The Savages’ olympics

THE Olympic sprint final was about to commence and the competitors were on their marks. But as the starter’s pistol cracked, it became clear this was no ordinary race.
Some of the male runners were so alarmed by the bang that they froze, while others, unaware of the impera¬tive to run their fastest, began ambling down the track.
Amid jeers from hordes of hot-dog munching spectators, they eventually reached the finishing line in times that would be beaten by an average school¬boy athlete.
Elsewhere in the stadium, the ath¬letes’ performances were equally inept. They stared quizzically at the javelin, discus and jumping pits before making the feeblest throws and shortest leaps ever seen at the Olympics.
If these farcical scenes carry echoes of that Monty Python sketch where race contestants meander off in differ-ent directions, then at the third modern Olympiad, in St Louis, Missouri, in 1904, they were all too real.
The hapless competitors, or "sav¬ages", as the white American organis¬ers preferred, were Native Americans and ethnic tribesmen shipped in from places as far away as Africa, South America, the Middle East, the Philip¬pines and the far north of Japan.
One Congolese pygmy, with sharp¬ened teeth, was simply described in the official games report as a "cannibal".
They had been conscripted as Olym¬pic athletes in a shocking racial experi¬ment designed to prove their natural athleticism was inferior to that of "civi¬lized" white Americans.
It was devised by 1904 games di¬rector James Edward Sullivan, a big¬oted Irish-New Yorker who decided the tribesmen should be pitted against one another over two days in August 1904, as a prelude to the main Games.
Sullivan called this tawdry sideshow the ‘Anthropology Days’, and invited the world’s leading scientists to watch the guinea-pigs try, and inevitably fail, to match the athletic feats of muscular, well-nourished, all-American heroes.
But among the crowds who thronged to gawp at the grim spectacle, the com¬petition became known as ‘The Sav-ages Olympics’.
Surely the most shameful interlude in Olympic history, it is unlikely to be mentioned by London 2012 organisers, for even in those unenlightened times it appalled the modern games’ founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.
Like most of Europe’s top athletes, De Coubertin didn’t attend the St Louis games because the journey was too arduous, but he was furious when he heard about Sullivan’s "anthropologi¬cal" trials.
Olympics overlords have rarely spo¬ken of the appallingly insensitive ex¬periment since then.
Memories of it have been recently re¬vived, however, following the airing of a controversial theory by U.S. Olympic gold medalist sprinter Michael John¬son, who believes black sprinters may hold a biological advantage because they possess a "superior athletic gene".
Johnson believes there is compelling evidence that this "go-faster DNA" was inbred during the days of slavery, when only the fittest survived the gruelling journey from Africa to the Caribbean, and plantation bosses often ran breed-ing programmes to produce the strong¬est workers.
Though some experts agree, others are sceptical, among them John Entine, author of the ground-breaking book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sport And Why We’re Afraid To Talk About It.
Johnson is "intuitively correct but factually mixed up", Entine told me, arguing that the undeniable biological superiority of Jamaicans such as Usain Bolt and other Afro-Caribbean sprint¬ers could not be attributed to a single gene.
Rather, he says, it is more likely to be down to a "constellation of genes" that have evolved over thousands of years for a variety of environmental, climatic and cultural reasons.
Whatever the truth, the irony is that today we are trying to fathom the su¬periority of black athletes, whereas 108 years ago in Missouri their inferiority was said to have been proved beyond doubt.
The racial experiment in St Louis was a debacle, however.
On the first morning the tribesmen were herded together and given rudi¬mentary instructions on the various sports’ rules, but as these were barked in English, most hadn’t a clue what was being said.
‘Great Fun for Savages!’ trumpeted the Los Angeles Times, though the for¬lorn photographs published belied the jaunty headline, and their results were predictably poor.
One African pygmy called Lamba ran, or rather jogged, the 100 metres in 14.35 seconds, which meant, as Sulli¬van pointed out disdainfully in his re¬port, that U.S. champion Arthur Duffy could have given him a 40-yard start and still won at a canter.
In the running broad jump (early long-jump) the efforts of the pygmies, Ainus and Indians were deemed so abject that the leading American leapt considerably further from a standing start.
One the second day "the savages?.?.?. showed what they could accomplish in some of their own particular sports", Sullivan noted. "The most marvelous performance at pole-climbing ever wit¬nessed in this country was given by an Igorot (a native Filipino) who climbed 50ft in 20.35 seconds."
But he was disappointed with their ineptitude at javelin and archery, where they should surely have shone given their cultural dependence on these tra¬ditional weapons.
And though one renowned anthro¬pologist, a Dr McGee, had the wisdom to suggest they might have fared better had they been professionally trained, Sullivan would have no truck with such concessionary theories.
"The whole meeting proves that the savage has been a very much overrated man from an athletic point of view," he averred.
Sullivan said his Anthropology Days had debunked the mythical existence of the "noble savage", a supreme natu¬ral athlete whose strength and skill was honed by living a pure, simple outdoor life.
Concluding his self-congratulatory report, he wrote: "Lecturers and au¬thors will, in the future, please omit all reference to the natural athletic ability."
For the ensuing half-century or more, as the doctrine of white su¬premacy grew dangerously unchecked across Europe and America, as mani¬fested in the rise of Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan, many supposedly reputable scientists did just that.
Even as late as 1943, seven years af¬ter the black American track and field star Jesse Owens won four gold med¬als under Hitler’s impassive gaze at the Berlin Olympics, a Swedish sporting encyclopaedia declared unequivocally that "it is not possible to make sports stars out of African Negroes".
Where did its "evidence" come from? St Louis, of course.
It was not until modern black sport¬ing legends such as Olympic 100 me¬tres champions Bob Hayes, Jim Hines and Carl Lewis began to dominate the explosive events, not to mention sports such as basketball, boxing, grid-iron football and soccer, where speed, agil¬ity and strength are paramount, that the white establishment began to accept the inescapable truth.
Should anyone doubt this, the statis¬tics offer conclusive proof.
In the past four Olympic men’s 100?metres finals, every one of the 32 competitors has been of West African descent, even though they make up just eight per cent of the world’s population.
In London next month, the sprint will almost certainly be fought out again by the incredible lightning Bolt and seven other runners of similar ethnicity.
It would seem, then, that Michael Johnson’s so-called "superior athletic gene" may well exist.
When a furious Baron de Coubertin learned how Sullivan planned to tar¬nish his noble ideal by staging a pseu¬do-scientific circus, he could only re¬flect that such displays "will, of course, lose their appeal when black men, red men and yellow men learn to run, jump and throw and leave the white men be¬hind".
History has proved the father of the modern Olympics to be right.