The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (18 page)

Today, the five hundred or so Maroons of Accompong Town comprise a sovereign nation inside of Jamaica. Just over the hill from where Pitsiladis and the colonel met are the childhood homes of Usain Bolt and Veronica Campbell-Brown.
*
Maroons in Accompong Town do not hesitate to claim them as members of their lineage.

•

“No one can argue that there was selection of the fittest slaves,” Pitsiladis says. He has seen some of the historical records himself, interviewed experts on the island, and coauthored papers on the demographics of the Jamaican slave trade. “The guys selling the slaves were their neighbors,” he says. “What happened was: I knew you were strong, and before you knew it I had a hood over your head, and I sold you. So, eventually, the strongest and fittest got on those ships.” And the strongest and fittest of those supposedly ended up in the northwest quadrant of the island, as indomitable Maroons. “And that’s the
area where the athletes are from in Jamaica,” Pitsiladis says. “So it all makes a really convenient story.”

The story: that strong people were taken from Africa; that the strongest of those survived the brutal voyage to Jamaica; that the strongest of those strong fed the Maroon society that cloistered itself in the most remote region of Jamaica, and that the Olympic sprinters of today come from that isolated, warrior genetic stock. (In a 2012 documentary, world-record-holding sprinter Michael Johnson sided with the theme of that theory: “It’s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations. . . . Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me—I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.”)

Since 2005, Pitsiladis has collected DNA from Maroons as well as 125 of the best Jamaican sprinters of the past fifty years. (He is careful not to identify exactly the athletes he has taken genetic material from. When I visited Pitsiladis’s lab in Glasgow, he hovered over a grad student who was using a pipette to transfer the DNA of “the likes of a Usain Bolt,” Pitsiladis said, onto a plastic sample plate.)

His data, though it is preliminary, has not particularly supported the idea that the Maroon warrior society specifically spawned the Jamaican sprint society.

Maroons in Accompong Town repeatedly told me they could pick other Maroons from a crowd by the darkness of their skin. But, when pressed, most admitted that this was just a bit of folklore they repeat, and that they actually probably could not do so. Nor can Pitsiladis, from the standpoint of their DNA—though he has analyzed only a fraction—really tell the Maroons apart from other Jamaicans. “They look [genetically] like West Africans, and so do all the other Jamaicans,” he says. “Look around, and try to tell me, what
is
a Jamaican?”

Pitsiladis is referring to the fact that the DNA of Jamaicans follows their national motto: “Out of Many, One People.” Slaves came to Jamaica from a raft of countries in Africa, and from a bundle of ethnic groups within those countries. Genetic studies of Jamaican ancestry
have found an array of West African lineages. One study of a section of Jamaicans’ Y chromosomes—passed only from fathers to sons—found that they tended to be most similar to Africans from the Bight of Biafra, which includes coastal areas of Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. An investigation of Jamaicans’ mitochondrial DNA found more similarity with Africans from the Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast, which include areas in Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. As with African Americans, all of the studies agree that the genetic matrilines of Jamaicans are essentially entirely West African, but from a number of countries.

In short, as expected from the island’s slave importation history, the residents descend from western Africa, but from a variety of ethnic groups therein. (Captain Cudjoe, after all, famously united fighters from the Ashanti, Congolese, and Coromantee tribes.) Not to mention that genetic studies have found that some Jamaicans carry a bit of Native American DNA, presumably from mixing with the Taino people, native inhabitants of Jamaica who some historians previously thought went extinct from disease and persecution at the hands of Spanish colonizers before West African slaves arrived.

Colin Jackson, who held the 110-meter hurdles world record from 1993 to 2006, has Jamaican parents but was born and raised in Wales. He underwent genetic analysis in 2006 for the BBC ancestry program
Who Do You Think You Are?
To Jackson’s surprise, his DNA revealed that he is 7 percent Taino. Historians now believe that a small number of Taino people must have survived the Spanish occupation by fleeing into the hills to join the Maroons. So the British Jackson may be yet another world champion sprinter with Maroon heritage. (In 2008, five years after his retirement, Jackson participated in another BBC program,
The Making of Me
,
in which a laboratory at Ball State University took a sample of muscle tissue from his leg and determined—to Jackson’s utter delight—that he had the highest proportion of type IIb, or “super fast twitch” muscle fibers, that the lab had ever seen.)

Clearly, there are intricacies yet to be discovered regarding the
genetic heritage of Jamaicans as well as the island’s premier sprinters. But, at the least, the work of Pitsiladis and others has shown that neither the Maroons nor Jamaicans overall constitute any sort of isolated, monolithic genetic unit. Rather, as we should expect from a mixed group of West Africans, Jamaicans are highly genetically diverse. (Though, also as expected, Jamaicans are decidedly
not
diverse when it comes to the ACTN3 “sprint gene.” Nearly all Jamaicans have a copy of the right version for sprinting.)

If the sprint factory phenomenon came down to the natives of the sprint-happy Caribbean with the highest degree of genetic African-ness, then we would expect more top sprinters from Barbados, as the 250,000 inhabitants of that tiny island tend to have the least diluted West African ancestry in the Caribbean. (That said, Barbados actually
is
overrepresented given its population—an Olympic medalist in the 100-meters in 2000 and an Olympic finalist in 110-meter hurdles in 2012—though not to the degree of Jamaica. The tiny Bahamas, population 350,000, is also perennially one of the best sprint countries in the world. Bahamas beat the United States to win gold in the men’s 4×400 relay at the 2012 Olympics. Trinidad and Tobago, population 1.3 million, is yet another of the Caribbean’s global sprint powerhouses.)

When Pitsiladis compared two dozen gene variants that have been associated with sprint performance—albeit extremely tenuously in some cases—in Jamaican sprinters and control subjects, the results “went in the right direction,” he says, “but it was not dramatic.” That is, sprinters did tend to have more of the “right” versions than nonsprinters, but it was by no means always the case. One of Pitsiladis’s grad students, who was used as a control subject, had more of the sprint variants than “the likes of a Usain Bolt.” This does not mean that genes are unimportant for sprinting, but rather that scientists have located only a very small number of the relevant genes.

Pitsiladis continues to analyze the genes of top Jamaican sprinters, and as technology has made it easier to study vast swaths of the genome, a few gene variants have emerged in his work as differing between
sprinters and controls and thus as potential influences on sprinting success, but the story is murky. And because there are too few Olympic-medal-caliber sprinters in the entire world to create large studies, it will likely remain murky. Sports scientists have a tortuous path ahead to uncover many of the physical qualities that lead to elite athletic performance, much less the genes that undergird them.

In his decade of travel to Jamaica, Pitsiladis’s theories regarding the world’s sprint factory have been influenced less by the data he has compiled with expensive DNA sequencers and chromatographs, and far more by the data he has gathered with two other important scientific instruments: his eyeballs.

•

Known simply as “Champs,” Jamaica’s national high school track-and-field championships has run continuously since 1910—when Jamaica was still a British colony and the headmasters of six boys’ schools arranged the races—and it is the island’s crowning entertainment event of the year.

Champs extends over four days with one hundred high schools in both the boys’ and girls’ competitions. The riotous final day is what you might get if all at once a thousand nightclubs were poured into a track meet.

Kingston’s 35,000-seat National Stadium becomes standing room only, with enough dancing fans in the aisles to show off the “whine,” a methodical, hip-rolling dance that will coax a blush from the uninitiated. In the evening, the stadium halls are redolent of jerk seasoning, and seating areas filled with devotees of a particular high school are covered in brightly colored banners the size of schooner sails. When the fans spot a “cracker”—local jargon for a hotly contested race—the noise of cheers and whoops and whistles and horns crescendos to deafening as athletes lean for the finish in lockstep. If an anchor leg in a sprint relay starts catching a competitor late in a race, the PA announcer will remind spectators not to show their excitement
by jumping out of the stands onto the track. Olympic sprinters show up to cheer on their old schools or to bask in celebrity. At the 2011 Champs, a retinue of girls in sequined shirts and boys in open jackets and loose sneakers bulged around Asafa Powell as the former world record holder—in designer jeans, gold chains, and sunglasses at night—sauntered through the stands.

Youth track is all the rage in Jamaica. Prior to Usain Bolt, professional track meets in Kingston played to empty stands, outdrawn even by the national championship for five- and six-year-olds. Puma stores around Kingston stock gear emblazoned with the emblems of schools that boast hallowed Champs histories, like Calabar High, named after a port city in Nigeria that was a final point of departure for slaves. The fever pitch of youth track gives rise to enthusiasts who want to help their local school succeed at Champs. Enthusiasts like Charles Fuller.

Back in 1997, when he was an employee of the Alcan Jamaica aluminum company, Fuller was sick of watching the fastest local kids leave Manchester Parish for high school. It pained him to see neighborhood boys and girls help other schools defeat Manchester High at Champs. In an effort to hoist his local team back atop Champs, Fuller began to steer local runners to Manchester High. Runners like Sherone Simpson.

In ’97, Fuller saw Simpson run in a local 100-meter race for twelve-year-olds. His mellow, baritone voice rumbles when he describes it. “She ran 12.2 seconds, hand-timed,” he says, his eyes widening. “And that was bare feet, in the grass!” Fuller marveled at Simpson’s lithe build. It reminded him of Grace Jackson, a Jamaican Olympian of the 1980s.

But Simpson was an excellent student, and her primary school exam scores had earned her placement at Knox College, a premier academic school in Jamaica, and one without a track team. So Fuller intervened.

He convinced Simpson’s parents, Audley and Vivienne, of their daughter’s potential on the track. Once they agreed, Fuller got Manchester principal Branford Gayle on board. Gayle contacted Knox
College, and, after some prodding, Knox agreed to grant Simpson a transfer.

For the first few years, she ran well at Champs, but Simpson was more focused on school. High school coaches in Jamaica are generally very conservative in training—most underclassmen don’t practice every day, and athletes don’t lift weights until at least fifteen or sixteen. High school practice, Simpson says, “was not intense.”

But in 2003, her last year at Manchester, Simpson blossomed. She finished second in the 100 at Champs by a shoulder blade to future Olympic medalist Kerron Stewart. Scouts from American colleges, marked by shirts and hats with matching logos, prowl the stands at Champs. (Some scouts also stand out by virtue of the small number of white spectators in the stadium. When I visited Champs, a teenage boy approached me, uttering, “Excuse me, sir?” several times before I realized he meant me. “Do you have any scholarships available?” I was sorry to disappoint him.) Simpson was on the verge of accepting a full scholarship to the University of Texas–El Paso when one of her track-and-field guardian angels intervened, again.

Nearby at UTech—where Errol Morrison is president—coach Stephen Francis was busily molding the MVP Track Club in an effort to give Jamaican athletes a venue to continue training after high school without leaving for the United States and the NCAA track system that Jamaican coaches feel over-races athletes. Manchester High’s principal Gayle called Simpson into his office: “‘You’ll do UTech for a year, and see how it is,’” Gayle recalls saying. “Then I let her cry, and wipe her eyes. And then she agreed.”

In 2004, as a freshman at UTech, Simpson exploded on the international scene, finishing sixth in the finals of the 100-meters at the Athens Olympics. A week later, and just two weeks after her twentieth birthday, Simpson ran down U.S. superstar Marion Jones on the second leg of the 4×100-meter relay and became the youngest gold medalist in Jamaican history. Four years after that, in Beijing, Simpson tied for the 100-meters silver medal, behind UTech classmate Shelly-Ann
Fraser-Pryce, and tied to the hundredth of a second with Kerron Stewart, who had nipped her at Champs five years earlier. Jamaica, 1-2-2 on the Olympic podium.

•

On a sweltering spring day, reclining on a concrete bench in view of the majestic Blue Mountains and beside the undersized grass track where the MVP Track Club trains, Simpson’s lips curl up toward her impossibly high cheekbones when she thinks back on her journey. “I remember it vividly, when Mr. Fuller saw me race the first time, and he came and told me I have a lot of potential,” she says. “It all started from there!”

Simpson’s story is emblematic of the best of the Jamaican system: nearly every kid is made to sprint at some point in youth races (Simpson’s first wins came as a five-year-old in relays at the annual sports day held for Jamaican schoolkids), and adult track enthusiasts, like Fuller and Gayle, keep their eyes peeled for speedy youth and recruit them to good track high schools. There, they are developed very slowly, but get big-race experience at Champs, where they earn adoration and scholarships by performing well. Or, for the best of the best, a shoe company endorsement and membership in a pro club.