Why Root for the Jamaican Sprinters?

Ben McGrath on Usain Bolt, and Nicholas Thompson and Malcolm Gladwell on Olympic sprinters. Illustration by Robert Risko.

Nicholas Thompson and Malcolm Gladwell will be chatting about track and field throughout the Olympics. You can read their first exchange, about the five-thousand-metre race, and their second exchange, about doping.

Nicholas Thompson: Malcolm, you’re half Jamaican, but you’ve also lived in the United States for a long time. Who do you want to win the hundred-metre dash?

Malcolm Gladwell: Do you have to even ask? I have actually set the bar very high. I want an all-Jamaican sweep: Bolt, Blake, and Powell, in any order. I also want to see the Jamaicans set a new world record in the four-by-one-hundred relay. No country has ever fielded a stronger sprint relay team than the Jamaicans this year.

N: Don’t you feel any sympathy for the top American, Tyson Gay? Esquire magazine just wrote the following, about Gay and Bolt: “By almost every criterion, Gay is the better runner. He trains harder, gets off the blocks faster, has superior form. Even in purely physical terms, Gay has the sort of dense, muscular, compact body that was long considered the apotheosis of the human sprinter before that tall, lazy, gangly showboat loped out of Jamaica and changed everything. The only area in which Gay falls short is the most important one.”

M: Sympathy? Why? Jamaica is just slightly bigger than Brooklyn. The United States is a hundred times larger.

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N: Well, that gives me one reason to root for the Brooklyn-born Justin Gatlin, even if he was suspended for steroid use.

M: Cheering for Tyson Gay is like cheering for Microsoft. I had dinner with a friend last night who argued that pound for pound the greatest sporting nation in the world is Croatia—Goran Ivanisevic, Toni Kukoc, et al. (I should point out that my friend is Croatian). But surely this is nonsense. Croatia is one and a half times the size of Jamaica. It dwarfs Jamaica, and Jamaica has a legitimate chance of winning five or six track-and-field gold medals in London.

N: If you measure the 2008 Games by medals won per G.D.P., Jamaica comes in second, narrowly edging Mongolia and Cuba, but losing to Zimbabwe. Croatia comes in twenty-sixth, and I give very few bonus points for Toni Kukoc.

Speaking of this, there are a lot of top American distance runners competing who weren’t born in this country—Bernard Lagat, Meb Keflezighi, Lopez Lomong—and I often get the sense that the track community hasn’t embraced them as much as they would American-born runners. Do you agree that this is the case? And should we take more pride in American-born runners? In one way, Galen Rupp’s success, in a country that doesn’t prize distance-running the way that Kenya does, is more impressive than Bernard Lagat’s.

M: Um. Well, Galen Rupp does have the full force of Nike behind him, which is to say that he has an awful lot more resources in his corner than any except the most established Kenyans and Ethiopians. It's not like the United States neglects its distance runners, or forces them to run barefoot to school. The U.S. just has the “problem” that any wealthy country has, which is that there is no particular reason for talented athletes to become distance runners when there are a hundred more rational and productive options for them to take. I was just on vacation with some friends of mine who have a thirteen-year-old daughter. We went for a run, and I was astonished. She’s as smooth as Bernard Lagat. Will she become Bernard Lagat? I doubt it. Why should she? I’m sure she’d rather go to graduate school than train six hours a day.

N: I would rather be Bernard Lagat than go to graduate school. But point taken.

M: Affluence is the enemy of athletic accomplishment—and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

N: Well at least in running, a sport with no cost to participate, and relatively limited financial rewards if you’re great at it. Soccer has no cost to participate—you just need a ball of tape and some lines in the dirt—but it’s lucrative if you’re good at it. Other sports, like swimming or gymnastics, require a certain level of national affluence. You need pools and pommel horses, which is why there’s so much less geographic diversity in the participants.

Speaking of which, your forthcoming book is about underdogs, and the ways that, through science and strategy, Davids can beat Goliaths. Are there any particularly intriguing underdogs you’ll be watching in this Olympics?

M: You mean other than every Jamaican? I think I would like to see Rupp win the ten-thousand-metre race. Some of his times this year at shorter distances suggest to me that his finishing kick might be greatly improved. This is the only instance in which I will accept the idea that an American is an underdog.

See our full coverage of the Games at The Olympic Scene. Read Gladwell and Thompson's other exchanges about track here, and here.

Illustration by Robert Risko.