In Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 1, I introduced the topic that I wanted to discuss and defined some end points that I was going to use in the discussion.  I also introduced the first group/sport I wanted to talk about which was Kenyan distance runners.  If you want the details, read Part 1.  For now just accept that starting in about 1970, Kenyans rose from total anonymity to what amounts to simple overwhelming and absolute dominance in the men’s distance events.

And a question that has been posited since they started winning is why this is the case.   And the answer is not simple.  Demonstrating that, to look at this in the detail I want, it’s going to take me today and Friday to cover factors ranging from physiology, sociology, economics, incentives, and who knows what else.   This should give you some idea of what I’m going to try to address in this series as a whole to answer the original question.

And don’t worry, I won’t be going into this kind of nauseating detail for every sport and every group.  I’m doing it in this first case to try and express the degree that all of these different factors contribute, just to give the scope of complexity of this topic and why simple answers of “Just do this one thing” are invariably so wrong.

In any case, back to the Kenyans.  Over the years folks have looked intensely for the reasons behind Kenyan running dominance and early studies focused, somewhat logically on physiology.  Examination of other factors that might play a role came later.   Today and Friday, of course, I’ll look at all of it.

Physiological Factors

Early studies of Kenyan runners focused on physiology and genetics since they were fairly easy to measure (and physiologists were really getting a hardon for such about the time the Kenyans came to dominance).  However, no real differences in VO2 max showed up.  This is no surprise, at the top levels of endurance athletes there is not only a clear limit to VO2 max but by itself it holds little predictive value for performance.  A high VO2 max is required for top endurance performance but, in and of itself it is not sufficient and this is true in all endurance sports.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 2