I was just looking for information on the French swimmer, Malia Metella.  Unsurprisingly, I found little about her.  But I did find an interesting article written by David Owen in 2005.  What caught my attention was that in addition to  asking Metella about herself and her success as a swimmer (she won silver in the 50 free in Athens 2004), Owen asked her why there were so few black swimmers.

My immediate thought there is, why would she know that?  What does that have to do with her, really?

And then the article forgets her altogether and goes off in search of its answer.  Owen cites studies which point to blacks having denser, heavier skeletons, blah, blah, blah.  Then he finds another researcher who said that skeletons change quickly, and the reason for the dense skeletons may be the lifestyle of the person. So this thing perpetuates–black people generationally don’t swim, and their skeletons are denser because of the stress and work black people generationally do, and so on. In other words, because black people don’t swim, they don’t have ‘swimming skeletons,’ not the other way around.

Then they bring up the socio-economic reasons again, ignoring the one point Malia Metalla did have to make about the issue.  There’s just not a lot of encouragement for black swimmers, because they don’t see a lot of other black swimmers.  That is neither a poverty argument, nor an evolution argument.

It smacks of the truth.