When I teach my occasional sociology class every once in a while race and sports get brought up. It’s one of those things that people tiptoe around and have their own opinions about but don’t really take the time to investigate or discuss. 

To grab the bull by the horns, there’s a popular perception that African Americans are just genetically more athletically gifted. When things like this come up I address the perspective as a sincere, good-faith argument instead of just dismissing the belief as racist, but I typically point out that, for example, if it was a matter of genetics Nigeria would be a basketball powerhouse. I’m vaguely familiar with a DRC NBA player, and I think there’s one from South Sudan, but I don’t get the sense there are nearly as many NBA players from Africa as there are from, say, the former Yugoslavian countries.  

(I am, admittedly, more open than many social scientists to the possibility that very particular groups in very particular areas of the world have something biologically going on, like Sherpas being really good high-altitude mountaineers, or the Kalenjin East African ethnicity absolutely dominating international distance running. However, in the very rare cases even if there is something like that going on it is operating at a much, much more fine-grained level than race, which covers thousands of ethnicities and a wide range of genetic variation, especially in the case of Africans). 

No, some groups are just powerhouses because that’s their thing. And middle-to-long-distance running is a Latter-day Saint thing. Recently Timpview high school student Jane Hedengren ran a mile faster than any other high school woman ever after breaking the 5,000 meters record earlier. She has committed to BYU, but this isn’t exactly some sacrifice-for-the-kingdom move, as BYU is a well-known cross-country powerhouse; last year their men’s and women’s teams swept the Division I national championship. 

And I don’t think it’s just an artifact of BYU having a good program. At my son’s DC-area high school where 90% of the student body is Black and Hispanic, the core of the cross-country team are a bunch of white Mormons. The coach is a local bishop. Growing up I had a friend that most certainly was not getting into BYU and was the cross-country equivalent of the beach bum, and we kind of wondered where he had gone and what he was doing with his life–until we found out he was the coach for the fastest middle-distance female in the world. There was a kid at my high school who held the world record for the fastest 12-year old marathon (sounded kind of child abuse-y when I heard that was a thing), and now owns a running equipment store. My brother-in-law’s brother was the national champion for the over-40 year old mile. 

Distance running is one of the more obvious cases, but ballroom dancing is also our thing. Accounting is our thing. Wrestling could have been our thing (Cael Sanderson, Rulon Gardner, Mark Schultz coaching the BYU team) if BYU hadn’t canned their wrestling program. Heck, YouTubers, and musicians in particular, are our thing (Piano Guys, Lindsay Stirling, Simply Three). 

I don’t pretend to know why certain institutions organically found fertile soul in Mormonism, although I can guess (cross-country running has always been the quintessential wholesome-sport option), and this tracks the pattern of some groups just being good at certain things. I suspect that it’s an interactive feedback loop between institutions and culture, where success at something feeds into the cultural emphasis on that thing, which then encourages more people to try out for it, which leads to more success, etc. 

For example, if we’re going to go with the biology hypothesis, we have to explain what the heck is going on with Lichtenstein and their skiing genes. Even though they are a tiny country, they have earned ten olympic medals (all in skiing), they have “the most medals per capita of any country, with nearly one medal for every 3,600 inhabitants.” To this we can add that Caucasus and Central Asian countries produce way more than their fair share of MMA fighters and olympic wrestlers. And then we have Jamaican sprinters, African American basketball players, Russian chess players, Romanian gymnasts, Dominican Republic baseball players, everybody else except the US and soccer, etc. While nowadays the stereotype of American Jews is of bespeckled, slight scholars (I say American Jews because I get the sense Israeli Jews have developed a very different stereotype in regards to their physical prowess and masculinity, regardless of the actual situation), in the early 20th-century Jews dominated prize fighting and boxing. 

So it is interesting that even with the turnover from leavers and conversions, we are still a peculiar enough, reified and large enough community that we have developed our own athletic niches. And of course, we all know where this is going, we need to convert the Kalenjin, send them to BYU, and create a God-like Mormon-Kenyan runners ;)