White Women Can Run

There’s no diversity casting when it comes to athletics. You are either fast enough or you’re not. So it is with the remarkable Amy Hunt who won four gold medals last week at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham. As such she is the first athlete to win four gold medals at a European Championship.

Ms Hunt is something of a phenomenon. Public school with accent to match, Cambridge University and lots of bling. She has created a persona that is both posh and sassy. She made her intention of taking four gold medals plain at the outset in her sprinting events (100 and 200 metres and the 4 x 100 metres women’s and 4 x 100 metres mixed relays).

I find her manner of address with her well-practised posing, ballerina style, the air-kissing and displays of her bejewelled fingernails slightly irritating. But, nevertheless, she is unforgettable. Oh, and did I mention that she is white? Oops, I’ve just gone and got myself cancelled.

I was once having breakfast with a colleague at Penn State University who, up to the point of that breakfast, had been a good and friendly colleague. We were on an academic visit to explore collaborations with my then employer, the University of Sheffield. Penn State is home to the Nittany Lions, the name shared by the university American football team and the basketball teams.

There was a significant inter-varsity basketball competition on at the same time as our visit, and the Nittany Lions female team were in the same accommodation as us. They arrived while we were sitting in the foyer and all we could do was stare open-mouthed. These ladies were super-models, all well over six feet tall and all of them were black. We did not see them playing, but were taken to see the male team play. All of them were also black.

I made the mistake of bringing up the fact that both teams were exclusively black over breakfast and raising the possibility that, perhaps, they had some inherent advantage over white athletes. I was on the verge of saying that this was not exclusive, of course, but it was noticeable. My erstwhile colleague – a professor of law and a former police officer – simply exploded. How dare I say such a thing? He could point to plenty of black people who were not fast runners. Clearly, the concepts of probability and averages was beyond him.

As other colleagues arrived, two very senior ones, he took delight in telling them that I considered that black athletes had some genetic advantage over white athletes. I had not used the word ‘genetic’, but I suppose it was implied. We never spoke again.

Fast forward, as they say, to the European Championships in Birmingham and Amy Hunt who, I mentioned, is white. Why should I say that? Well, the 4 x 100 metres male team was 75% black, likewise the 4 x 100 metres female team, the 4 x 400 metres male team and the 4 x 100 metres mixed team. The 4 x 400 metres female team was 100% black and only the 4 x 400 metres mixed relay team bucked the trend by being 75% white.

The teams are not, of course, independent as some of the same athletes competed in more than one relay. But I leave ‘the math’ to you. People who identify as black make up less than four percent of the United Kingdom yet approximately 70% of the relay teams competing in the 2026 European Championships were black. Are we not supposed to notice or speculate on the reasons?

Anyway, I am just saying, not speculating. But it is strange how many black chief executives, judges, barristers and heads of sections of major government departments there are – on TV. Take the series The Undeclared War as a case in point. Excellent drama but the diversity casting is off the scale.

As I said at the start, there is no diversity casting in athletics, performance is everything. But the issue of the imbalance is never mentioned. International athletics is colour-blind, but the viewers are not. Neither was Michael Johnson who made a famous documentary in which he speculated that the predominance of black athletes in sprinting was a result of natural selection emanating from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Of course, he was pilloried and he may well have been wrong. But there has to be some explanation!

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK. His Substack can be found here.

(Photograph: National Lottery Good Causes, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)