The Winter Olympics are over, and somehow the US media missed a key story coming out of the Games. In the rush to check on the day-to-day condition of Lindsey Vonn’s shins, the exploits of athletes from the little kingdom of Norway were ignored.
Such ignorance was a mistake. Norway did astonishingly well at the Games, capturing 23 of the 86 medals awarded (27 percent). That’s a rather shocking development when one realizes that Norway’s population is 4.8 million, just .07 percent of the world’s total of 6.8 billion folks. Only one out of 1417 persons walking this earth is a Norwegian citizen, and yet Norskies captured more than one out of every four medals given out at the Games.
Norway’s gold-medal count was nine, the same tally achieved by the United States, a country with 64 times as many people. Norway’s population size is very close to Colorado’s total of five million people, and Norway’s geographical area of 385,000 square kilometers is close to Montana’s overall wing span. If Coloradoans had brought home 23 badges of honor, the unique glory of such athletic achievement would certainly have been trumpeted on the pages of USA Today and Sports Illustrated. If Montanans had been bringing back such a collection of gold, silver, and bronze, wouldn’t we have heard about it, big time? Instead, our Viking athletic friends flew back to their little country with very little fanfare.
The Norwegian exploits bear a remarkable resemblance to what Kenyan male runners accomplished at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. If we throw out the relays and examine all other running events (from 100 meters up to the marathon), Kenyan men took home nine of the 33 medals awarded in Beijing. Yes, that’s 27 percent – the same as the Norlanders’ share of medallions in all sports at the 2010 Winter Games.
But of course a key difference is that when Kenyan athletes fare extremely well the tabloid press erupts with the news that Kenyans probably possess the right genes for performance, that they are genetically superior to runners from the rest of the world. The remarkable sprinter from Jamaica, Usain Bolt, shares a similar fate. When he blows away the field and sets world records at 100 and 200 meters, the talk immediately turns to genetics - and (even more condescendingly) to steroids.
The Norwegians, of course, are a different story altogether. When they out-compete big-brother Russia to the east, garnering 50-percent more medals than their Russian counterparts (despite Russia’s population of 142 million), the lofty Norwegian performances are simply the result of discipline, hard work, scientific training, culture, and the unique Norse environment. While Russian heads roll, not a whisper is heard about Norwegian DNA.
It must certainly be true that culture and environment play key roles in the Norwegian successes. If you strap skis and skates onto the feet of young people, encourage their participation in skiing and skating, provide the perfect physical environments for skiing and skating, make skiing and skating your national sports, treat your best skiers and skaters as national heroes and reward them with scads of the world’s strongest currency, doesn’t it stand to reason that you will end up with highly competitive skiers and skaters? No rocket science (or foray into the genetics of performance) is required to understand this.
And yet the genetic rationale is reached for immediately whenever Kenyans excel. This is despite the fact that the Kenyan athletic culture and environment bear strong resemblances to cultural and environmental factors in Norway (without the snow, skis, and skates, of course). Kenyan kids are sent off to school barefooted, and they run, run, run, fast and hard, to school and back, to their friends’ farms and back, over rugged terrain with uneven footing, in the process building up tremendous strength, endurance, and coordination. Thanks to the unshod condition of their running, young Kenyans’ arches and ankles become powerful springs which move the runners forward explosively with the most-minimal of ground-contact times.
The other Norwegian factors are there, too. Kenyan kids are encouraged to become runners, the Kenyan environment is perfect for running (temperate and dry, with lots of hills to build strength), running is the national sport of Kenya, the top Kenyan runners become national heroes, and the internationally successful Kenyan runners bring home what are king’s ransoms in Kenya (although not in the world’s strongest currency). Sound familiar?
Scientific studies have been performed on elite Kenyan runners to “discover” the genetic basis for their high achievements (of course, no such inquiries have been conducted on Norwegian Olympic performers). So far such inquiries have borne little fruit. And why should they? Just as the “secret” of Norwegian Olympic success can be found on the ski paths and ice rinks of Norway, the “mystery” of Kenyan endurance-running dominance is actually just a logical tale of intense training, environment, and culture.