The Center of Gravity Helps You Go Faster

Sprinters who establish world records generally have West African ancestors and the fastest swimmers in the world are white. Without being a racial differencing, this reality is rather biologically motivated, Adrian Bejan, professor of engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering and co-authors Edward Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University currently teaching at Howard University, and Duke graduate Jordan Charles say. According to them it is all in the center of gravity, located about three percent higher in blacks than whites.

Edward Jones, who is specialized in nutrition, adolescent obesity and anthropometry, or the study of the body's composition, says that even if sprint winners are Jamaican Canadian or African, they are generally traceable to West Africa. As for swimmers, most champions are European, thus usually white. The main idea is that the difference in body morphology divides athletes this way, and their race is not the decisive factor.

As blacks usually have longer limbs and smaller circumferences, their gravitational center is higher than in whites or Asians. These last have bigger torsos, therefore a lower center of gravity and this makes a difference in sports. According to Bejan, Asian body conformation is even more suitable for swimming, the only problem is that being generally less tall than Europeans, Asian athletes are not setting many records.

“Locomotion is essentially a continual process of falling forward,” Bejan stated. “Body mass falls forward, then rises again. Mass that falls from a higher altitude falls faster. In running, the altitude is set by the location of the center of gravity. For the fastest swimmers, longer torsos allow the body to fall forward farther, riding the larger and faster wave.”

Studies on the human body showed that black sprinters run 1.5 times faster than white and at swimming it is the other way round. This small difference proves to be crucial in competition, where world records are established with differences of milliseconds.