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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"The long jump"

28 Comments -

1 – 28 of 28
Anonymous Severn said...

as Levin notes, 100m times have continued to fall because it's a glamor event with a fair amount of money involved

I'm not sure why some events are "glamor events" and others are not. It sometimes seems as if a "glamor event" is one in which a US athlete has a good chance of winning the gold. There's no obvious reason why the 100m dash ("the worlds fastest man") gets so much more attention than the weightlifting events ("the worlds strongest man").

8/5/12, 4:43 PM

Anonymous jose said...

And the women's long jump was one by a white blonde woman.

The long jump physique and the sprinter physique seem to have diverged. The long jumpers all are very lean -- presumably to minimize weight. While the sprinters are increasingly jacked looking.

Bolt is leaner, and better, than the other sprinters, but he still looks much more muscular than the long jumpers do.

The female long jumpers were also very long and lean compared to the muscled female sprinters.

Also -- could the pounding from sprint training be increasing bone density of the sprinters? I imagine the ideal long jumper has plenty of muscle, but the bone density of a bird. Would mild osteoperosis actually help a long jumper?

8/5/12, 4:56 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

"The long jump physique and the sprinter physique seem to have diverged."

Right. It's hard for me to remember how surprising it was when Ben Johnson emerged in 1987 hauling this absurd amount of upper body musculature down the 100m track to a world record. Before then, everybody just knew that long and lean was the ideal physique for both a sprinter and a long jumper.

8/5/12, 4:59 PM

Anonymous jody said...

"Rutherford's winning leap of 27' 3.25" was the shortest gold medal leap since 1972"

everybody was jumping into negative wind, so it was hard to jump very far. cool, rainy, windy london is not a great place for track & field historically.

"Jesse Owens' 1935 record lasted into the mid-1950s, Bob Beamon's 1968 record lasted until 1991, and the current record is 21 years old and is in no danger."

owen's long jump record was a great one. he was less great as a sprinter. still the best of his era but not so fast that nobody else was even close, they were.

all the records from the 1968 olympics should just be pretty much ignored due to the elevation. it made all the short races fast and all the long races slow. that screwed up track & field for 20 years.

carl lewis is the best long jumper of all time. but that was during the drug era, so even he's slightly suspect.

the high jump record is from the same seemingly frozen in time period, the early 90s, when most of the field records were set. and it was set by a caught juicer. so the long jump record is likely a drug record too, unfortunately.

"And the women's long jump was one by a white blonde woman."

that was the triple jump. but a european might win long jump too. it's possible europeans will win the long jump, high jump, and triple jump in london.

it's important to remember that whites can't jump, however.

8/5/12, 5:27 PM

Anonymous jody said...

"But, as Levin notes, 100m times have continued to fall because it's a glamor event with a fair amount of money involved, while the long jump has lost its glamor status."

well, sort of. he's right that there is no money in the field events, so the international field is not as good in the field events as the track events. the participation rate is lower relatively speaking. it's not low, just not as good as it could be. the diamond league is an attempt to change this, with 1 million dollars available to anybody who wins their event at every meet for the season.

but now you have a stupid situation like the one i've been following in football, where the united states sends 3 africans, always 3 africans, to almost every world championship and olympic championship, and sometimes they end up getting beat by guys like rutherford and mitchell watt - genetically english guys from nations much smaller than the US. so a guy from scotland and a guy from australia can outjump the best africans from the US, but not a single european from the US can even make the team? there's 200 million europeans in the US and only 55 + 20 = 75 or so million europeans in the UK and australia. the US is now deliberately ignoring, or perhaps, deliberately not developing, a huge talent pool, the same way it does in american football.

the culture in the US today is to tell europeans in sports that "You can't do it" but to tell africans in academics "You can do it!". i think everybody should be encouraged to do well. yet, again i note that it's always the europeans who are singled out for a sustained negative psychological campaign, while other groups have billion dollar federal government programs created from scratch, explicitly to encourage and support and develop their group. it's frustrating watching this happen.

also like i've said, if you take africans from the US out of sports, "black athletic domination" mostly goes away. you end up with a decent amount of africans in track, less in field, and they drop precipitously in other sports. black athletic domination is dependent primarily on africans from america.

8/5/12, 5:34 PM

Anonymous jose said...

I still want to see an explanation for why the east asians do so well in the ultra-precision sports - badminton, ping pong, shooting, archery, diving, gymnastics.

If there's a sport that requires either:
1) Be extremely still
2) Extreme, but confined, hand-eye coordination
3) Extremely precise and repeated body motions.

then it seems east asians would be good at it.

8/5/12, 5:51 PM

Blogger Greenidge said...

Mr Rutherford is the greatest stereotype shatterer since Pietro Mennea and Arthur Ashe.

8/5/12, 6:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

also like i've said, if you take africans from the US out of sports, "black athletic domination" mostly goes away. you end up with a decent amount of africans in track


Well, no. If you take the black West-African Americans out of the 100m sprint, what you are left with is black West Africans from other countries. Both the men's and women's 100 meter race in the current Olympics were won by Jamaicans, not Americans.

8/5/12, 6:22 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's no obvious reason why the 100m dash ("the worlds fastest man") gets so much more attention than the weightlifting events ("the worlds strongest man").

Simple races in real time do seem more appealing to people.

8/5/12, 6:39 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I still want to see an explanation for why the east asians do so well in the ultra-precision sports - badminton, ping pong, shooting, archery, diving, gymnastics.

It could just be shorter stature and limbs that helps in games where the court is smaller.

8/5/12, 7:02 PM

Anonymous cherly boston said...

An exceptionally remarkable performance was Galen Rupp's silver in the 10,000m. He beat out all of the Kenyans and Ethiopians, finishing second to a British-born Somali.

8/5/12, 7:28 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I still want to see an explanation for why the east asians do so well in the ultra-precision sports - badminton, ping pong, shooting, archery, diving, gymnastics.

It could just be shorter stature and limbs that helps in games where the court is smaller.


Larger cerebellums (cerebella?)
So why are they such bad drivers?

8/5/12, 7:57 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sailer manages to turn a story about whites winning the gold and silver in long jump, with the black only getting the bronze, into a complicated tale about, "you see, it's really these other blacks in the past that have set records, and long jump isn't that glamorous or important anymore anyway (just like boxing, etc.) so you see, in the end, the black studs still dominate"

8/5/12, 8:01 PM

Anonymous US Boxing WTH? said...

What happened to the US Boxing Team in London?

Beijing 2008 was the worst US Boxing team in Olympic history with only 1 bronze medal.

London 2012 could be even worse with only 1 of 9 US boxers surviving beyond the initial Round of 16 or 32. If he doesn't win at least the next 2 fights, I think the US will come home with 0 boxing medals.


http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1285400-london-2012-raushee-warren-usa-boxings-crisis-and-more-olympic-impressions

8/5/12, 10:09 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You know Steve lots of black long jumpers have won since 1991 in international competition and not gotten close to Powell and Lewis' 1991 numbers either. I think the big long jumper later in the late 1990's early 2000's was Ivan Pedroso, a black Cuban dude who had the good fortune to jump in sunny, Mediterranean Sydney and Athens and not cold rainy and head winded London. That might explain the shorter jumps at this Olympics as well.

8/5/12, 10:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/track-and-field/highlights-pole-vaulting-bloopers.html

the wrong jump

8/6/12, 12:33 AM

Anonymous MC said...

"Lewis was hardly an unlucky man overall, but he never held the long jump world record because Beamon and Powell had a little more luck at the perfect moments."

If Mike Powell were really lucky "at the perfect moments," he would have taken one of Lewis' four Olympic gold medals in the long jump.

8/6/12, 1:23 AM

Anonymous CJ said...

"Before then, everybody just knew that long and lean was the ideal physique for both a sprinter and a long jumper."

At the time (1988) Ben Johnson actually reminded me of a severely-roided-up version of 1964 Olympic champion Bob Hayes.

8/6/12, 1:53 AM

Anonymous Londoner said...

Severn: "I'm not sure why some events are "glamor events" and others are not."

I think the racial group that tends to dominate a given event has almost everything to do with whether it's a glamour event or not.

Farah and Ennis are media darlings here and have dominated the athletics coverage. Rutherford - well who cares about him really. White athletics champions are invisible and instantly forgotten.

8/6/12, 3:46 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Simple races in real time do seem more appealing to people


And yet I notice that the other sports which do seem appealing to people are things like gymnastics or volleyball, which are not simple races in real time.

8/6/12, 7:35 AM

Blogger pat said...

So why are they such bad drivers?

In the Bay Area the prejudice against Chinese driving is firmly established. It's called DWC. Driving while Chinese.

I have a personal insight. When I first came to California I worked as a driving instructor at a place called International Driving School. Our competitive advantage was that we taught driving in multiple languages including Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese.

The owner spoke Portuguese and we had one Spanish speaking instructor and one Chinese speaker. But I - who can only manage English - seemed to get all the non-English speaking students.

Bob Newhart used to do a comic routine about being a driving teacher. He should have tried teaching it in a foreign language. That's funny.

At this time there was a major scandal in the papers about an outfit called the Chinese Driving School. It seems they had planted a guy in the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Chinese students would make some sign or signal in the DMV office and the student would get his license. In fact the office would funnel these Chinese only speakers to the planted accomplice. He was the only one on staff who spoke Chinese.

I had a Chinese student who spoke decent English but who after only three lessons confronted me with the charge that I was wasting his time. He wanted me to simply sell him a driving license. I told him I couldn't do that and besides he couldn't drive. He was terrible. That argument didn't impress him. He left in a huff. He was indignant that I was fixated on trivialities - like actually being able to drive.

I only once taught a Japanese woman. She seem to take driving as a serious responsibility. So I think it's cultural not genetic. At the time we used to tell new students that it took a month and mechanic's exam to get a driving license in Japan. The Japanese seemed to revere automobiles and respect the process of learning to drive.

In the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden dragon the villainess is guilty of reading the secret texts that explain how to do Kung Fu. Think about that. The Chinese thinks that fighting skill is a scholarly pursuit. But they don't seem to think driving a car merits even simple practice.

Maybe that now that the Chinese are getting off their bikes and into cars they will change their attitude toward learning to drive.

Albertosaurus

8/6/12, 9:17 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I only once taught a Japanese woman. She seem to take driving as a serious responsibility. So I think it's cultural not genetic. At the time we used to tell new students that it took a month and mechanic's exam to get a driving license in Japan. The Japanese seemed to revere automobiles and respect the process of learning to drive.

I was the one who posted the above comment. You're right, it probably is cultural. Asians do have a (stereotyped) reputation for precision, manual dexterity, and martial arts proficiency. I also read somewhere that Asians have the largest cerebellum size relative to total brain size. But there is also the Bad Driver Repution....

That's probably also a third world thing - if you're rich enough to drive, you're rich enough to bribe someone for a license. Japan is first world; and the Japanese American community is well-integrated into America.

Maybe that now that the Chinese are getting off their bikes and into cars they will change their attitude toward learning to drive.

Even getting off their bikes and onto motorbikes will help.

8/6/12, 1:32 PM

Anonymous randolph said...

"Obviously, as Levin notes, better drug testing has brought long jumpers back to earth."

Serious question here - would drugs really significantly improve a long-jumper's performance?

I note that when people talk about all those virtually unbreakable women's athletics world records from the steroid-tainted 80s, they often include Galina Chistyakova's 7.52m long jump record. But she looked a lot more natural to me than some of the other athletes from that era.

8/6/12, 5:32 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

I'm kind of leaning away from the PED explanation. Or to be precise, that Ben Johnson showed that a massive upper body could pay off in the 100m, which drove a wedge between the 100m and the long jump, where lankiness, like a young Carl Lewis (pre Ben Johnson) pays off.

8/6/12, 5:55 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I just noticed that American decathlete Ashton Eaton jumped 8.23 at the Olympic trials in Eugene(where he also set the world record for decathlon). That would have been good enough for silver in London. It was also the same that American bronze medalist Will Claye jumped at the trials. Perhaps our best long jumper is a decathlete!

8/7/12, 11:57 AM

Anonymous Hacienda said...

"Ben Johnson showed that a massive upper body could pay off in the 100m, which drove a wedge between the 100m and the long jump, where lankiness, like a young Carl Lewis (pre Ben Johnson) pays off."

This could be tested if Usain Bolt seriously tried the long jump.
He's between Lewis and Johnson in terms of bulkiness.

Significantly faster than Lewis, but would his extra mass be too much a burden?

Assuming equal training and skill as Lewis, I'd guess he could have still have won the gold in London, but not get beyond 29 feet. For Bolt, that's probably not flashy enough to dedicate himself to.

8/7/12, 4:36 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Before then, everybody just knew that long and lean was the ideal physique for both a sprinter and a long jumper.

I noticed that the 110m hurdlers look a lot leaner than the regular sprinters. They look like sprinters used to look back in the day.

I wonder if there's less benefit to juicing in the hurdles. Perhaps it's because you have to be nimble, and you can't just power through a straight course.

8/7/12, 8:04 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder if there's less benefit to juicing in the hurdles. Perhaps it's because you have to be nimble, and you can't just power through a straight course.

I would think so too.

There's no way of "juicing" your cerebellum, other than by endless practice of a motor skill.

8/8/12, 6:51 PM

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