When Will India Win the 100 Meter Dash at the Olympics?

India is the most populous country on the planet and will likely have the biggest economy in the world by the end of this century. It has given birth to major religions and major social movements. It is one of humanity’s great civilizational nodes.

Indians have achieved a lot in practically every domain, except the Olympics.

India ranked dead last in medals per capita (see here) at the Paris Olympics.

For comparison’s sake, the tiny, impoverished island nation of Grenada generates a medal per every 50k people. India needs 234mm people to generate a single medal (in the last Olympics they didn’t even win a gold medal).

This isn’t an anomaly. Throughout its over 100-year participation in the Olympics, India has never won a single medal in track (see here). Slovenia a country of 2 million people that just started participating in the Olympics in the 90s has more total medals than India.

Why is a person from Grenada 4,408 times more likely to win an Olympic medal than a person from India – or put another way – why are Indians so bad at sports? 

I asked ChatGPT this exact question and I got the sort of politically correct answer that a middle school social sciences teacher would give you.

India, like any country, has diverse people, and there are athletes excelling in sports across various disciplines.

For example, athletes like PV Sindhu (badminton), Neeraj Chopra (javelin throw), Mary Kom (boxing), and the Indian hockey team have brought pride to the country and proved that with the right support and opportunities, India can compete on the world stage.

However, there are several factors that have historically affected India's performance in global sports competitions, especially in areas outside cricket. Some of these factors include:

1. Infrastructure and Facilities: India has not always had world-class sports infrastructure, training facilities, or access to advanced coaching methods across all sports. This has made it difficult for many young athletes to realize their full potential.

2. Cultural Factors: Historically, academic success has been emphasized more in India, and many families push their children toward engineering, medicine, or other traditional career paths rather than sports.

3. Funding and Support: While cricket in India receives a lot of financial backing and attention, other sports haven't historically been as well-funded. This means athletes in less popular sports may not have access to the same resources.

4. Opportunities: The number of opportunities to compete on the international stage has been limited for many sports. The lack of competitions and exposure to higher levels of play can hinder the development of elite athletes.

In this answer, we see the typical response pattern that authority figures – be they LLMs or academics – have when confronted with a very stark difference in group outcomes.

OpenAI starts by questioning the premise - offering up some one-off examples of Indians who are great at sports (I mean who hasn’t heard of PV Sindu and his badminton prowess!) as if their existence disproves a claim about overall group performance. 

Then the LLM offers up the typical soup of environment, cultural factors – it is the crushing poverty, the lack of facilities etc. You also get a small mention of cricket – Indians would be great at other sports, but they are too busy playing cricket.

These explanations are all rather silly and ignore all the obvious counter factual examples. The top three countries in terms of per capita performance in the Olympics (Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia) are all poor Caribbean countries with zero infrastructure and when you solve environmental factors by placing Indians in the wealthy West where lots of infrastructure exists, the results are no different. Indians are a sizable percentage of the US and the UK and are an incredibly successful ethnic group across a whole range of domains; yet there is not a single person of Indian descent in any professional sports league – NFL, NBA, MLB or Premiere League. An Indian is more likely to own a sports team than play in a sports league.

What about cricket? Even here, Indians massively underperform relative to population size – Australia a country with 1/50th of the population of India has won 5 World Cups to India’s two.

This lack of Indian professional sports representation is not a galvanizing social issue, and in the scheme of things, perhaps not even an interesting fact, but what makes it notable is just how utterly incapable scientists, LLMs, and institutional authority figures are in examining it – they will bend over backwards to offer every ridiculous explanation possible, but the most obvious one and that is group genetics.

The reality is this - even if India decided tomorrow to spend $100 billion a year for the next 24 years with the goal of winning the 100 Meter dash at the 2048 Olympics, I would venture that barring genetic engineering, the winner of that race would still be someone of West African ancestry. No amount of athlete selection, training and nutrition would overcome whatever millennia of selection pressures have led these two population groups into having very different levels of fast twitch muscles.

But Chat GPT can’t come out and say that. 

If the modern West has a shared religion or rather a shared delusion, it is the blank slate theory – the idea that each human starts out life equally capable of achieving the same thing as any other human in any domain. Any differences that arise in outcomes between groups are either harmful stereotypes that are not true (if you notice them you are racist) or they are due to environmental factors that with enough work can be change.

This is the belief system of practically everyone in the world of academia (and now the LLMs).  If you bring up group genetics as a factor to perhaps consider in explaining divergent outcomes between groups, you don’t get a polite disagreement, you get stapled to a cross.

In many ways, social scientists today are no different than Italian astronomers in the 17th century trying to divine the motion of celestial bodies. These astronomers were able to conduct free scientific inquiry into the matter, but their explanations kept coming up short – they came up short because their inquiry couldn’t explore theories that would violate one of the central tenants of Catholic the faith – that is that the sun revolved around the earth.

When an astronomer named Galileo came along who was willing to violate that tenant, he ended up being able to accurately predict the motions of heavenly bodies, but for being right but blasphemous he was locked up for years.