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RACE AND SPORT (Sept. 2002)

          "Race and sport". I can see faces tightening and fists clenching as soon as I throw out those 3 words. Each has a stick of dynamite stuck deep inside. Look, can we talk some sense on the subject? There's really nothing to be afraid of here.
     Listen, yes, in Sydney, as in recent Olympics, the medal winners in running were generally black, in swimming white. Other sports also tend to sort out along racial lines. We all know this. Sport is not about comforting equalities but triumphant superiorities. But what are these superiorities? Differences that are microscopic and of no meaning whatsoever for "just-plain-living". Let me give a single example--- the 100 meter race. The fastest 200 races for men have all been run by blacks. Under 10 seconds is common. For whites and Asians, no one has cracked the 10-second barrier, but they've hit it. But will you please, everybody, contemplate the meaning and non-meaning of all this? Will you consider what 100 meters is? It's a football field plus 10%. A fifth of a second is the difference between the black records and the white/Asian records. In this arcane 100 meter skill the races are in fact essentially equal, but it does appear that from sport to sport nature has granted one group an extra 1/5th of a second here, or an extra 1/3rd of a second there. Now, in our obsessiveness, of such inconsequentials are champions made. But no, the human race does not consist of a single human being cloned 6 billion times either.
          Everyone relax.

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