The Great Race: Why is the 1500 meters so diverse?
The Great Race: Why is the 1500 meters so diverse?
Unlike the sprints and the long distances, no racial group has a near-monopoly on the middle distances. Much of the world is in the running for medals.
Yesterday’s men’s 1500 meter running race, following the fun, sprinter-like trading of insults across the North Sea by the champions of Scotland, Josh Kerr, and Norway (who, whenever I see Jakob Ingebrigtsen, I think, “Wow, Morrissey is looking great for his age”),
is being widely heralded as the greatest metric mile in Olympic history. You can watch it here. If you don’t know what happened, go ahead and watch. You may think track is boring, but in this case you won’t mind the 3 minutes and 27 seconds it takes.
The middle distances, 800 and 1500 meters, are particularly entertaining races.
Why? Unlike the sprints, they involve strategy. Unlike the longer distances, the strategic laps are over quickly and you are into the frantic bell lap in which history is made.
And, not unimportantly, unlike the sprints and the long distances, no racial group has a near-monopoly on the stars. Much of the world is in the running for medals.
How come?
My anthology Noticing (which Amazon continues selling in Kindle digital download version for only $9.95; you can get the paperback for $29.95 here) includes my 1997 article “Track and Battlefield,” which features this graph (accurate as of 27 years ago):
My basic theory was that runners of white-European descent tend to be pretty good at all distances, but runners of West African-Bantu descent are great at the sprints and runners of East African-Nilotic descent are great at the longer distances (although the marathon back then was more of a crap shoot than the 3000-10000 meters races). But nobody is all-powerful at 800-1500 meters, so it’s hard to predict who will win in the end.
Which is fun.
One conundrum is that Northeast Asians tend to be pretty good at the 100 meters and at the marathon, but are not so hot in-between.
Why?
Truly great race.
I vote for a return to a track & field dominant Olympics.
I’ve seen enough break dancing.
Thanks; a very exciting and fun race to watch; slightly refills my long empty reservoir of Olympic enthusiasm. I guess my working theory would be, since we are all descended from the same small pool of hunter-gatherers, when chasing game, or in flight from predatory threats, the 800-1500 range is about when we could optimize closing for the kill, or finding appropriate life-saving shelter from a carnivorous predator. So, almost all human sub-groups could have talent there. I'm thinking that other ethnic groups who are dominant long or short distances have recent genetic adaptation (last 10K years or so) that is brought out by the specialized Olympic competition. I remember one of your posts a few years back during the Olympics about West African sprint dominance, and I pointed out the NW European dominance in swimming. As you like to point out, this stuff is INTERESTING!