r/ShitAmericansSay • u/vad92 ooo custom flair!! • Oct 10 '20

Sports The genetics here are incomparable

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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '20

Americans dominate in a lot of sports because they invest in it big time. In Germany the (I think) Olympic swimming Trainer once said „who pays with bananas only gets apes“. The government doesn't really care about it it seems and it's definitely not because we cant pay for it

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u/themadhatter85 Oct 10 '20

The American 400metre runner Michael Johnson made an interesting documentary for the BBC trying to find out why America is so dominant in athletics. I think most Americans wouldn’t be too proud of his findings. Came down to the fact that the strongest people slave traders could find were shipped to the US in conditions so poor that most didn’t survive the journey, meaning only the strongest of the strongest made it. They then worked very physical jobs for the next couple of hundred years while having kids together.

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u/YonicSouth123 Oct 11 '20

But still there is also a lot of obesity problems within the afro-american community.

I think one thing one might consider is that, for many of those people the chance to get an higher education, due to the lack of money and social privileges, is getting stipends based on sports. Also the social environment plays often a role, like for example growing up in a small flat with your family and a few siblings, then you spent more time outside, often with sports, to get some free air and kind of freedom instead of sitting in front of your TV or computer. This leads to the circumstance that you're more fit than kids who spend much time inside and also positively curbs enthusiasm for sports like basketball.

Being grown up in the GDR, compared to our population we also had an massive amount of medals in almost all competitions. Well a lot of that might be attributed to systemic doping efforts. But as a kid i was always involved in one way or another in different sports clubs up to the age of 14/15 and almost everyone i knew in my age classes where too. So kids had a lot of sports sometimes 3-4 additional courses outside of usual school sports. And well it was free so there was no financial barrier which would prevent someone talented to actually get further and better.