BS: English Athletes

Subject: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,Guest
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 02:01 PM

What is the proportion of black English athletes to white? Not a racist question, just statistical.

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Jack Campin
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 02:05 PM

What are you counting as an athlete?

Footballers?

Skateboarders?

Golfers?

Yachties?

How on earth would you count?

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Kampervan
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 02:25 PM

What a very vague question.

Without wanting to be pedantic, Jack c is quite right - firstly you need to define the terms -Athlete and also Black.



I'm a great fan of verbal gymnastics myself.

K/van

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,Guest
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 02:53 PM

Sorry, I was thinking in terms of the Commonwealth games.

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: akenaton
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 02:55 PM

Athletics are well defined surely, running, jumping, pole vault, walking, etc. swimming?

Team games like football and rugby are not "athletics"

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Kampervan
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 03:03 PM

Well that defines half of the question, but the word 'black' is so vague as to be meaningless. It sounds easy enough, but really it's not.

I'm not being antagonistic here, but it really is impossible to answer if you think about it.

HOWEVER, I may be proved wrong.

Cheers
k/van

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,MikeL2
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 03:39 PM

Hi

I too believe this is a difficult question to answer.

Remember - most of the events in The Commonwealth games are not athletics. eg Bowls,Rugby,Netball,Judo,Weight-lifting,Swimming,Shooting,Squash,Table Tennis,Gymnastics,Cycling etc etc.

But even if it is possible to answer, what will it prove?

Maybe a better question to ask is how many of the English Commonwealth Games squad ( or Team England as they are now known )are actually English?

Of course the same could be asked of most of the other countries too.

Best of luck


Cheers

MikeL2

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,MikeL2
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 03:51 PM

Hi

Maybe a much simpler question to answer would be if you asked about Brunei. They have only one competitor who took part ( I use the words deliberately) in the Cycling Events.

He did not finish in one, did not qualify in another and in the third I can't find any record of him actually taking part.

Cheers

MikeL2

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,Ed
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 03:52 PM

And define 'English'

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,Tunesmith
Date: 29 Jul 14 - 04:27 PM

Well, in the UK we don't, generally, the term "track and field" and so the word athlete is usually associated with athletics ( ie. running, jumping,throwing).
Of course, the word athlete can be applied to any "physical" sportsperson.
As to black and white, so many of our great athletes have been the product of a black father and white mother ( think Daley Thompson, Kelly Holmes, Jess Ennis and Katarina Johnson-Thompson AND the amazing 17yr old double junior world champion Morgan Lake.

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Musket
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 03:59 AM

I'm English and I'm fit as a butcher's dog.

I assumed the thread was in worship of me till I opened it.

I don't know the answer, but statistically, black athletes would be far more represented in track and field than the swimming pool. Not a question of eugenics, more an observation of bone to muscle linking in the same way as you could differentiate skin pigment or note that people from the India sub continent are more prone to type II diabetes.

The other variables are about access to sport. You rarely see people from deprived areas representing in equestrian sports. Look at professional footballers and professional rugby players. Footballers come from a larger cross section of demographic than either type of rugby. Real rugby has a large socioeconomic representation from A & B and league a large geographic one.

So even if someone pointed out the answer, I don't see any purpose as it doesn't tell us anything?

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 04:16 AM

Here's a list of the England Athletics team.
From this you should be able to Google each name (that you don't recognise) and estimate the ethnicity of each based on your own preferred definitions.

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,Tunesmith
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 11:39 AM

The idea that blacks can't swim as well as whites is a myth!
It's easy look at a sport and make assumptions!
For example, blacks can't ride bikes well!
The statistics prove it!
No black man has won the Tour de France! Indeed, has a black man ever rode in the Tour De France?
But, get a bunch of Kenyan distance running stars, give them bikes, train them for a few years, and I bet they'd eventually - probably sooner than later - win the Tour.
Here's another one!
20+ years ago the idea of white men dominating heavy-weight boxing would have seemed ridiculous.
But it came to pass!

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 11:44 AM

These things go oddly in waves. In the 40s-50s, only two countries, USA & Oz, produced any tennis players of any note at all.

Now they have pretty well vanished from the top of that sport, & it's all Scandies & Central & Southern Europeans.

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: selby
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 11:52 AM

Does is matter they have all put a lot of hard graft in Best of luck to them all
Keith

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Musket
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 11:53 AM

It's such a myth, medical students are required to know the reasons for it as part of their anatomy exam and the part 1 examination for foundation doctors includes knowledge of precautions for orthopaedic setting of certain bones in people of Afro Caribbean descent.

It is a fact that the folklore surrounding the reasons dissuades many black people from trying to get on in competitive swimming, I'll agree. Fitness and technique are important factors. Just because my bones move in the right way more easily for many strokes and kicks doesn't mean that I am faster than my mate John. He is younger than me, fitter than me and goes swimming most days at the gym.

Up till recently, misplaced political correctness precluded targeted diabetes screening of people of India sub continent origin, but NICE guidelines threw that out. There are differences between races medically speaking but they are at the susceptibility level in all but UV tolerance of skin. Sadly there are still people who like to use differences for reasons of prejudice. That doesn't mean the point doesn't stand. Susceptibility, not absolute difference.

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: GUEST,Tunesmith
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 12:07 PM

There's a black man out there who can swim faster than Michael Phelps!

Subject: RE: BS: English Athletes
From: Musket
Date: 30 Jul 14 - 12:11 PM

I hope he gets gold. If he does it might help you understand what susceptibility means.