The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

by David Epstein

  And so Pitsiladis’s sports research must proceed via the bubble gum and duct tape school of science. Since he started visiting Jamaica in 2005, Pitsiladis has paid for much of the work from his own pocket (he remortgaged his home, twice); by collaborating with media (he sold footage from Jamaica to the BBC for a documentary); by partnering with foreign scientists (the Japanese government has carved out a bit of funding for sports genetics); and with a little help from his friends—a 2008 trip to Jamaica was funded by the owner of Pitsiladis’s local Indian restaurant in Glasgow, on the condition that the restaurant owner’s son be allowed to tag along.

  This is science at its most wondrously bold and shoestring. And still, for Pitsiladis, getting the funding can be as harrowing as not getting it. He is deathly afraid of flying. His assistant can expect a call prior to every visit to Africa or Jamaica, the man on the other end pleading for the trip to be canceled. But with the help of some vintage red, he always boards.

  Not all of his trips to Jamaica have revolved around DNA collection. On the first few visits, Pitsiladis was more of an anthropologist, asking the Jamaican people themselves for their own theories on the secrets of the sprint factory. Answers spanned from the yams they eat to rural children’s habit of chasing animals, to the people’s history of sprinting away from European slave masters. The latter idea may sound silly, but it has origins as deep as the caverns of northwest Jamaica, the locale from which it springs.

  Early in his Jamaican ventures, Pitsiladis learned that not only does the island produce an extravagant number of the world’s top sprinters—the national 100-meter record holders for Canada and Great Britain are Jamaican expats, and top American sprinters often have Jamaican roots—but many hail from in and around the tiny parish of Trelawny, in Jamaica’s northwest quadrant. The 2008 Beijing Olympics were the crowning achievement of sixty years of Jamaican sprint success. And the ’08 winners of both the Olympic men’s 100-and 200- and the women’s 200-meter dash—Usain Bolt and Veronica Campbell-Brown, the premier sprinters of a generation—hail from Trelawny. In the eighteenth century, it became home to a small band of unlikely warriors who descended the sheer limestone cliffs from the thickly layered rain forest of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country into the valleys below to terrorize the most refined soldiers of the world’s most feared military.

  It is these Jamaican warriors, Pitsiladis was told, who spawned today’s captains of track and field.

  •

  On April 3, 2011, one week after his gourmet dinner with Morrison, Pitsiladis is sitting in a chipped plastic chair in a dimly lit concrete room in the rain-forested region of Jamaica that most of the island’s natives have never seen. And he is fighting for his science.

  Across a wooden desk that was dragged into place for this meeting is Colonel Ferron Williams, the leader of Accompong Town. Williams is wearing a golden brown short-sleeve button-down, and his perfectly shaved head tilts quizzically as he listens. To his left is Norma Rowe-Edwards, his deputy and the town nurse.

  When Pitsiladis visited three years ago to gather DNA from Accompong residents, Rowe-Edwards voiced concern about his collection method because it necessitated rubbing cotton swabs inside mouths. Within days, the gossip around Accompong was that Pitsiladis’s cheek swabs were spreading AIDS.

  To the colonel’s right is a local man whom Pitsiladis hired in 2008 to help with the swabbing. The man promised to collect DNA from two hundred Accompong natives. But when Pitsiladis returned to Glasgow to analyze the data, the sequence of Gs, Ts, As, and Cs was the same in all two hundred samples. The man claimed that area residents must just be very closely related. But the sequence was not close, it was identical. The man had swabbed himself two hundred times.

  Despite these previous travails, embodied by the people now at the table, Pitsiladis is prevailing in today’s discussion. The DNA collection kits no longer require a swab, just drool in a plastic disc, so the nurse’s concerns about invasive testing are alleviated. And the colonel would like to draw attention, and visitors, up the lone, spiraling mountain road that leads to this tiny farming community with its low-lying, pastel-colored concrete structures placed haphazardly beside canted tin shanties. So he’s glad to watch over the scientific work so that it can proceed without obstacle. By the end of the meeting, the colonel has reached across the table to grasp Pitsiladis’s hand. He has given his permission for more sampling.

  This wedge of Jamaica is of paramount significance to Pitsiladis. The oral history of northwest Jamaica tells that the fiercest slaves were brought here, first by the Spanish and eventually the British, because it is surrounded by cliffs and ocean and difficult to escape. The part of the story that drew Pitsiladis here begins in 1655, when the British navy came to Jamaica to wrest control of the island from the Spanish. Intrepid slaves took advantage of the chaos to flee into the Cockpit Country, the mountainous highlands of northwest Jamaica. The escaped slaves founded their own communities and became known as Maroons, from the Spanish word cimarrón, which describes domesticated horses that flee into the wild.

  The geography of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country is entirely unique on the island, and rare in the world. Known as karst topography, the remote and wet forest blankets limestone that has been cut away by millions of years of rain, leaving star-shaped valleys—called cockpits—walled in by sheer, vertiginous cliffs. Unlike most valleys formed by water, these have no rivers. The water works its way through the porous limestone and disappears into a lattice of underground caverns. For Maroons who mastered the terrain, and knew the layout of the limestone sinkholes, the Cockpit Country provided an impregnable defense against British troops.

  After taking over from the Spanish, the British furiously ramped up slave importation, bringing Africans by the thousands from locations that correspond to modern-day Ghana and Nigeria. Many came from ethnic groups expert in warfare—like the Coromantee of Ghana—sometimes sold into slavery by rival peoples who captured them. Contemporary letters from British officials show deep respect for the Coromantee, whom one British governor in Jamaica called “born Heroes . . . implacably revengeful when ill-treated,” and “dangerous inmates of a West Indian plantation.” Another Brit, writing in the eighteenth century, said that these “Gold Coast Negroes” were distinguished by “firmness both of body and mind; a ferociousness of disposition . . . an elevation of the soul which prompts them to enterprizes of difficulty and danger.”

  In the 1670s, as slaves were increasingly brought to Jamaica, and increasingly fled to join the burgeoning communities in the mountains, the Maroons burned sugarcane fields, painting the night sky with the color of their intentions. “No flame is more alarming” than a cane fire, wrote William Beckford, an Englishman living in Jamaica. “The fury and velocity with which it burns and communicates cannot possibly be described.” From those bold Coromantee came the military genius known as Captain Cudjoe.

  Cudjoe, along with Nanny, the female leader of Maroons on the east side of the island, created an elaborate spying system that employed Maroon soldiers and slaves on plantations to track the movements of British soldiers.* When the British ventured into the Cockpit Country to retrieve runaway slaves, Cudjoe’s fighters ambushed them, not merely beating them back despite their superior numbers, but building an army with the weapons they seized. The battles were so lopsided that the soldiers of the vaunted British Empire, wrote one English planter, “dare not look [the Maroons] in the face . . . in equal numbers.” That British dread is still embedded in the local names of Cockpit Country districts: Don’t Come Back and Land of Look Behind.

  The climactic battle occurred in 1738, just a short stroll from where Pitsiladis met the colonel to discuss DNA collection. A band of Cudjoe’s soldiers hid in a limestone cave, now called Peace Cave, and placed a loose rock on the path outside. The British soldiers clattered the rock as they passed, while the Maroons waited, tallying their number. Then one of the Maroons emerged and signaled to others i
n the surrounding hills by blowing into an abeng, a bellowing instrument carved from a painted-green cow horn. Maroon fighters flooded the valley from every direction and massacred the British soldiers. Legend has it that only one British soldier was spared, sent home with his ear in his hand, to tell his superiors what had occurred. Shortly after the slaughter the British signed a treaty with the Maroons, granting them their remote territory—Cudjoe was made chief commander of nearby Trelawny Town—and their freedom, a full century before official emancipation.

  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.