in horse racing blood lines are incredibly important. breed a thoroughbred to a short horse and repeat 10 times in future generations and you'll get lovable but slow horses every time.
strip away what the media and social leaders have told us to say and think. isn't this cross-bred horse line exactly what most Americans are like?
i think this genetic component of athletes (and others) is fantastically important and largely ignored by humans for socio-political reasons. a "pure-bred" moroccan or Kenyan or Ethiopian; conceived, birthed, raised, fed, nurtured in the appropriately suited environment... why wouldn't this produce super-ior athletes to cross-breeding?
i'm not saying it's all genetic. It's clearly not.
I have another thing to say. capitalistic culture and competitive distance running go hand-in-hand if runners make money. In America very few runners make money. why, oh why, would we have the world's best runners?
capitalism and capitalistic thinking also go hand in hand with cheating. why do we expect that our runners be clean? politics are all about money and power games and cheating under the table. so is big business. so is wall street. so is practically everything else! we praise whatever's great at the moment and ignore the ugly process.
why, why, why, would we expect our runners not to cheat?
that being said, it is fun to try to find the non-cheaters and those who are great without being obsessed with the outcome.