I appreciate that you took the time to respond to my post Sharmer.
I am also a seeker of truth. Here is my take and some of it comes from hunch and instinct (which the self should not completely ignore, as often the hunches and instincts are backed up and/or quantified at a later date.)
Though I deffinately believe some have a slight physical predisposition advantage, I still believe that the ‘potential’ of an athlete can be so very different to their starting point. We have heard of sprinters and athletes who barely improved at all from age fifteen onwards, and then their are others who improved several seconds, their hundred meter times.
Still the biggest influance in hundred meter speed is gravity. (people run slower on the moon, than on earth, infact, it is allmost impossible to run on the moon, because of its very low gravity. Ofcourse, you can jump very high on the moon.)
Slight adjustments in posture allow you to increase your speed as gravity takes a better hold of the diss-placed c.o.m. Now Joe Bloggs is working with the same gravity as Usain Bolt.
Joe has slightly differant anatomical proportions, and slightly different ratio of fast to slow fibers and MU recruitment, and slightly lower insertion points than the top sprinters. But the differance is only slight. Valery Borsov apparently had 65% fast twitch fiber. Most of his opponents had higher ratios of fast fiber to slow fiber, and still, he beat them. He was trained
smarter, and if the Munich track had cured better, and wasn’t so crap, he might have run 9.9 seconds. He allmost certainly had the capacity to do it. So I see the anatomical traits as only very slight advantages, and that they can just about be overcome, with serious training focuses.
I don’t rate the slightly longer achilles as being a huge advantage. Ofcourse, if your lower leg is especially short, like some 5 foot 6 inch white pro bodybuilders, then you probably aint ever going to bust a 9.9 second meters. But if you have longer lower leg than that amongst other factors, you don’t necesarily need the very high calf of say Francis Abikwelu.
The center of mass is moving forwards too quickly for the achilles to be responsible for that speed of plantar flexion. I don’t see the heel as pushing away from the ground, I see it as simply leaving the ground and being pulled away from the ground by the whole body which is being pulled along by gravity. Your achilles merely needs to be strong enough to not get injured, and not much else. I could babble on but I think you get my point. I personally feel that their are differences, but that the differances are only slight. One can not also overlook the ‘bias’ in athlete selection in different sports, as being yet another factor.
Here’s something interesting. A study was done, and was done cleverly in a way that the participants (judges) didn’t know the point of the study untill afterwards.
In Gymnastics, the white girls were given a very slightly higher points in some categries of the ‘presentation’ aspect. Conversely, in Boxing,. the black boxers were awarded very slightly higher points, even though apon further examination , did not statistically fare any better than their white opponents in the particular boxing matches studied.
What happens, is that there may be slight advantages, but then people become biased and actually give momentum to these factors instead of finding ways to bridge the original (albeit very small) gap in genetic dispostion from one person/race, to another. However, I cannot pretend that there is absolutely no differances, because my eyes tell me there are. But the differances are acute, and do not account fully, for all the dominace of different races in different sports.
As a side note: one of the swimmers in the U.S.A record breaking swimming relay team was black. He had to be seriously fast to be on the same team as Michael Phelps. He obviously didn’t care that the slightly less dense white athletes body is maybe a few % more boyuant in the leg area. He still learnt to keep his whole body flat in the water, which some black athletes find a little challanging initially.