subcontinent. With a total population of 1700 million or almost a quarter of the world's population, their share of the 302 gold medals awarded is ZERO. Of the total 906 medals awarded they won 6.
ReplyDeleteEast Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) with a population around 1600 million won 62 gold medals, about 20% of the total awarded. Which is close to their 22% share of the world's population.
People of African ancestry, who number close to 1000 million won around 40 gold medals by my estimate, or 13% of the total available, also very close to their 14% share of the global population. The great majority of these medals were won by the small fraction of Africans who live in the American Continent.
The paradigm shift is coming.
ReplyDeleteOf the medals won by Muslims the great majority were won by the Turkic people. From Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia. It is quite possible that some, if not all, of Iran's 4 gold medals were won by its large Azeri Turk minority. I will have to check on that though.
ReplyDeleteNote from history that Turkic slaves eventually became the sword of Islam, and after the Mongols ended Arab hegemony with the defeat and destruction of the arab caliphate in Baghdad the Turks replaced them as the Caliphs and founders of ruling dynasties from the Moghuls of India to the Safavids of Persia to the Mamluks of Egypt to the Ottomans of Turkey.
I am Lugash.
ReplyDeleteOT: Justice Department sez an illegal immigrant can't get a law license because it's a public benefit:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immigrant-lawyer-20120813,0,2182329.story
I wonder what would happen if an illegal made an Olympic team.
I am Lugash.
The European Union nations won 92 gold medals which is more than the combined Chimerican (China / US) total of 86
ReplyDeleteWhat about Jewish surnames ?
ReplyDeleteAppears Israel did even worse than Norway in these Summer games:
"Israel completed its below-par participation in the London Olympics on Sunday, with marathon runner Zohar Zemiro finishing in a very disappointing 81st position.
As expected, those final events left Israel without a medal at the Olympics for the first time since Seoul in 1988."
For UK gold medalists I think I have counted correctly.
ReplyDelete29 golds
2 for a Somlai immigrant in distance running (HBD again)
2 for blacks in boxing
1 for half white/half black the heptathlon (HBD)
As far as I can tell all the rest are for indigenous British athletes although you wouldn't guess that from the coverage.
Sailing (1), rowing (4), triathlon, equestrian (3), bantam weight boxing, long jump, canoeing, cycling (5), tennis.
None in swimming which is unusual. Also, you would think that British women had won everything. Not so, both genders performed well.
I cannot recall a South Asian winning anything (HBD) and they are much more numerous than blacks.
The opening ceremony had almost no Asian participation, but blacks were hugely over-represented.
For New Zealand, 5 golds, four in rowing, one in sailing. One of the competitors was clearly of partly Maori heritage. All the others looked white.
Valerie Adams, half English half Tongan national heroine, beaten into silver medal position by a woman(??) from Belarus.
Alot of white New Zealanders have a tiny shot of Maori and may call themselves Maori, but overall, the fact remains that Islanders and Maori are overrepresented in the rugby team. Rugby vies with Christianity as the national religion.
What's your point exactly? The kind of self-ID that's been wrecking well-prospected societies the world over?
ReplyDelete"A shot of Maori" is a rather loose phrase, considering there is not even one full-blooded "Maori" left living nowadays and most self-IDed natives in that country are majority Scots-English-Irish.
The biggest losers by far in the Olympics continue to be the nations of the Indian subcontinent. With a total population of 1700 million or almost a quarter of the world's population, their share of the 302 gold medals awarded is ZERO. Of the total 906 medals awarded they won 6.
ReplyDeleteIndia did well in terms of GDP per capita:
http://www.billmitchell.org/sport/medal_tally_2012.html
What about Jewish surnames ?
ReplyDeleteThere are Jews on the US Olympic team. Like Aly Raisman on the women's gymnastics team.
"What about Jewish surnames ?"
ReplyDeleteJewish medal winners:
Alexandra Raisman USA - 2 gold, 1 bronze
Rebecca Soni USA - 2 gold, 1 silver
Jason Lezak USA - 1 silver
Jessica Fox AUS - 1 silver
Nathan Cohen NZL - 1 gold
Jo Aleh NZL - 1 gold
Total Jewish medal count: 6 gold, 3 silver, 1 bronze
"For UK gold medalists I think I have counted correctly.
ReplyDelete29 golds
2 for a Somlai immigrant in distance running (HBD again)
2 for blacks in boxing
1 for half white/half black the heptathlon (HBD)"
Blacks are only 2% of the population in the UK. So they won 14% of the gold medals, and that too in the internationally competitive sports, not unpopular sports like equestrian, cycling and boat races in which white Brits dominated.
By the way the half-black heptathlon champion aka greatest female athlete would be considered black in the US. Which would make the black contribution 17%. Blacks won ~25% of the gold for the US.
Yes the south asians were almost completely relegated to the background despite being the largest minority in the UK, especially London.
Do the same last name analysis for the National spelling bee, the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the National Forensic League national tournament,, National Academic Quiz Bowl national tournament, or any other high school or college based academic competition.
ReplyDeleteI would be surprised if3% of the participants at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair can be traced back to Mexico.
I've found that Mexicans are quite strong relative to their stature. Maybe the olympics are a case where a cultural bias does exist. If there were races through a 64 inch tunnel, they might be world champs. Many olympic events are contrived and require exotic equipment. Like the Nobel Prize there are hard catagories and fuzzy categories.
ReplyDelete"the remarkable lack of high achievers among the Hispanic Tidal Wave": given the rather impressive feats of Mayans, Incas and so forth, it is a bit of a puzzle. Did the great death rates from Old World diseases after European contact kill off disproportionately the able ones? But why both the intellectually able and the athletically able?
ReplyDeleteSeriously: apart from anything else, these are the people who gave the world maize and the potato, which is a bloody sight more than Europeans of the time managed. What's up?
On Indian sporting non-prowess: The Pittsburgh Pirates funded a national search for pitchers in India. I think there was a $1m award for the best prospect. Unfortunately, they didn't find a single person in the subcontinent who could throw 90mph. Think about that: an entire continent of cricket mad Indians, none of whom can throw a fastball.
ReplyDeletePeople of european ancestry continue to be the biggest winners of gold at the Olympics, winning ~190 out of 302 or 63%.
ReplyDeleteBut if you consider only the internationally competitive events in which many non-eiuropeans compete there is a dramatic drop in proportion of golds won.
The big story in these Olympics is Britain's success. Third in the medals (gold is in fact worth more than silver)... I'm amazed but a little nervous that we will end up a sport-obsessed country like East Germany.
ReplyDeleteOff topic yet on topic - Left blog has conniptions as evil BBC reinforces racial stereotyping by not fainting at the suggestion that black people are better sprinters.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.leftfutures.org/2012/08/bbc-feature-before-olympic-200m-final-amounted-to-far-right-propaganda
This just in from CNN. "In a remarkable display of nationalism, an estimated 20 million Mexicans left America to return to their nation of origin due to their immense pride at having won the Olympic gold medal in soccer. Nearly all vowed never to return to America, noting they could never again debase themselves by living in a country with such poor soccer talent."
ReplyDeleteAnd then I woke up.
I wonder what would happen if an illegal made an Olympic team.
ReplyDeleteUnlikely. Olympians by definition are adept at beating the competition within the rules. Being illegal indicates the person is too much of a loser to be a winner in the first place.
I wanted to see the medal breakdown by sex and country. I can't find that info anywhere - is it banned as sexist?
ReplyDeleteThis was to see what % of Chinese medals came from relatively noncompetitive womens sports vs the much more competitive mens sports.
It would also be interesting to have a list of olympic sports based upon competitiveness. For example, how many people/countries worldwide compete in handball or curling vs running, boxing, wrestling or swimming?
"So how the hell has this wave of mediocre population manage to totally screw over the good ole US of A?"
ReplyDeleteIt hasn't and it didn't. It was the weapon used by the white elites to screw over the rest of us.
You know what people with hispanic surnames DO achieve?
ReplyDeleteLots of kids!
not like white boys!
http://vimeo.com/38463833
ReplyDeleteBert from Sesame Street.
Well, alot of the Calif swimmers were an older generation. Couglin 29 years, Lezack 36 and Ervin 32., Calif is not over represented in Swimming its unrepresented compared to earlier teams way back in 1984 Calif had about 30 member's born or train in the state for La down to 8 or 10. And as mention about 3 were some of the oldest swimmers. Hispanic growth has made la and Orange have a lot less elite swimmers a lot of the top age groupers are from back east now. Tyler Clary was the only Calif swimmer born in the state to medal in the pool in an individual race not a relay while the other person Haley Andersons from No Calif in open water compared that from 12 years ago when Aaron Perisol, K Sandeno and Lenny Kazerburgh medeled in individual events. Sailer ca has gone down in sports and swimming is one of them unless you are Berkeley or USC and you can get swimmers from other states which is hard for age group programs like Mission Viejo which isn't even in a Hispanic area.
ReplyDeleteSpanish surnamed Mexican medal winners: 29 (21 gold, 5 silver, 3 bronze
ReplyDeleteI think Steve's point is about the population of Hispanic immigrants into California, not about Hispanic writ large.
Most people (especially East Coast lefties) honestly equate all things Spanish with uneducated Mestizos and Amerinds, because, for the last 20 years, it's uneducated Mestizos and Amerinds who have been fleeing to America. The Spaniards and educated Mestizos don't migrate; they're doing just fine in Mexico and southward. But it still boggles my mind that Americans can't fathom that many hiSPANics and LATINos are European (culturally and, often, phenotypically).
A female shot putter from Belarus has been stripped of her gold medal after testing positive for an anabolic agent:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2187660/London-2012-Olympics-Nadzeya-Ostapchuk-stripped-gold-medal-failed-drugs-test.html
1. South Asians. By far.
ReplyDelete2. Southeast Asians.
3. Mestizos
4. Arabs
Jews...
but they own the media and much of pro sports industry. They'd rather be owners/managers than be human horses/greyhounds.
"The Muslim nations together won 18 golds while Hindus won zero."
ReplyDeleteNow, we know why Muslims ruled India for so long.
The biggest losers by far in the Olympics continue to be the nations of the Indian subcontinent.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that Sebastian Coe, the greatest non-African middle distance runner by far and possibly the greatest middle distance runner ever, was a quarter Punjabi. Likely some unexploited athletic talent in the subcontinent due to poverty and the lack of any national heroes in Olympic sports.
"The biggest losers by far in the Olympics continue to be the nations of the Indian subcontinent. With a total population of 1700 million or almost a quarter of the world's population, their share of the 302 gold medals awarded is ZERO. Of the total 906 medals awarded they won 6."
ReplyDeleteIn a way, I admire them for not giving a shit. I mean who cares that China won the gold in badminton? Or that UK won golds in equestrian? Or who will care, a week from now, who won the marathon?
We don't even care who won the superbowl or world series two yrs ago.
Sports don't amount to much. Its only long term effect is in the West. White women will worship black males as studs and have more babies with them. But in India, who wins gold or not in diving or whatever means little. Indians are wiser for it.
I hate water bolo. And they all look like babies with them funny headgears.
ReplyDeleteOne of the Hispanic medalists from the US ran around the track with the Mexican flag.
ReplyDeleteSo, that was ... interesting. VDARE has the whole story, for those interested.
The non-reaction is also interesting. America as a nation is pretty much dead, when a medalist nominally from this country can run around the track with another nation's flag and not receive a torrent of criticism and issue an apology. And a "dead" America is one that is focused on me/mine and not on any sort of communal basis, its Italy or Greece writ large.
"The European Union nations won 92 gold medals which is more than the combined Chimerican (China / US) total of 86"
ReplyDeleteChina and the US could field a total of two teams. How many did the EU field, dozens? Having more total athletes there, the EU nations had more chances to have luck on their side.
So how the hell has this wave of mediocre population manage to totally screw over the good ole US of A? I'd really like to see what this nation (or at least this land mass) looks like one hundred years from now.
ReplyDeleteSame way the common cold screws over an AIDS patient.
"So how the hell has this wave of mediocre population manage to totally screw over the good ole US of A? I'd really like to see what this nation (or at least this land mass) looks like one hundred years from now."
ReplyDeleteBrazil, Mexico, China, or perhaps even America.
Could make obvious joke about expanding Olympic sports to include the "Breaking Into A Car And Stealing The GPS",but isteve readers dont want to see that! OT,but Chad Ochocinco apparently is a political animal as he seems to have had a big arguement with his new wife about the Obama health care plan:they had strongly differing views about birth control.
ReplyDelete"spanish-surnamed US medal winners"
ReplyDeletethere were some on the US softball teams, but IOC dropped softball after 2008.
"I wonder what would happen if an illegal made an Olympic team."
there is some thought that leo manzano actually is an illegal alien. i'm not sure the seriousness of any claims though.
"None in swimming which is unusual."
that's not unusual. the UK has a relatively weak national swimming program. back in 2001 or 2002 when the british were seeking an american or australian to come in and run british swimming, hoping that they could improve it dramatically, i remember the americans coming back and saying there were only 5 or 6 50 meter pools in all of britain. there were 4 50 meter pools in pittsburgh when i grew up in the 80s and 90s. so just one american city had almost as many as the UK.
pools for competitive swimming are actually common, but 50 meter pools, the internation distance, are not common in many nations.
that's ok. the UK is dead serious about track & field, it's something of a national love affair to them. and boxing is their national sport. the british invented boxing and boxing today is conducted under marquess of queensberry rules.
they have good programs in both.
"Valerie Adams, half English half Tongan national heroine, beaten into silver medal position by a woman(??) from Belarus."
ReplyDeletehaha. indeed. woman (?) from belarus. in fact nadzeya ostapchuk just tested positive for steroids and was stripped. valerie adams, who appears to be part european and part islander, was declared the winner of the women's shotput and all other competitors were moved up 1 spot in the final rankings accordingly.
the truth though is that most of these athletes are on drugs. they're smart and cycle their drug use so that WADA rarely catches them. for example, i simply assume most of the olympic lifters are on drugs and i don't even bother trying to make educated guesses about who is and who isn't like i do in track & field. i go in under the assumption the top guys are all on drugs, because they have to be if they want to be competitive.
dmitry klokov, one of the favorites to win 105 KG, simply dropped out of the olympic tournament before it happened, because he knew he timed his drug cycle wrong and would rather avoid a positive drug test and a 5 year ban, than compete in the event he had trained 10 years for.
what's interesting to me is how obvious the drug use is in some of the competitors in track & field. for example, the receeding hairlines on so many of the african women on the US team who are only in their 20s and early 30s. all the artificial adrogens they are on are attacking their hair follicles. and then there was lashinda demus and her ugly mug. whenever she grimmaced and flashed those braces, ugh. the reason she has adult braces is because HGH causes accelerated growth in your jaw and teeth.
and what's the deal with 15 year old katie ledecky going bald? that could be horrible genetic luck and early onset female alopecia, or it could be more HRT. which i don't like thinking about, because the US swim team is pretty clean in general. only a few minor positive tests over 40 years. HRT for a 15 year old girl? awful stuff.
10 years from now when lots of the truth comes out and we're having our marion jones moments, we'll look back on video from 2012 and slap our foreheads and ask "How could we have missed the obvious truth staring at us in broad daylight?"
In order to root out the white racism holding back Mestizo achievement, the DoJ should start an inquiry led by Xochotil Hinojosa.
ReplyDeleteLeo Manzano sounds more Italian than Spanish.
ReplyDelete"Leo Manzano sounds more Italian than Spanish."
ReplyDeleteAnd if he grew a mustache, he'd look like Super Mario. But, still, as Italian as he seems, he is identified as Mexican.
I'm glad you said it. I'll take it a step further - water polo is extremely boring to watch. Maybe it's because swimming is so slow in comparison to the similar sports such as soccer, hockey and basketball, which also require getting an object into the opponent's "castle". This slow speed means the tactics and strategies used in those other sports are can't be used in water polo. So basically, it always winds down to a "half-court" offense in which a person treads water and repeatedly pretends to throw the ball toward the net, and then instead passes it to a teammate who does the same thing, until one eventually comes up with the courage to actually throw the darned thing.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, the refs are blowing their whistles non-stop as the players gouge, scratch, kick, hit, choke and abuse each other, but the whistles generally mean nothing.
"Sports don't amount to much. Its only long term effect is in the West. White women will worship black males as studs and have more babies with them."
ReplyDeleteUhh, sure...
I wrote a post on the British team but it fell into the interhole.
ReplyDelete114 Brits won 65 medals in the Olympics. Eight of the medalists, winning ten medals (one of them a team medal in gymnastics), were non-white. All of the non-white medalists were black. No South Asians or Orientals won medals for GB.
The non-white medalists:
1) Mo Farah
2) Louis Smith
3) Jessica Ennis
4) Nicola Adams
5) Anthony Joshua
6) Christine Ohuruogo
7) Anthony Ogogo
8) Lutalo Muhammad
Lutalo Muhammad, who won a bronze in Taekwondo, is an interesting case. Ranked 59th worldwide in his sport, he was selected for the British team over Aaron Cook, the current world #1 (they didn't select them via competition). Apparently there were some hard feelings that Cook had trained on his own rather than with the national team (think Harold Abrahams and "Chariots of Fire").
Correcting my above post: two of Great Britain's non-white medalists (Jessica Ennis and Louis Smith) appear to be half white.
ReplyDelete"A female shot putter from Belarus has been stripped of her gold medal after testing positive for an anabolic agent."
ReplyDeleteYou know.. maybe cheating pays off in that you still get your 15 min of fame. Even if you're stripped of the medal, you still got to stand tall and have your national anthem play.
Why would anyone despise water polo?
ReplyDeleteYou suppose journalists--most of whom are liberal--are muted in their criticism of Obama not simply out of ideological loyalty but social fear? Suppose you're a liberal journalist but wanna dig into Obama's wrongdoings. Your colleagues might see you as a turncoat. Your bosses might not promote you. They may not even renew your contract. You will lose friends. Even if you remain a liberal and a good Democrat, if you go after Obama, there may be too much of a social cost. Also, most Americans have been raised to feel morally inferior to blacks. So, if a liberal journalist has black colleagues, he will be afraid to do anything that might offend his colleagues.
ReplyDeleteThere is also the racial angle. Though liberal journalists were supportive of Clinton, he was still a white guy, and so he could be attacked now and then. But if any liberal journalists digs into Obama, he may fear that he'll be seen as a closet 'racist'.
So, the problem of liberal media isn't just ideological conformity but social/professional pressure. Didn't Amity Shales say people wouldn't even ride in the same elevator after she wrote honestly about crime?
Funny... liberals used to rag on white Southerners who refused to drink from the same water fountain as blacks but liberals refuse to ride in the same elevator with people they disagree with.
Liberals used to rag on white soldiers who changed their routes so as not to come upon black officers whom they had to salute, but liberals will not share the same space with ideological enemies or 'turncoats'. They are worse than HUAC.
PS. There are conservatives in the MSM but they know their hiring and firing are determined by liberals who own the industry and outnumber them. So, even conservative journalists are always in 'win approval from the liberal' mode, which is most of them are so wimpy and gimpy.
"Blacks are only 2% of the population in the UK. So they won 14% of the gold medals, and that too in the internationally competitive sports, not unpopular sports like equestrian, cycling and boat races in which white Brits dominated."
ReplyDeleteNo one really knows the racial make-up of modern Britain, but Blacks are alot more than 2% of the under-30's.
UK government statistics are about as reliable as those from N. Korea.
"Eurozone, in contrast, relies on lots of Negroes. France has tons of Negroes, UK has tons of Negroes, Netherlands has tons of Negroes, and even Germany used a Negro to a medal in pole vault. I
ReplyDeletecall that racial cheating."
Holland won 20 medals and, except for a Javanese swimmer, all of them appear to be white natives. No "negroes." Only 8 of Britain's 114 medalists were black. Without its blacks Britain still would have won 55 medals.
Ogogo's and Joshua's medals were a gift from either corrupt or very UK friendly judges. Both should have been eliminated in their first fights. Ogogo was almost knocked out and still got a draw. Joshua had his ears boxed of by Cuban.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to see the medal breakdown by sex and country. I can't find that info anywhere - is it banned as sexist?
ReplyDeleteThe medal tally lists I've seen on Yahoo, the official NBC Oly page, etc. all have breakdowns by sex.
"A shot of Maori" is a rather loose phrase, considering there is not even one full-blooded "Maori" left living nowadays and most self-IDed natives in that country are majority Scots-English-Irish."
ReplyDeleteI agree it's a loose phrase. Anyone less than one eighth Maori looks white and the Maori rugby team has a greater proportion of blonds than the national rugby team.
Having said that, there is a big difference between notional South Island Maori (Ngai Tahu) and brown-skinned Ngati Porou and Tuhoe up North. They all have white ancestry, but look largely Maori.
That's not supposed to matter in New Zealand, but it does!
"Blacks are only 2% of the population in the UK. So they won 14% of the gold medals, and that too in the internationally competitive sports, not unpopular sports like equestrian, cycling and boat races in which white Brits dominated."
I suspect that Americans pretend to be less class-conscious than they really are. The British don't even pretend. The way you speak, the furniture you buy and the sports to which you are exposed all depend on class. New Zealand claims to be a classless society, but nothing could be further from the truth. Soccer (overwhelmingly white) is becoming more popular among richer families who don't want to see Johnnie decked by a ten-foot Tongan.
I suspect some people who claim Maori ancestry have none at all. Also some more genuine Maori might reject certain sports as being too Pakeha.
In Britain, certain prominent politicians most notably Lord Moynihan is claiming that there are too many privately educated people in Team GB and want it to be more like the repulsive soccer team.
Correcting my above post: two of Great Britain's non-white medalists (Jessica Ennis and Louis Smith) appear to be half white.
ReplyDeleteYes. A lot of the apparent "black" over-representation in sports comes from counting mixed race people as black.
Also, Steve, just in case you a still reading the comments on this entry, New Zealand might be fruitful area for research. The schools here are all assigned a decile depending how wealthy or poor the children's parents are. The racial make-up of the schools is also listed and league-tables are about to be introduced.
ReplyDeleteAs a loyal California, I've tried hard to like water polo, but it's not much of a TV sport, to say the least.
ReplyDeleteYeah I tried to get into water polo after I learned that it was one of the original sports when the modern Olympics started a hundred or so years ago. In principle it seems like it could be exciting to watch. But it turns out it's mostly just watching guys treading water.
"they didn't find a single person in the subcontinent who could throw 90mph. Think about that: an entire continent of cricket mad Indians, none of whom can throw a fastball"
ReplyDeleteIndia and Pakistan/Bangladesh are not known for their fast bowlers, unsuprisingly the West Indies have been historically fastest, followed by Australia/South Africa - although the current world bowling speed record of 100.3 mph is held by Shoaib Akhtar of Pakistan, aka "the Rawalpindi Express". He's very much an exception, although Pakistan has usually had faster bowlers than India.
then there is the interesting case of what spain actually does in sports.
ReplyDeletethe jon entine argument is that whoever wins the 100 meters on the track is the best athlete. but the money hypothesis, endlessly touted in the US as to why africans "are only interested in football and basketball now", says that salary is the final arbiter of what sports the best athletes play.
spain won zero medals in track, so the entine hypothesis says the evidence is automatically that spaniards are inferior athletes. and probably not just inferior but vastly inferior. in fact, a spaniard did not even appear in the finals of any track event, except for one guy in the 10000, who got 23 out of 26 finishers.
the entine argument says jamaicans are the best athletes in the world, for obvious reasons.
but spain has the best soccer team, the second best basketball team, and the best tennis team. the best spanish athletes are earning 20 million dollars a year in salary, the best jamaican athletes are earning less than 1 million.
spain would clobber jamaica comically in all of these big money ball sports. imagine how badly the spanish basketball team would smash the jamaican basketball team. here, the garcia's and lopez's and rodriguez's would be dunking repeatedly on the heads of the williams's and thompson's and macfarlane's. in soccer spain would beat jamaica 10 to 0 if they actually tried to score as much as they could. although spain is a ball control team and wouldn't bother trying to score that much, so it would be more like a 5 to 0 win without spain having tried hard the entire game. spain has 13 guys in the ATP top 100, so they could send a random player like verdasco or lopez and no jamaican would even be able to win a game let alone a set.
clearly the two hypotheses are in opposition, and clash. but actual hispanics are decent athletes. fake "hispanics" and "latinos" are not.
"Yes. A lot of the apparent "black" over-representation in sports comes from counting mixed race people as black."
ReplyDeleteThey are only "mixed race people" when convenient; I call them MRPWC's. I don't remember any London rioters being refered to, on this board, as "mixed-race."
"A doping free Olympics? Not in London -- and maybe never"
ReplyDeletehttp://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/olympics/2012/writers/sl_price/08/10/2012-olympics-doping/index.html
""He makes me skeptical," Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Thursday afternoon. "It's short of suspicion: I would never go out and say I'm suspicious of his results, but they're so remarkable that even though he is 6-foot-whatever-he-is and runs like a cat rather than a tank in the old steroidal model, the improvement is so far off the curve that you have to wonder if it's entirely natural. I hope it is -- but you wonder. That's the price you pay for allowing this doping to get out of control."
Let's repeat it: As warmed as they are by British wins and hospitality, as popular as they've proven through record TV ratings, these London Games have shown that the Olympics are troubled still. Any radical spike here in time -- think swimmer Ye Shiwen of China in the 400 IM most prominently -- has been cause for speculation about doping. Any dominant performance, except those of Michael Phelps (and why is that, really?), has raised eyebrows if not questions. If it's not John Leonard, the American coach who told The Guardian that Ye's swim was "disturbing" and reminiscent of the legendarily drug-fueled East German swim program, it's Carl Lewis -- the same U.S. track great who questioned Jamaica's drug-testing program after Bolt struck gold in Beijing -- casting yet another gimlet eye on Bolt before these Games.
"It's just ... interesting," Lewis said. "I watch the results like everyone else and wait for time to tell."
And then there are all those sticky associations. After taking the 200 bronze medal on Wednesday night to become the first U.S. woman since, yes, Florence Griffith-Joyner to medal in the both the 100 and 200 (Marion Jones also did it in 2000, but later was stripped of her medals after admitting use of performance-enhancing drugs and lying about it to a grand jury investigating the BALCO scandal), U.S. sprinter Carmelita Jeter addressed her relationship with former agent Mark Block, who is two years into a 10-year suspension for his involvement with doping athletes. "Mark Block is a close friend of mine," Jeter said. "I love him dearly. I love his family."
Block's family includes wife and former Ukrainian sprinter Zhanna Pintusevich-Block, who was connected to BALCO founder Victor Conte and hit with a two-year doping suspension in 2011. Which brings us to Thursday morning, when Conte, a convicted felon, showed up in The Times of London to say he was working with U.S. sprinter Ryan Bailey, who finished fifth in the 100 final here, and bronze-medal-winning U.S. boxer Marlen Esparza; to denigrate the Olympic drug-testing program, which has conducted more than 6,000 tests here; and to estimate that 60 percent of the 10,000 athletes at these Games were using performance-enhancing drugs."
Part of the problem with water polo is the water: it slows everything down, and obscures the view. But take away the water and you've got team handball, which isn't that exciting to watch either. So that's the other part of the problem with water polo.
ReplyDeleteThe guy who got silver behind Bold in the 100M and 200M, Yohan Blake, has gotten caught for doping in the past:
ReplyDeletehttp://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/olympics/2012/writers/sl_price/08/10/2012-olympics-doping/index.html
"What's going on now -- blood-doping, steroids, EPO and human-growth hormone use -- and with whom is anyone's guess, which brought us to Thursday's historic one-two-three finish by Jamaica in the 200. Bolt's runner-up, Yohan Blake at 19.44, was banned for three months in 2009 by Jamaica's anti-doping agency for testing positive for a stimulant, and bronze medalist Warren Weir, 22, in running 19.84 in the final, has now sliced nearly six-tenths of a second off his personal best in the last year.
With all that -- and Lewis and Conte -- in the air, it's no wonder that a reporter stumbled during the post-race press conference, asking Bolt, "Can you assure us that you and the Jamaican drug team --excuse me, track team -- sprinters are drug-free?" Cue widened eyes from Bolt and Co., and guffaws across the packed room, but it was no joke: This was Jamaican sprinting's moment of triumph, yet the atmosphere is still so smoky that the question had to be asked."
Re Truth:"I dont remember any London rioters being referred to as "mixed-race".." An obvious case of istevers wanting to have their cake and eat it,too. Recalls the comment re Wayne Rooney,the soccer star,who is "Irish when they lose and British when they win." Truth,rest assured,there is no doubt the mixed-race were WELL represented in London and did their homies proud!
ReplyDeletebut actual hispanics are decent athletes. fake "hispanics" and "latinos" are not.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of Medals per GDP, Guatemala, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba did better than Spain.
In terms of Medals per Population, Puerto Rico and Cuba did better than Spain.
In terms of Medals per GDP per capita, Colombia, Brazil, and Cuba did better than Spain.
http://www.billmitchell.org/sport/medal_tally_2012.html
How are the public pools in CA these days?
ReplyDeleteIf they are anything like NY's, you never see another champion from home. Whenever NAMs touch a public facility it is destroyed. In the present age, parents have to accompany their kids for protection to anything called public if there is any chance that a NAM element might be there, and NAMs are always searching for areas where there are no NAMs. McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn had a FIFTY MILLION DOLLAR renovation to bathe the NAMs. Its reputation is already ruined - see the video. How can you expect middle class kids to put in hours of practice, if their parents have to be there for the entire duration of it? Gone are the days when small kids could head out with their friends and put in hours messing around while developing skills.
It's Always Sunny In Philidelphia had an episode where the cast is seeking private pool membership because the public pools are such dumps. Some of the characters get wounded in the crossfire from rock fights at the public pool. Doesn't sound too farfetched.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/html5/video?id=8722765&pid=§ion=
Re anonymous,total world jewish medal count: A) I just checked one,Rebecca Soni,purely by chance. They say she isnt Jewish. B)Really dude,find a hobby! Come on! You checked all the affletes in all the white countries to see who have a touch of the (really)Ould Sod in 'em? Do something useful,like,say,masturbation.
ReplyDelete"They are only "mixed race people" when convenient; I call them MRPWC's. I don't remember any London rioters being refered to, on this board, as "mixed-race.""
ReplyDeleteWell gee, Truth - you coulda pointed that out.
The real problem here is how finely we can analyze the data. There is a lot of information out there about various Olympic atheletes that can be used to determine their race. The rioters were - shall we say? - a bit less famous. If you have data with which we can analyze more precisely the race of the rioters, please do present it.
Re doping, one of the big problems seems to be very lenient punishment. Apparently there's only a 2 year ban for getting caught now.
ReplyDeleteJustin Gatlin (who won gold in the 100M in 2004), Dwain Chambers, LaShawn Merritt (who won gold in the 400M in 2008), were caught doping, served their 2 year bans, and were allowed to compete in this summer's Olympics:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/doping-back-in-the-olympic-spotlight-with-new-cases-past-offenders/article4463234/
So they were allowed to keep their past medals, and compete again in the Olympics to pick up more medals. The 2 year ban is not really a punishment since it's too short and presumably they're training and recuperating all the same during that period.
You'd need to implement lifetime bans, or something practically similar, like 10 year bans, and strip any past medals, to curb doping.
@ anon 10:02pm "Hispanics do not always have Spanish surnames."
ReplyDeleteYou mean, for example, George Zimmerman.
"Many olympic events are contrived and require exotic equipment."
ReplyDeleteCan you name me one event which isn't "contrived"?
Overblown WASP/Frog hype with a strong tang of Han and Han bandwagoning and syrupy Slavic sensualism.
I don't know how gold medals translate into successful people. It sure hasn't worked for blacks.
ReplyDeleteThe Olympics has become a nationalist stage where some countries will do anything to win. Others are just happy to be there. I couldn't care less about the medal count.
Spain wasn't a terribly athletic country for much of the 20th Century, and its sports tended to be insular, such as bullfighting. Then the Spanish geared up and won some medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. After that they seem to have moved strongly into big money sports: soccer, basketball, and tennis.
ReplyDelete"Can you name me one event which isn't "contrived"? "
ReplyDeleteRaces, both foot and swimming have been going on since the beginning of time. Same goes for boxing and wrestling. Pretty much all the rest is contrived to create an extravaganza.
Hispanics should lobby for stuff they're good at, like baseball and softball. God knows they cry racism enough, why did they hold back when these were eliminated. I seem to remember a significant number
on the US softball team.
imagine how badly the spanish basketball team would smash the jamaican basketball team. here, the garcia's and lopez's and rodriguez's would be dunking repeatedly on the heads of the williams's and thompson's and macfarlane's. in soccer spain would beat jamaica 10 to 0
ReplyDeleteImagine how badly the Jamaican cricket team would clobber their spanish counterparts, In Baseball the Dominican Republic would humiliate Spain 10-0......
HBD "sceptics comment: -
ReplyDelete"They are only "mixed race people" when convenient; I call them MRPWC's. I don't remember any London rioters being referred to, on this board, as "mixed-race.""
Aging HBD Sceptic:
Of course, most of this is utter crap, with Steve throwing out a hunch, and his band of dittoheads falling on it ravenously. As soon as "Whiskey" joins the fray you know it's over.
I think the thing here is novelty. Men love novelty. Much of what we call beauty (nowadays) isn't beauty, it's just something different.
The comments on this site vary from good to dire. Most of the people are trying to make some contribution to a topic that is hardly discussed at all and yet affects every sphere of human activity.
How does sniping like this add to the debate? Snide little ad-hominem comments merely imply that you have lost the argument. If you can produce well-reasoned counter arguments, then THAT would be helpful.
In a way, I admire them for not giving a shit. I mean who cares that China won the gold in badminton? Or that UK won golds in equestrian? Or who will care, a week from now, who won the marathon?.......in India, who wins gold or not in diving or whatever means little. Indians are wiser for it.
ReplyDeleteDoes India really look like a country of wise people to you? Do you also admire them for not giving a shit where they take a shit?
Actually they do give a shit about the Olympics, Which is why they keep sending large teams to compete.
"Re Truth:"I dont remember any London rioters being referred to as "mixed-race".." An obvious case of istevers wanting to have their cake and eat it,too."
ReplyDeleteAgain, if you know of a good place to find out the precise racial background of each rioter please feel free to point us there. They tend to be a bit less famous than Olympians, for some strange reason.
We analyze the race of each Olympian more precisely because we can.
"then there is the interesting case of what spain actually does in sports.
ReplyDeletethe jon entine argument is that whoever wins the 100 meters on the track is the best athlete. but the money hypothesis, endlessly touted in the US as to why africans "are only interested in football and basketball now", says that salary is the final arbiter of what sports the best athletes play.
spain won zero medals in track, so the entine hypothesis says the evidence is automatically that spaniards are inferior athletes. and probably not just inferior but vastly inferior. in fact, a spaniard did not even appear in the finals of any track event, except for one guy in the 10000, who got 23 out of 26 finishers.
the entine argument says jamaicans are the best athletes in the world, for obvious reasons.
but spain has the best soccer team, the second best basketball team, and the best tennis team. the best spanish athletes are earning 20 million dollars a year in salary, the best jamaican athletes are earning less than 1 million.
spain would clobber jamaica comically in all of these big money ball sports. imagine how badly the spanish basketball team would smash the jamaican basketball team. here, the garcia's and lopez's and rodriguez's would be dunking repeatedly on the heads of the williams's and thompson's and macfarlane's. in soccer spain would beat jamaica 10 to 0 if they actually tried to score as much as they could. although spain is a ball control team and wouldn't bother trying to score that much, so it would be more like a 5 to 0 win without spain having tried hard the entire game. spain has 13 guys in the ATP top 100, so they could send a random player like verdasco or lopez and no jamaican would even be able to win a game let alone a set.
clearly the two hypotheses are in opposition, and clash. but actual hispanics are decent athletes. fake "hispanics" and "latinos" are not."
A pretty insightful post. In fact, today's athletics doesn't represent the real global talent and the ethnic composition in some events is almost comical. People in the industrialized world follow sports with big money, not a sport that you must practice as a hobby, unless you are a top star. However, their lack of participation has an important psychological impact, because it creates an impression that they don't possess "athletic abilities".
"In a way, I admire them for not giving a shit."
ReplyDeleteHeretic! ....me too.
A female shot putter from Belarus has been stripped of her gold medal after testing positive for an anabolic agent.
ReplyDeleteThat's no female. That thing looks like a Hell's Angel on a Harley.
India did well in terms of GDP per capita
ReplyDeleteYou can spin it any way you want but 6 medals (0 gold) out of 906 or 0.007% is absolutely pathetic. For a country that has 17% of the world's population.
Only indians could that take as proof that India is now a budding sports superpower!
I was going to jump in that Lisa Fernandez of Lakewood, CA and UCLA was probably the greatest women softball player ever and that she was obviously a regular Southern California Mexican-American. But when I looked it up on Wikipedia, it turns out her father is Cuban and mother Puerto Rican and they met in New York City.
ReplyDeleteThey are only "mixed race people" when convenient
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you're talking about. I'm the commenter you are responding to and I call mixed-race people mixed-race people, period.
I, and other people around here, commonly notice when "black leaders" are mixed race with a heavy emphasis on the white side. Benjamin Jealous, for example.
Being an obsessive race-hustler yourself I suppose you can't help but imagine that everyone else thinks as you do. You're wrong.
The fact that the West-Africans who do well in sports are almost always West-Africans in Europe or America and not pure-blood West-Africans from West Africa does open the possibility that they do well in spots precisely because they are mixed race.
If being West-African by itself it the ticket to athletic excellence, it's curious that countries like Chad, Cameroon, Senegal, Ghana etc do so dismally at the Olympics. Instead the successful African countries at the Olympics are Ethiopia and South Africa. Not a single medal went to any West African country.
That's a very odd result, if West Africans are the athletic supermen some people make them out to be.
"Do you also admire them for not giving a shit where they take a shit?"
ReplyDeleteHygiene is important. Much more important than the Olympics. I wonder if they pee in the pool, like us hygienic Americans?
I don't like using, or even copying, profanity. Is it just me? It seems so affectations.
You can spin it any way you want but 6 medals (0 gold) out of 906 or 0.007% is absolutely pathetic. For a country that has 17% of the world's population.
ReplyDeleteIt's not spin. It's reasonable to look at these things in terms of things like per capita income since they're basically leisure activities that cost a good deal of money.
Only indians could that take as proof that India is now a budding sports superpower!
ReplyDeleteIt suggests that if their GDP per capita rises, their medal count will rise.
Hygiene is important. Much more important than the Olympics. I wonder if they pee in the pool, like us hygienic Americans?
ReplyDeleteIf hygiene is much more important than the Olympics why is "wise" India doing even worse in that department compared to the rest of the world?
Only an indian would try to draw a favorable comparison of the disgusting hygiene of India with that of America.
I meant "affectatious", apple autofill made a fool of me, but I'm unrelenting. When Steve starts cursing in his posts, I will start cursing in my comments, with tears in my eyes as I mourn the age of civility.
ReplyDeleteDoes India really look like a country of wise people to you? Do you also admire them for not giving a shit where they take a shit?
ReplyDeleteIf hygiene is much more important than the Olympics why is "wise" India doing even worse in that department compared to the rest of the world?
Because the lower castes, known for their terrible hygiene, are the ones breeding the most.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_Americans
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about Indians, but they seem to be flourishing here, even if not one of them can throw a fastball.
I don't know why they have such nasty habits at home, but they seem to assimilate and contribute.
One of the Hispanic medalists from the US ran around the track with the Mexican flag.
ReplyDeleteSo, that was ... interesting. VDARE has the whole story, for those interested.
The non-reaction is also interesting. America as a nation is pretty much dead, when a medalist nominally from this country can run around the track with another nation's flag and not receive a torrent of criticism and issue an apology. And a "dead" America is one that is focused on me/mine and not on any sort of communal basis, its Italy or Greece writ large.
Once in a while Whiskey posts something I agree with 100%. Other than the Italy/Greece thing, since I don't know near enough about those countries to judge.
dearieme said: Seriously: apart from anything else, these are the people who gave the world maize and the potato, which is a bloody sight more than Europeans of the time managed.
ReplyDeleteHunsdon replied: Maybe they used up all their genius inventing maize and the potato? Oh, corn and potatoes were just growing? Never mind.
The biggest underperformers in the medals race:
ReplyDelete1. South Asians. By far.
2. Southeast Asians.
3. Mestizos
4. Arabs
That is very strange that Arabs are so unathletic considering they have a very high-school-jock culture and attitude.
Whites won nothing in 100 m and 200 m sprints. Does that mean white race is shit?
ReplyDeleteNo. So, stop ragging on Indians. So, they don't give a crap about the dumb Olympics. I mean who cares about it anyway? If sports reflects greatness, then Jamaicans are the greatest people on Earth.
It's because Americans and Europeans are so sports-obsessed that they've come to worship the Negro. Since the Negro is athletically superior, white boys and girls suck up to whites. If whites were more like Indians, sports would be less of a deal and blacks wouldn't be worshiped so much.
ReplyDeleteHow about a breakdown of conservative and liberal medal winners. I'll bet most competitors are liberals.
ReplyDeleteOnly indians could that take as proof that India is now a budding sports superpower!
ReplyDeleteIt suggests that if their GDP per capita rises, their medal count will rise.
We've gone over this in this thread already. Ethnic Indians don't do well in rich countries, either - not in Great Britain ( 0/114 British medalists this year were South Asian) and not in the US, where they've won only 3 Olympic medals total, ever (two of them team medals).
I'm not dismissing the possibility of changes in the future. Perhaps their poor athletic performance is entirely cultural. But what evidence there is indicates they don't do well.
Re anonymous,total world jewish medal count: A) I just checked one,Rebecca Soni,purely by chance. They say she isnt Jewish
ReplyDeleteNice try Goebbels.
Jewish grandparents, sent from Hungary to Auschwitz during World War II. Parents who emigrated to the US from Romania in the 1980s.
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=iw&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nrg.co.il%2Fonline%2F54%2FART2%2F392%2F517.html%3Fhp%3D54%26cat%3D872%26loc%3D15&act=url
Speaking of South East Asians lack of athletic ability.. In my high school gym class there as a Pakastani kid, and I remember vividly thinking he was one of the worst athletes I had ever seen. Makes sense now that I see his people´s olympic record.
ReplyDeleteWe've gone over this in this thread already. Ethnic Indians don't do well in rich countries, either - not in Great Britain ( 0/114 British medalists this year were South Asian) and not in the US, where they've won only 3 Olympic medals total, ever (two of them team medals).
ReplyDeleteI'm not dismissing the possibility of changes in the future. Perhaps their poor athletic performance is entirely cultural. But what evidence there is indicates they don't do well.
We actually haven't "gone over this" already. I'm talking about Indians in India and per capita GDP rising there. That's a totally different environment than a mixed environment. Just as 200 million whites in a mixed environment like the US don't end up playing high level basketball relative to 40 million whites in Spain from their own environment who end up seriously challenging the black US basketball team.
It's simply a fact that the Indians in India did well in terms of medals per GDP per capita. It's reasonable to believe that if GDP per capita goes up among Indians in India, India's tally will rise.
It's simply a fact that the Indians in India did well in terms of medals per GDP per capita.
ReplyDeleteNo, it is not a fact. Jamaica did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita. China did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita.
India, not so much.
Hunsdon said...
ReplyDeleteOh, corn and potatoes were just growing? Never mind.
No, they weren't "just growing". Smallest pictured is the wild variety:
http://accessscience.com/loadbinary.aspx?name=qa&filename=Maize-teosinteFigB.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rNgI4OP7Kug/TBqQZADT9UI/AAAAAAAABbc/u_Jgbzvje44/s400/071126152711-large.jpg
No, it is not a fact. Jamaica did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita. China did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita.
ReplyDeleteIndia, not so much.
India came in 16th by that measure. Which is doing pretty well and better than many much more renowned countries. And Jamaica and China are probably heavily doped.
UC Berkeley athletes won 17 medals, including 11 gold.
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/ucbmedals
Once in a while Whiskey posts something I agree with 100%. Other than the Italy/Greece thing, since I don't know near enough about those countries to judge.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Like a broken clock is correct twice a day, he occasionally writes something true. But as for the Italy/Greece thing, remember this is the guy who wrote recently that Stephen Spielberg did not like Israel and did not want Israel to exist. So as Reagan used to say about the Soviets, 'trust, but verify', when it comes to his comments.
"Which is why they keep sending large teams to compete."
ReplyDeleteNo, they see it as a fun vacation.
Jamaica did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita.
ReplyDeleteJamaica won 12 medals, all of them in track and field. 3 of them were won by Yohan Blake, who has been caught doping before. Bolt and the other Jamaican medalists are likely dopers as well.
"That's a totally different environment than a mixed environment. Just as 200 million whites in a mixed environment like the US don't end up playing high level basketball...It's reasonable to believe that if GDP per capita goes up among Indians in India, India's tally will rise."
ReplyDeleteIt's reasonable to believe that blacks doing really well can push whites out of 1 or 2 sports, but are you saying that diaspora Indians are being pushed out of every sport, by whites, blacks, Latinos, and the rest?
I certainly expect to see India doing better the wealthier it gets. No one should dispute that. Whether India will ever achieve parity in sports relative to its population is the larger question, and the data suggests that it isn't likely.
"That is very strange that Arabs are so unathletic considering they have a very high-school-jock culture and attitude."
ReplyDelete???
I believe it's a very vicarious jock culture or one, two-off. Like the shieks who build state of the art gold courses in the desert, or own racehorses, but never actually play the sports or get involved with the horses themselves. They seem to enjoy the trappings of sport. Islam and actual sporting practice- oil and water. Not meant to mix.
Where, after all, are the great Islamic sporting nations?
"Races, both foot and swimming have been going on since the beginning of time. Same goes for boxing and wrestling. Pretty much all the rest is contrived to create an extravaganza."
ReplyDeleteDon't buy it.
Long ago, anywhere, no one ever ran 100 meters in a straight line on a track, off blocks, gun start. Add recent innovations like professional paid competitions, weight coaches, athletic science, performance enhancers, variable drug testing regulations by country. Adds up to
contrived in the nth degree.
"Jamaica did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita."
ReplyDeleteJamaica won 12 medals, all of them in track and field.
Yes? Jamaica still did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita.
@Anonymous 10:47 PM
ReplyDelete"The white-majority Anglosphere (US, UK, CANADA, AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, IRELAND) won 89 of the 302 gold medals awarded."
Yeah, but Anglosphere countries are all highly deveeloped capitalist societies where sports are big business and where gifted athletes have enormous technical and financial incetives to become as good as they can be. The same happens in a Communist regime such as China where the government spends tons of money and resources to screen atheletically gifted children and then do whatever it takes to make them as good as they can be.
You people(racist conservatives) think that everything is about innate talent and that certain peoples are inferior. Of course, you remain silent or make all sorts of excuses when Asian children outscore white children on IQ and scholastic tests. Why can't you accept that Third World countries have innate disadvantages in producing Olympic medalists and Nobelists? They don't have the resources to make their athletes as good as they can be, and they do not have the universities and research centers to produce to foster their cognitivelly gifted youths to become top scientists and researchers. Not a difficult concept to grasp. But believing that it's all about genes is more reassuring to racists.
@Steve Sailer
ReplyDelete"Spanish-surnamed U.S medal winners:5 out of 208"
So what? The Latino immigrants who come to America do so because they are indigents. They are too busy working minimum-wage jobs to buy food and to have a roof over their heads to win Olympic medals or Nobel prizes. Do you have any idea the kind of time and financial and technical resources needed to win an Olympic medal? Do you think Olympic competitors work day jobs - with very few exceptions? Do you think they just train at any gym or anywhere? No, they do state-of-the-art training at state-of-the-art facilities and have armies of kinesiologists, physiologists, nutritionists and medical doctors helping them. This is also the reason why the countries with the largest number of Olympic medalists and Nobel prize winners are either capitalist socities that reward athletic success handsomely or Communist countries like China where the state makes Olympic medals a prime priority for state-propaganda reasons.
What pisses me off is that you make obvious observations as if they were some kind of profound revelation, and think that this proves some point you have, when in reality it often has more likely explanations that actually suggest the opposite of what you are proposing.
"Like the shieks who build state of the art gold courses in the desert, or own racehorses, but never actually play the sports or get involved with the horses themselves. They seem to enjoy the trappings of sport. Islam and actual sporting practice- oil and water. Not meant to mix."
ReplyDeleteNot always. UK shooting medal winner Peter Wilson was coached by this guy, from this family.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/shooting/9448296/London-2012-Olympics-Shotgun-Sheikh-shares-secrets-of-success-with-double-trap-shooting-champion-Peter-Wilson.html
"The young Wilson was in China as part of the Mission 2012 programme, giving potential Olympians a chance to witness the Games in action. He approached the Sheikh and asked him a simple question: would he help him become the Olympic champion?
“I looked at him and thought he had something,” said the Sheikh. “And what he had is the most important quality of all: the desire to get to the top.”
“This man is a prince,” said Wilson. “It’s quite bonkers really that he agreed to coach me. I’m just so honoured. It’s as if Prince William was teaching me how to fly a helicopter.” "
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/shooting/9448408/London-2012-Olympics-Sheikh-Maktoums-sporting-influence-spreads-wide.html
"His son Sheikh Ahmed won shooting gold for the United Arab Emirates at the 2004 Athens Olympics and has trained British gold medallist Peter Wilson for the last four years.
Rashid Maktoum took individual gold in endurance horse riding at the 15th Asian Games in 2006 and also joined with Ahmed, Majid and Hamdan to take the team gold as well.
Their sister Maitha led the UAE team in taekwondo and their cousin Latifa won bronze in show jumping."
"Again, if you know of a good place to find out the precise racial background of each rioter please feel free to point us there."
ReplyDeleteI find that the computer screen works pretty well.
And when did John Entine say that the guy who runs fastest was "the best athlete?"
"That's a very odd result, if West Africans are the athletic supermen some people make them out to be."
ReplyDeleteBelieving that a few of the children of "rich" connected Africans could compete on sheer athletic potential against the multi-billion dollar coporate/government sports institutes, prize monies, training, facilities, drugs, psychiatrists, family structures, etc. of the world's athletic powers, is akin the the stupidity I've read here in that Einstein could have come up with the theory of relativity if someone had thrown a few astronomy books in his crib. Or that Jimmi Hendrix was a great guitarist naturally and did not need to practice.
Of course I expect nothing more at this point.
Best performers in the Defection Race:
ReplyDelete#1 - Cameroon 7
#2 - Congo 4
#3 - Ivory Coast 3
"Believing that a few of the children of "rich" connected Africans could compete on sheer athletic potential against the multi-billion dollar coporate/government sports institutes, prize monies, training, facilities, drugs, psychiatrists, family structures, etc. of the world's athletic powers, is akin the the stupidity I've read here..."
ReplyDeleteJamaica does it. Kenya does it. Ethiopia des it.
Running speed certainly benefits from taining, by all means. But, probably as with racehorses, who come from a very narrow gene pool, it's a pretty unidimensional trait - you're either fast or you're slow. There are a few genes which probably affect speed, but unlike with some other traits they don't number in the hundreds.
And there are at least a few West African countries with the organization and the money to fund Olympic programs.
Money is only (a very large) part of the problem, the main part is that the best African athletes, or the best Africans at anything they do, do not compete.
ReplyDeleteWest Africa is the world largest nepocracy, and the world's smallest meritocracy. Totally disregarding money, you simply do not get a chance to do anything in Africa in any field without family and tribal connections, and those change with who's tribe is in power at the time.
Yes? Jamaica still did well in terms of medals per gdp per capita.
ReplyDeleteYes and a known doper won a quarter of their medals, and it's very likely their other athletes who won medals are dopers as well.
Believing that a few of the children of "rich" connected Africans could compete on sheer athletic potential against the multi-billion dollar coporate/government sports institutes, prize monies, training, facilities, drugs, psychiatrists, family structures, etc. of the world's athletic powers
ReplyDeleteThe Spaniards were 100/107th as good as the black US team. The black US team players have had much better training and competition in basketball and from a much earlier age than the Spaniards.
"'Again, if you know of a good place to find out the precise racial background of each rioter please feel free to point us there.'
ReplyDeleteI find that the computer screen works pretty well."
Really? You must have got an extra-special computer screen along with your decoder ring. Looking at images of the POTUS on my computer screen I could have sworn he was a mulatto but no. He's black.
Hacienda said...
ReplyDeleteO.P. said...
"That is very strange that Arabs are so unathletic considering they have a very high-school-jock culture and attitude."
It's not so much Islam but Arab culture - though Islam likely makes it worse. Christian Arabs have much the same attitudes.
I believe it's a very vicarious jock culture or one, two-off.
Yup.
It's is if Arabs have the bad traits of jocks - arrogance, wastefulness, machismo, bullying, cruelty, irresponsibility, anti- intellectualism - but none of the athleticism and sportsmanship.
They have this love of partying, drinking, smoking, toking; all an act of fake rebellion. Yet they piously enforce the moral laws on their social inferiors. And they haven't the balls for any real opposition to corrupt kings and presidents or repressive mullahs (specially if it's their kings rather than hated western puppets.)
Like the shieks who build state of the art gold courses in the desert, or own racehorses, but never actually play the sports or get involved with the horses themselves. They seem to enjoy the trappings of sport.
Its their way of showing off their wealth, like another yacht they never sail, or limousine they never drive.
Islam and actual sporting practice- oil and water. Not meant to mix. Where, after all, are the great Islamic sporting nations?
The non-Arab ones - Iran and Turkey mostly.
"given the rather impressive feats of Mayans, Incas and so forth, it is a bit of a puzzle. Did the great death rates from Old World diseases after European contact kill off disproportionately the able ones? But why both the intellectually able and the athletically able?"
ReplyDeleteStab in the dark: there's usually a trade-off in how resources are allocated. Given how severe the European-introduced plagues were, killing off something like 90% of the population, those whose genetics didn't prioritize the immune system above all likely didn't make it.
"Believing that a few of the children of "rich" connected Africans could compete on sheer athletic potential against the multi-billion dollar coporate/government sports institutes, prize monies, training, facilities, drugs, psychiatrists, family structures, etc. of the world's athletic powers, is akin the the stupidity I've read here..."
ReplyDeleteYes, it's truly stupid to think that blacks/Africans could accomplish anything on their own without whites there to subsidize, organize and invent everything, even within the one area where blacks actually have competence - sports.
"But it still boggles my mind that Americans can't fathom that many hiSPANics and LATINos are European (culturally and, often, phenotypically)."
ReplyDeleteNotwithstanding the natural merit and advantage of having curiosity for and being inquiring about the race, beliefs and mores of foreign nations, why should Americans regard the Mexican and assorted South American columns socially invading their country with anything else than (albeit often ignorant) disdain?
'Latino' and 'Hispanic' are American-manufactured Nixonian sociological fictions without applicability outside of affirmative-action papers and diversity offices in the US bureaucratic industrial complex.
"In terms of Medals per GDP, Guatemala, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba did better than Spain."
The analogy is not sound. Those countries enumerated beside Spain are clearly non-white (and non-white by any local standard, whether Western European or compared to the indigenous white standard in Asiatic countries as Turkey or Iraq) and the bulk of whites in Cuba, Colombia, etc, a meagre if powerful minority, are mostly not the racial kind of whites best fitted by their physical nature or circumstance to excel in rigorous competitive exercises.
Conversely, Spain is a wealthy and stable Western European nation in its biology and culture (the latter proceeding from the former) and, as Mr Sailer has described, participates in sports congruent with this origin and outlook. The athletic focus falls sharply in Olympic contests on sports which the poor and mixed-caste or Amerind Cubans and Dominicans cannot afford, and thus dislike and ignore. It's much harder for Spaniards to defeat Germans and Britons and (white) Americans in canoe racing than it is for Cubans to dominate baseball which Spaniards positively scorn.
For example in 2008 at Peking,
Spaniard Saul Craviotto won the gold medal for the sprint canoe K-2 500m race. At London in 2012 Craviotto won the silver, beaten by the native Briton Ed McKeever.
It's hard to imagine a sport more centred on upper middle class, single-mindedly devoted vaguely Teutonish Western Europeans than canoe racing, and the podium results at the Olympics demonstrate this. I do however agree with the drift of a previous commenter about prevailing Anglophone (mainly US-originating) notions about Spain: it's a Mediterranean Western European nation, comparison with the nations of Central and South America is not enlightening.
"Yes, it's truly stupid to think that blacks/Africans could accomplish anything on their own without whites there to subsidize, organize and invent everything, even within the one area where blacks actually have competence - sports."
ReplyDeleteYes it would be quite difficult for a team of blacks to compete with a team of whites at basketball, if they had never played before.
"the remarkable lack of high achievers among the Hispanic Tidal Wave": given the rather impressive feats of Mayans, Incas and so forth, it is a bit of a puzzle. Did the great death rates from Old World diseases after European contact kill off disproportionately the able ones? But why both the intellectually able and the athletically able?
ReplyDeleteSeriously: apart from anything else, these are the people who gave the world maize and the potato, which is a bloody sight more than Europeans of the time managed. What's up?
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Think of Mayan temples as big, immobile, stone low riders.
Truth-
ReplyDelete""Yes. A lot of the apparent "black" over-representation in sports comes from counting mixed race people as black."
They are only "mixed race people" when convenient; I call them MRPWC's. I don't remember any London rioters being refered to, on this board, as "mixed-race."
I don't think there's any hypocrisy there. Biology matters in sports events, so it is fair to want to distinguish between races as finely as possible. But any able-bodied person can throw a brick or loot a shop, and it's not like they are being measured for distances or times, so cultural factors come more into play. And blacks in London do seem to have a strong influence over an underclass culture containing black, white, and mixed race kids (watch the film 'kidulthood' if you wish to hear what they sound like).
"I don't think there's any hypocrisy there. Biology matters in sports events..."
ReplyDeleteSure but the keystone thesis to this entire blog is that biology matters in ALL events. If it's a good thing, blacks do it poorly, whites do it well. Winning olympic medals is a good thing, so people here tend to highlight Jessica Ennis white heritage in an attempt to "claim" her in Chapel's "racial draft."
Similarly, any black scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc, has a draft choice expended upon him, yet no light-skinned black ne'er do well ever has his white side "credited" on this blog.
Part of the problem with water polo is the water: it slows everything down, and obscures the view. But take away the water and you've got team handball, which isn't that exciting to watch either. So that's the other part of the problem with water polo.
ReplyDeleteHow to make water polo more exciting?
Make it more like real polo!
Instead of a swimming pool, use a shallow (4' or so) outdoor flood plain. Replace the horses with dolphins. Use a heavy ball that sinks to the ground. Keep the clubs / sticks / long things that the players use to hit the ball.
Truth:
ReplyDeleteIt seems like the more common assumption here is that blacks do well at sports, as with various people complaining that the European nations were "cheating" by having blacks competing on their teams in track and field.
Just based on observations, blacks seem to do very well at sports and show business, way above what you'd expect from their proportion in the population, and pretty badly in school and science and trouble with the law, again out of proportion to their population.
It also appears that mestizos don't follow this pattern. They don't seem to do all that well in school (but it's hard to know how much of that is selective assimilation, where the Mexican girl that goes off to college often marries an Anglo guy and her kids are named Jones instead of Rodriguez). They don't seem to stand out in sports or entertainment--perhaps they're actually underrepresented in both. Again, it's not clear why.
A huge amount of the discussion about that stuff here is crap, of course. Largely, that's because there isn't a deep fund of already-thought-out ideas and insights lying around to be brought into the discussion, and peoples' first cut arguments are often full of holes.
NOTA; I can not argue with you on anything there.
ReplyDelete