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The fall of African descent athletes is actually pretty interesting. I think there's a good chance it's downstream of the increased professionalism (in both player development and optimization of tactics) of sports and the scouting pathways starting younger and younger.
I've read articles suggesting that American Big 4 athletes are also coming from consistently more affluent backgrounds, since those are the ones that can afford the travel leagues, the gymwork etcetera you need to get up the ranks. Even the NBA pivoting to be less centric on height and physicality plus having truly global scouting these days. Black American athletic performance was naturally gonna dwindle as the talent pool for most major sports expanded.
Even the UFC which is still pretty chaotic in terms of development pathways and truly global doesn't have any black champions at present.
I’ve argued before that a big part or AADOS athletic over performance is just selection effects from sports starting to cut- or otherwise ruthlessly ability sort- at the ages when black’s physical advantages from early puberty are at peak. If everyone played on the same no-cut teams until college the NFL would be a lot whiter.
I don't think this is true because the population isn't evenly distributed as far as teams are concerned. Here in Western PA, if you're black and good at football you're likely playing on teams that are majority black all the way through high school, the same being true of white students. And at the high school level, the racial composition of teams isn't a factor in how competitive they are. If you're white and good at football you're not getting cut in middle school in favor of precocious black kid for the simple reason that there probably aren't enough black kids to make a difference.
Even if you're not getting cut, you're still playing against them. I've heard kids on my son's all-white middle school basketball team make comments asking how they're supposed to deal with a "casual 6'3" dreadhead" that every team from certain towns seems to have. Or in football where there's always that one kid from the predominantly black down who looks like he's 4-5 grades ahead of everyone else. My son's class doesn't have a lot of size; he tends to get put wherever the disparity is worst. I've literally heard coaches tell him his position is "wherever their biggest kid is". When he was 9 years old, he came out of a playoff game in tears, because the black kid he was supposed to be handling was taller than the refs and just absolutely trucked him every play.
Maybe they just lie about ages for a few kids to cheat the system - I know for a fact that some of those towns train outside league rules. But that sort of thing absolutely drives kids towards lacrosse or hockey. (And funny note, my son just discovered a few weeks ago that the couple of enormous black kids in his 12-15 hockey league are only a year older than him. From the first game we saw them, two years ago, I assumed they were 15. Luckily they've been on his team often enough over the last few years for him to become friendly with them.)
But the Sailer sort of argument, as I've seen it, isn't that kids are being cut, but that Eastern Europe is putting up white guys in basketball at the NBA level because in that environment, they get to compete against age-appropriate athleticism all the way up, until things are evened out in late high school or college, so a lot fewer kids get discouraged and quit or go to other sports.
I can see it either way. On the one hand, my son has massively improved his hockey skills by comparing and sharpening himself against enormous (and talented) black kids. On the other hand, he occasionally brings up quitting football and basketball to focus on year-round travel lacrosse.
Lying about ages always seemed like a second tier thing- lying about residency is the usual scam for Friday night lights to cheat on eligibility.
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Nonchalant*
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I will point out that the Euro countries which are producing the most NBA stars are also some of the countries with the highest average male heights on Earth. (The Balkan countries, Lithuania and Latvia, Finland, and Germany.) Not saying the other factors people have brought up aren’t real, but it’s worth pointing out that men from these countries do have at least one very important physical attribute working in their favor, relative to the world at large.
Statistically, maybe. I grumble.
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I've heard similar things about Polynesian players in Rugby where the long-term lock-in effects of early selection are used.
Personally I don't think it's outlandish that certain ethnicities are a bit more explosive or whatever, but ultimately the professionalism of modern sports means that consistent structured play matters more. Especially with modern strength and conditioning meaning everybody's largely 'strong enough'
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I agree, it shakes a lot of deeply held Uncle Roy assumptions I was raised with! There's a tendency to always see whatever obstacles have already been done away with as resulting in a "final product" of a society, and it keeps turning out we're wrong. The same assumption is made about class in every society: the current upper class tells myths of a prior class system that was unfair and stupid that put them at the bottom, but the current system that puts them at the top is justified and logical. It's hard to critically examine assumptions about the world.
My guess is that we're also seeing assimilation, with black teens acting more like white teens. I've seen it argued that much of the purported drop in teen sexual intercourse in America disappears if looking purely at whites; the white rate has remained the same while the black rate has converged with the white rate. Life paths are probably converging in other ways as well.
Notably we're writing about five minutes after Jon Jones retired, but it's actually notable that the UFC is pretty dominated by a really tiny global minority of central Asian athletes. I'm sure there are people who assume it is genetic, as they previously did with every other ethnic minority that has dominated a sport.
Jon Jones has been effectively retired for years now. I'd argue the central Asian thing is more that it's the only region where truly top class athletes will go into combat sports as a first option and then don't make enough money doing those so the UFC seems palatable.
I mean, that's exactly my point. It's all downstream of cultural or economic questions, of interest and the availability of a strong culture of training, you need the right economic mix of availability of training with desperation to succeed. This is obviously visible in sports, but there's no reason to think that it's less true of other human endeavors.
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