Talent identification in Cuba takes place in schools based on performance in testing sessions and competitions, and talented athletes are sent to “Escuelas de Iniciacion Deportiva Escolar” (EIDE), or Schools for Initiation into Scholastic Sport, to develop them as high performance athletes.
Here is what I think about this issue:
Physical traits that are determined by a number of interacting genetic and environmental factors (e.g. height, speed) are distributed normally (Gaussian) in biological populations. What we do know from historical evidence is that people of west African descent are much more likely to become world class sprinters than people of other ethnicities. In some cases, such as Nigeria, this is seen in spite of “less than optimal” training conditions, suggesting that genetics are more important than environmental factors here. This could either be due to the “mean speed” of this population being higher than that for, say, east African populations, or because there is more variability in these populations (e.g. the curve has a lower peak and broader shoulders). If the second was the case, there should also be more “super slow” people in the population that has a larger proportion of “super fast” people. I’m not sure which one is true, but my feeling would be that it is the first, because while they don’t seem to produce any world class short sprinters, east Africans are exceptionally good at endurance based events. I don’t think anyone here would question that a predisposition to speed events is mutually exclusive with a predisposition to endurance events.
In any case, none of these two options exclude the possibility of people of non-west African descent developing into sub-10s sprinters (see Patrick Johnson), it just makes it statistically less likely. I would thus echo Charlie’s and Pierrejean’s concern that people of any background should be allowed and supported to develop their talents rather than being excluded because they are not of the right ethnicity.