The Gold Mine Effect E-Book

Rasmus Ankersen

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

'A great read and a fascinating insight into performance.' Sir Clive Woodward We all want to discover our hidden talents and make an impact with them. But how? Rasmus Ankersen, an ex-footballer and performance specialist, quit his job and for six intense months lived with the world's best athletes in an attempt to answer this question. Why have the best middle distance runners grown up in the same Ethiopian village? Why are the leading female golfers from South Korea? How did one athletic club in Kingston, Jamaica, succeed in producing so many world-class sprinters? Ankersen presents his surprising conclusions in seven lessons on how anyone - or any business, organisation or team - can defy the many misconceptions of high performance and learn to build their own gold mine of real talent.

Leseprobe

Printed edition published in the UK in 2012 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by

Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-184831-423-8 (epub format)

ISBN: 978-184831-482-5 (Adobe ebook format)

Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Published in Australia in 2012 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Text copyright © 2012 Rasmus Ankersen

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Title page

Copyright

About the author

Acknowledgements

The Simon Kjaer problem

The eight Gold Mine concepts

The secret is not a secret

What you see is not what you get

Start early or die soon

We’re all quitters

Success is about mindset, not facilities

The Godfathers

Not pushing your kids is irresponsible

Who wants it most

Epilogue

Notes

Index

About the author

Rasmus Ankersen is a bestselling author, a motivational speaker on performance development and a trusted advisor to businesses and athletes around the world. He wrote his first book The DNA of a Winner at the age of 22. A year later he published his second, Leader DNA, based on field studies of 25 high-profile leaders, including the Secretary of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and the CEO of LEGO Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. Leader DNA has been the best-selling leadership book in Denmark for the last five years. In his home country Rasmus has also won a Berlingske Business Magazine award, being named one of the three biggest business talents in Denmark, and the Danish prime minister recently invited him to contribute a chapter to his new book The Danish Dream.

With The Gold Mine Effect Rasmus has taken another step into the secrets of high performance, becoming the only expert on the subject who has literally lived and trained with the best athletes on the planet. Now back in London, Rasmus is teaching organisations how to build their own Gold Mines of world-class performance, through real-life examples and result-driven insights.

You can find out more about Rasmus at www.rasmusankersen.com.

Henrik Hyldgaard is the co-author of The Gold Mine Effect and has been working as Rasmus’s personal sparring partner for the last three years. Henrik is a brand strategist and master of business creativity. In late 2012 he will be publishing his book Hotel Creativity – Check in and Change the Destiny of Your Company. Check him out at www.hotelcreativity.com

Acknowledgments

Expeditions are rarely the kind of thing you can manage on your own, and creating this book has certainly not been a one-man show. I would like to thank all those who have helped me along the way – any over-simplifications or mistakes are my responsibility, and mine alone.

I would like first and foremost to offer my sincere thanks to all the athletes, coaches and parents in the six Gold Mines. They opened their doors to me, allowing me to become part of their daily lives and to follow them closely.

I would also like to thank all the people who established contacts for me along the way and who moved some of the obstacles in my path, opening my way to the hearts of the Gold Mines.

Not least, I would like to offer enormous thanks to my co-author Henrik Hyldgaard for his indispensable efforts and world-class sparring. Without his invaluable advice the book would never have become what it is.

Finally, the biggest thank yous of all go to my mother Joan and father Søren for giving me the roots to grow, the wings to fly and the freedom to make mistakes.

The Simon Kjaer problem

I shall start with an admission: if everything in my life had gone as I hoped and believed it would, this book would never have been written.

I spent my boyhood in rural western Denmark, in a little town in the middle of nowhere. It had a population of 35,000 and its only claim to fame was as a hotspot of the Danish textile industry.

With the focus of that industry rapidly moving away to Eastern Europe and China, there seemed little sense in dreaming of a future as a textile magnate. Instead, I fantasised about being a footballer and playing on famous pitches across the world. The walls of my room were covered in posters of great players. After school every day I played on the street with the other boys in the neighbourhood. I even promised my dad I would buy him a Mercedes once my professional career took off. And at the age of eighteen I was made captain of one of Denmark’s best youth teams. Life was good.

But just one year later, my dream was over. I smashed up my knee so badly in my first league match at the age of nineteen that I would never be able to play professionally again. A promising career ended before it had even begun.

I have to admit that as a footballer I am now nothing but an injured-then-forgotten has-been. Like many other injured and forgotten players, I ended up working as a coach. The best coaches are often frustrated players with pent-up ambitions.

In 2004 I helped establish Scandinavia’s first football academy. In those days we didn’t have much more than a couple of grass pitches with cows grazing on the other side of the fence and a primitive building where we could put the players up for the night. Our ambition of creating world-class players at this desolate location in western Denmark must have seemed naive. I still remember how we had to struggle to attract players for the academy’s first intake. As newcomers to the business we were unable to entice those players considered to be the most talented in the country – we simply had to take what we could get. It was rather reminiscent of the way kids pick their teams at school. We were the last to pick and had to take what was left over when the other clubs had made their choices.

Eventually we had signed contracts with fifteen or sixteen boys and were only short of one player. One of the candidates was a fifteen-year-old boy from a town 50 kilometres from the academy. His name was Simon Kjaer. He belonged to the anonymous majority the Danish club scouts had no record of in their archives. In fact, we had already decided that we didn’t want him. Several of the academy’s coaches had seen him play, myself included, and all were agreed: ‘He hasn’t made a mark and he never will.’

But the season was about to start. We didn’t have much time, and we didn’t really have any other options, so we decided to give Simon Kjaer the last place anyway. He was the quickest solution, and his father had a job as materials manager at the club (read: he was good at his job and we were willing to go a long way to keep him). Simon Kjaer was accepted on the condition that he paid for his own keep. As Simon remembers it himself: ‘My impression was that they only accepted me because they couldn’t hire players who were better than me. The best of them had turned the opportunity down.’

He was absolutely right.

The big mistake

Flash forward seven years. I am sitting in the stands at the Olympic Stadium in Rome watching an Italian Serie A match between Roma and Juventus. The match is not only special because it is between two of Europe’s very best clubs, but also because it is the debut of Roma’s new 22-year-old centre back.

It is this blond-haired Dane I have my eye on from my seat among the euphoric Roma fans. As he jogs about clapping at the crowd, I think back to the first time I met him. It was at FC Midtjylland’s football academy in Denmark, where I was coach.

Things have moved fast since then for Simon Kjaer.

He was first sold to Palermo in Italy for £3.3 million when he was just eighteen years old. At twenty he was sold on to Wolfsburg in Germany for £9.2 million. In his early twenties, he went on loan to Roma – a major club. Playing in a position that most players only master in their late twenties or early thirties, he rapidly became one of the stand-out players in the Italian league, a league which historically has produced some of the world’s best defenders. Every weekend he was matched against enormously accomplished strikers, and his first season in the Serie A culminated in his selection for the team of the year alongside players such as the legendary Paolo Maldini. Experts called him one of the world’s most promising defenders, and major clubs like Manchester United, AC Milan and Liverpool were down on their knees begging to sign him. Today he plays for the French club Lille. He was part of the ‘team of the year’ award in France in 2014, and is an established player in the Danish national team.

The big shock

According to conventional wisdom, Simon Kjaer’s success should be the story of a boy born with an extraordinary innate talent coming into his own. This is certainly the explanation coaches, journalists and experts resort to when trying to explain his performance. They are, however, mistaken. His story is of anything but raw, inbred talent.

I still remember the day back in 2004 when Claus Steinlein, the director of the FC Midtjylland Football Academy, came into the coaches’ office with a pile of paper slips in his hand. It was just six months after Simon Kjaer had joined the academy. All the coaches were present in the room, myself included. Claus dealt out the slips and asked us each to write down the names of the five players we thought would go furthest in five years, in order of priority. At that time we had sixteen players to choose from. One of them was Simon Kjaer. When we had all written five names, the academy director sealed them into an envelope and put them away in a drawer.

Five years later, just after Kjaer was sold for £3.3 million, Claus Steinlein reopened the envelope. Out of eight coaches, how many do you think had Simon Kjaer’s name on their list?

Not one of us!

World War Three

You have to understand that none of the eight coaches that rejected Simon were amateurs. On the contrary; we were intelligent, highly trained, and we all had a UEFA A-license. Although between us we had more than a hundred years of experience in talent development, each and every one of us well and truly screwed up. How could we have been so mistaken? What exactly did we overlook? I have been asking myself that question every day since.

The case of Simon Kjaer is more responsible for the birth of this book than any other experience I have had and, as you will realise the more you read, his story is by no means unique. Coaches, managers, parents and teachers, in any field whatsoever, all have to deal with their own Simon Kjaer problem. He confronts us all with numerous questions, which need to be addressed regardless of what industry we work in or where in the world we find ourselves. What is talent? Do we actually know what the word means? Do we even know what we are looking for? How can we identify talent? How is it grown? And how can we grow it more effectively?

The answers to these questions are more valuable now than ever before. Talent is an absolutely crucial factor in the economic struggles taking place in the 21st century. Success or failure for both organisations and nations in the global marketplace is decided by their TQ (talent quotient) – the ability to capitalise on the talent they have at their disposal. A new world war is already breaking out, one that will be fought not with weapons but with talent. Anyone who does not take this challenge seriously will be crushed in the global competition. According to calculations by the World Economic Forum, for example, Europe and the United States, usually number one on the Global Talent Index, will not be in a position to maintain their levels of prosperity unless they develop their workforces with 72 million more qualified workers before 2030. As Anna Janczak, the World Economic Forum director says: ‘No-one will escape unscathed. Everyone will be confronted with the global lack of talent over the years to come.’

Aggressive talent strategies

It may seem like a luxury for Western nations to prioritise talent development in these times of crisis when they are suffering from low growth and stagnating productivity. But talent development may prove to be one of our most important tools with which to dig our way out of the economic crisis, not least in the light of the fact that rapidly growing, ambitious countries like China, South Korea and Singapore have all launched national talent strategies – recognition of the fact that their TQ is one of their greatest assets. Although these nations are already enjoying high growth rates, they are obviously aware of the fact that without constant and effective capitalisation of their talent mass they will not be able to maintain their current rate of progress.

The Chinese government, for example, has launched what is probably the most comprehensive national talent strategy, with a ten-year action plan. According to President Hu Jintao, who spearheaded the strategy himself, over the next ten years China must transform its current labour-intensive economy to a strong talent-based economy. This means, among other things, that by 2020, 15 per cent of the country’s GDP must be invested in education and research. The number of scientists must be increased to 3.8 million. By way of comparison, the 27 EU countries presently have 1.4 million scientists at their disposal. The Chinese plan includes numerous other initiatives, such as spreading the talent mass by motivating more well-educated people to migrate to poor rural areas, and boosting the recruitment of top management talent for the country’s many state-owned enterprises.

Talent development in Singapore is even more aggressive. The country’s talent strategy, which goes under the name ‘Managed by Elites’, is intended to identify and attract the greatest talent in the world to Singapore over the next few years. The country has already allied itself with a number of the world’s best universities in order to attract foreign scientists and students by means of lucrative tax schemes and the offer of free education if they stay in Singapore for at least three years. The declared goal is to attract 150,000 top foreign students in 2015. Several teams of talent scouts have already been set up in neighbouring countries to monitor primary and secondary schools, youth training schemes and universities in order to spot the best brains and entice them over to Singapore.

Meanwhile, companies in Brazil have recognised that losing talent overseas is a real problem, and have organised massive campaigns to attract talented citizens back home from the US and Europe.

Even if you cannot keep all your talent at home, you can exploit the fact that it is spread across the global labour market. India, for example, is currently trying to establish close contact with some of the 25 million Indians who live elsewhere in the world. The goal is to gain access to the knowledge of the nation’s ‘foreign stars’ and make use of their business contacts, expertise and networks to create growth back in India.

Everyone has their own ‘Simon Kjaer problem’

On a slightly smaller scale, individual forward-looking businesses are working intensively to develop their TQ. They have realised that without talent, organisations cannot prosper. As the American business author George Anders has pointed out, this is the reason that 208,000 full-time recruiters are working in the United States today, everywhere from General Electric to a three-person firm that specialises in pulp mill operators. Big companies like AT&T, Pfizer and Deloitte now even have ‘chief talent officers’. Recently, IT giant Cisco established a talent centre in India with the ambition of sextupling its recruitment of Indian engineers over a period of just five years.

Nobody can afford to lose the global talent war, which these examples demonstrate has already broken out. Every company and every nation has its own Simon Kjaer problem to grapple with and my purpose in this book is to present some specific ideas as to how people in the worlds of business, sport, education and beyond can take concrete steps to improve their TQ.

Having witnessed the remarkable story of Simon Kjaer unfold, it became a personal obsession to crack the TQ code. I decided to quit my job, and used all the money I had left to book six plane tickets. In the seven months that followed, I travelled round the world to live and train in six ‘Gold Mines’ – small, geographically defined locations which are pumping out top performers assembly-line fashion.

These Gold Mines are:

Bekoji, a village in Ethiopia where the world’s best middle-distance runners are raised.South Korea, which produces 35 per cent of the world’s best female golfers.Kingston, Jamaica, where a single athletics club has succeeded in producing most of the world’s best sprinters.Russia, which in a matter of a few years has evolved from a nation with an unremarkable tennis reputation to one which has produced 25 per cent of players on the world women’s top 40 ranking list.Iten, a village in Kenya which consistently produces the world’s best long-distance runners.Brazil, where a vastly disproportionate number of the world’s top football players originate from.

It is these six Gold Mines, and the remarkable people I discovered at each, that you will encounter in this book. Permit me to be your guide on a round-the-world trip to solve the mystery of what lies behind world-class performance.

My hunt for answers started early one morning on a dirt track in Kenya.

The eight Gold Mine concepts

It is 5.30 in the morning and I am standing in the half-light, waiting at the intersection of two red dirt paths. It is here that I have arranged to meet a very special group of people. As I watch, a silhouetted figure appears a bit further up the path, approaching with long, effortless strides. Ten metres away from me, the figure slows down. Christopher Cheboiboch, holder of the fourth fastest time ever in the New York Marathon, is out on his first training run of the day. He stops right in front of me and says hello.

I tell him that I am here to find the secret behind the success of Kenyan runners, and that I am waiting for the training group I have been allowed to follow for the day. He eyes me sceptically, then says, ‘People come here from all over the world, convinced that they will be able to suss out the secret behind our runners by lumbering about in the hills with their heart rate monitors, and staying at the four star hotel with a view. But they’re looking in entirely the wrong place.’

‘Where should they be looking, then?’ I ask.

For a few seconds the air between us is perfectly still. Christopher looks down at the red dirt beneath our feet. ‘There’s only one way to understand the code. Be a Kenyan, live like a Kenyan,’ he says. His glance lingers on me for a moment, before he turns about face and disappears off into the gloom once more.

Alone again on this path 2,800 metres above sea level, I try to imagine what it means to be a Kenyan. I start doing exercises to keep my body warm in the wind. Although I can still feel the aftermath of the long flight in my limbs, it does feel wonderful to be here at last.

It isn’t long before I hear a low thumping through the red earth, which gradually grows louder and louder. Then, down the hill behind me comes my training group: twelve Kenyan men and boys running at full tilt, their tracksuits slapping audibly in the wind as they head straight towards me.

The author running with the Kenyans

As they pass I fall in with them, bringing up the rear. Very soon my heart starts to pound. My legs struggle to keep pace even with the rear guard. My fellow runners were all born and bred here in the Rift Valley and are members of the Kalenjin tribe which, numbering three million, constitutes almost 10 per cent of Kenya’s population. On these unprepossessing dirt tracks, an incomprehensibly large proportion of the world’s best long-distance runners are produced, with the apparent efficiency and predictability of a factory production line.

It is a well-known fact that Kenyans occupy the throne of world long-distance running, but it is less well known that more than 70 per cent of all Kenya’s gold medals at international championships have been brought home by Kalenjin athletes. Since 1968, for instance, only one non-Kalenjin runner has succeeded in taking gold in the Olympic steeplechase.

These incredible statistics are the reason that I endeavour to keep pace with the group on this morning in Iten. The morning sun has now awoken and its first rays are falling on the pack that I am a part of as it pushes its way over the top of the hill. It’s hard going; my pulse is thumping and my tongue is hanging out of my mouth.

I’m here searching for the answer to one question: how can it be that a single tribe has won such a huge number of gold medals and toppled a succession of long-distance world records?

Closer scrutiny reveals that the mystery of the Kalenjin tribe is not unique. In five other places in the world we find a similar phenomenon – places which produce results that seem inexplicable at first sight.

How did one athletics club, which trains on a diesel-scorched grass track in Kingston, Jamaica, manage to win nine sprint medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics (five of them gold), one a world record and an Olympic record?

Why do 35 of the world’s 100 best women golfers come from South Korea which, with its inhospitably cold climate and astronomical green fees, scares off the vast majority of golfers?

How did it happen that one Ethiopian village in the middle of nowhere won four gold medals in middle-distance running at the latest Olympics?

How can it be that in just a few years Russia has developed from a mediocre tennis nation into one that occupies 25 per cent of the world women’s top 40 ranking list?

Why is it that every other year since 1993 a Brazilian has been named the world’s best footballer? And how can it be that in 2010, 67 Brazilians played in the world’s premier championship, the Champions League, compared to only 25 Britons and 26 Germans, even though not one Brazilian club participated?

Like the Kalenjin tribe, these other Gold Mines of elite performance leave us with a multitude of unanswered questions. With their outstanding results, they challenge our most ingrained convictions as to how elite athletes are created, and they confront us with mysteries that have preoccupied people for generations. What is talent? Why are some people so successful while others fail so miserably? Is there a code we can crack in order to unlock the secret of outstanding performance? If answers to these questions can be found then their application will reach far beyond the world of sport – into the boardrooms, classrooms and homes of the world.

Scientists, journalists and coaches are trying to come up with such answers all the time. The problem is that their ideas are based on observations they have made at a physical distance from the Gold Mines. They therefore present conclusions characterised by oversimplification and rigidity, and unfortunately it’s often on the basis of these oversimplifications that coaches, talent scouts, athletes and parents pursue high performance. If we really want to understand why the Gold Mines are such crucibles of talent it is hardly satisfactory to study them from afar. That’s why I decided to travel the world to find the answers I was looking for – talking, studying, eating, training and living with people in these places where the code of high performance has apparently been cracked.

Over a period of seven months I visited the six Gold Mines to feel for myself what it means to grow up in a Brazilian favela (shanty town) with the dream of becoming one of the world’s best footballers; to understand how much is actually at stake for a young runner in the Kenyan Rift Valley; to find out what it takes to make a world-class sprinter in Jamaica; and to learn how Russian and South Korean parents push their children to the limit so that they make it as elite professional tennis players and golfers.

This book presents my findings regarding the ingredients needed to create a Gold Mine, and shows how anyone can use this information to create their own Gold Mine of world-class performance.

Perhaps you’re sitting there right now wondering how you can put the ideas and principles behind the Gold Mines to good use if you are not involved in sport? Well, take a moment to read this list. A top performer:

Must perform under conditions of intense pressureMust understand that numbers drive everythingIs constantly under pressure from ambitious new competitors from all over the worldRealises that last year’s record becomes next year’s baselineConstantly grows and reinvents themselves in order to stay at the topIs subject to brutal accountability: you win or you lose – nothing in betweenMust have sustainable drive, or achieving performance goals becomes difficult.

My guess is that these prerequisites and requirements are almost identical to those you have to perform under in your own industry, whatever it is. At heart, the Gold Mines are about far more than just golf, running or football. They are about the underlying mechanisms which orchestrate world-class performance, and regardless of whether we work in sport, the arts, business or science, we have to understand that all journeys towards realising potential have a great deal more in common than we might at first imagine.

The general debate on talent development is full of misunderstandings, clichés, romanticised conceptions, guesswork and outdated knowledge. My aim in this book is to deliver a fresh, highly practical perspective on the subject. I have set down my conclusions in eight Gold Mine concepts, each of which delivers a decisive lesson in creating and sustaining top performances. The eight concepts are:

     The secret is not a secret

     What you see is not what you get

     Start early or die soon

     We’re all quitters

     Success is about mindset, not facilities

     The Godfathers

     Not pushing your kids is irresponsible

     Who wants it most?

Let us return to that morning in Iten.

In no time, the Kenyans’ fast pace in the thin air so high above sea level almost suffocated me, pushing my body way into the red zone. Out of politeness to the new white guy in the group they slowed their pace, but in spite of this concession, just 35 minutes after I had joined them it was all over. I stood bent double with the taste of blood in my mouth, spitting onto the verge, while the twelve Kenyans disappeared effortlessly out of sight.

I reflected on Christopher Cheboiboch’s words: ‘If you want to understand, you must be like a Kenyan, live like a Kenyan.’ Suddenly I understood his message much more clearly.

The secret is not a secret

‘If I had a million dollars I would close this discussion once and for all. I would lay the idea of “natural” black athletes to rest. That is not the same as saying that genes are not important, but there is no evidence that exclusive genes have been dished out to specific races.’

Dr Yannis Pitsiladis, University of Glasgow

A rotund little man stands waiting for me on the red gravel in front of St Patrick’s High School. He is wearing a dark knitted jumper even though the midday sun is beating down on us and it’s over 30°C. With his ruddy cheeks and a green baseball cap that barely covers the crown of his head, he looks anything but how I had imagined the world’s most successful athletics coach might. Colm O’Connell has agreed to meet me here at the legendary St Patrick’s High School in Iten, where everything began for him 35 years previously. In those days he was just a young Irishman whose main enjoyment in life up to that point had been ‘getting pissed at Skeffington pub’ while he was a student in Galway. It was certainly not on the cards that he would play a central role in the development of the planet’s very best middle- and long-distance runners.

When Colm left Ireland for Kenya in February 1976 to teach at an isolated boarding school 2,800 metres up in the Rift Valley, he knew absolutely nothing about running. In fact, he had never attended an athletics meet in his life.

‘I was just a geography teacher,’ he says with a shrug as we sit in the St Patrick’s school yard chatting in the shade.

Colm O’Connell speaking with the 1,500 metres runner Augustine Kiprono Choge

An entirely new world welcomed Colm O’Connell when he arrived in Kenya. There was no electricity, no telephone service, no tarmac roads and, back then, no reliable running water system. A far cry from the way things had been back in Ireland. By pure chance he became involved in the school’s newly initiated athletics programme as an assistant coach, although he was in no way qualified in this regard. ‘I would never have been given the opportunity to become an athletics coach in England or Ireland,’ he is happy to admit.

St Patrick’s High School already had proud sporting traditions, especially in volleyball. The school’s volleyball team did not lose a single match between 1973 and 1988. It took a few years before the school’s athletics team began to perform properly but when they did, they ran fast. So fast in fact, that managed by Colm O’Connell, they won nineteen out of 21 disciplines at a national athletics meet in 1985. They did not compete in the last two disciplines.

‘I learned how to coach through trial and error,’ says Colm. ‘Because the boys were boarders at the school I had them at my disposal 24 hours a day. This provided me with excellent conditions when it came to finding out what it took to get them to run fast.’

The entrance to St Patrick’s High School in Iten

Colm’s boys were superbly motivated. They had all heard of their countryman, Kipchoge Keino, the first African athlete ever to win the Olympic 1,500 metres gold. (He did so in Mexico in 1968.) Athletics had become professionalised, and the smell of dollars had wafted its way to the Rift Valley. Over the next ten years, Colm O’Connell and St Patrick’s High School would pump out one world superstar after the other.

The school yard of legends

Colm points to a tree in the school yard. On it there is a plaque embossed with the name Ibrahim Hussein.

‘He was my first really good athlete,’ he says.

Ibrahim Hussein was a thin lad from the Nandi tribe who came to St Patrick’s at the age of fourteen. He later ended up winning the Boston Marathon three times, and was the first African ever to win the New York Marathon.

Three-times Boston Marathon champion, Ibrahim Hussein, has got his own tree at St Patrick’s

The whole school yard is full of similar trees with small plaques on their trunks, each bearing the name of a great athlete who started their career at St Patrick’s High School. To begin with, they planted a tree every time one of their boys won a medal at the World Championships or the Olympics. However, they soon started to run out of room, and so decided to plant just a single tree for each of the greatest winners.

A couple of metres from Ibrahim Hussein’s tree stands the Birir tree. One of O’Connell’s Olympic winners, Matthew Birir, brought home gold in the steeplechase at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. As we walk through the school grounds looking at each tree in turn, I am struck by how unique the environment of St Patrick’s must have been in its heyday.

‘It wasn’t just dominance. It was another planet,’ Colm recalls, as he tells me one gripping story after another about his boys. You have to look long and hard to find a prize-winning Kenyan middle-distance runner who has not come into contact with ‘Brother’ O’Connell during their career. Wilson Kipketer (who, until August 2010, was 800 metres world record holder), Daniel Komen (current 3,000 metres world record holder), Asbel Kiprop, Lydia Cheromei, Susan Chepkemei, Isaac Songok, Linet Masai, Mercy Cherono, Janeth Jepkosgei, David Rudisha – you name them, Colm has trained them.

As I talk to Colm I have questions queuing up inside my head. I want to understand how it can be that this boarding school with no extraordinary facilities can achieve such staggering results. And the success of St Patrick’s High School isn’t where the astonishing facts end. The school is in the part of the Rift Valley that is home to the Kalenjin tribe. They make up 10 per cent of the Kenyan population. Since 1968, when Kenya began to completely dominate the Olympic steeplechase event, only a single non-Kalenjin runner has won the Olympic gold. When this sole non-Kalenjin winner, Julius Kariuki of Nyahururu, also a Kenyan, was asked about this phenomenon he said, ‘It is likely that my relatives came from the Kalenjin.’

But that’s not all. One of the ethnic groups under the Kalenjin tribe is the Nandi people, consisting of some 80,000 individuals. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Nandi runners won the gold in both the men’s and the women’s 800 metres – they also won two silvers and two bronzes! What are the chances of this happening for a tribe consisting of just 80,000 people when competing against the whole of the rest of the world?

The athletic Gold Mine in the Rift Valley is one of the most sensational phenomena in the whole history of sport. We’re not talking about ice hockey, rugby or baseball, all of which are regionally based sports. We are talking about a global sport, pursued professionally in almost every country in the world, and yet continually conquered by a tiny group of people all living within a 100 kilometre radius.

The running genes myth

The domination of the Kenyan runners is intimidating. In 2011 alone you find a Kenyan beside nineteen of the twenty fastest marathon times. That list includes a new world record, the winning performances from every major city marathon in 2011, and the World Championship marathon win. Not only were all the major city marathons won by Kenyans, but the course records at each were broken in the process.

More than 258 Kenyan marathon runners ran the 44.2 km race in under two hours and fifteen minutes. Britain, with a population twice the size of Kenya’s, delivered only a single performance under that time. The number of top runners in Kenya seems endless, and running is not even the national sport. The runners come from a very small portion of the country where the internal competition is ruthless. This is clearly demonstrated by the case of Luke Kibet – although four months earlier he had run the eighth fastest time ever in a marathon, and was the defending world champion, he did not qualify for the Kenyan Olympic team for Beijing in 2008. (Though during the very last week before the competition he was taken on as a reserve.)

The kind of world supremacy in running that the Kenyan’s enjoy strongly suggests that something more than just hard work is at play. Surely they would not be able to continually deliver the kind of performances they do without some kind of natural genetic advantage?

The same would seem to apply to Ethiopian men, who have won every single gold medal in the 10,000 metres since 1993 or, for that matter, to the West African sprinters responsible for 494 of the best 500 100-metres times ever run. For many years, athletes, scientists and coaches in the West have clung to the explanation that these groups of people must be equipped with special genes, perfectly designed for the specific sport in which they consistently excel.

In their attempt to explain the success of the East African medium- and long-distance runners, scientists have focused, among other things, on the Kenyans’ and Ethiopians’ slim calves, which they believe may be advantageous over long distances. But is this enough of an explanation? It certainly isn’t as far as the Jalou people are concerned. The Jalou are a tribe in Tanzania, which borders on Kenya, and their body types and build are largely identical to their Kenyan neighbours. However, the Jalou have never produced a single top runner. This fact (along with a number of others) has raised doubts as to whether slim calves play a decisive role in the Kenyans’ success at all.

Another theory is that East Africans are equipped from birth with top-of-the-line running hardware in the form of their maximum oxygen uptake, which enables them to absorb more oxygen than other people and thus work longer and harder.

But this argument also begins to waver under close inspection – Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin has studied the physiology of East African runners and concluded that it is largely identical with that of European athletes, saying, ‘There is no marked disparity between the maximum oxygen uptake of an East African and a Caucasian.’

Despite these conclusions, theories about the advantages possessed by East African runners keep on popping up. Some people have tried to argue for the existence of good genes for long-distance running in the population by pointing to the absence of results in sprint events. In other words, they argue that a predisposition for long-distance running is the opposite of being predisposed to sprinting. However, when exposed to a pressure test this observation also proves untrue. As Toby Tanser writes in his book More Fire about Kenyan runners: ‘In the fourteenth session of the men’s 4×400 metre relay at the African Championships, Kenya had five male gold medallists. In ten of the Commonwealth Games, the Kenyans have won four golds. These records remain unmatched.’

An entirely different attempt to explain the East Africans’ dominance relates to the thin air 2,500 metres above sea level, the environment in which they grow up and train. Exposure to these conditions naturally increases their production of red blood corpuscles.

But if thin air is the whole explanation, why have Nepal and Mexico not produced any world-class long-distance runners?

And why is the national marathon record in Malawi more than fourteen minutes slower than the Kenyan record, when the population grows up in exactly the same type of environment as the Kalenjin people, with the Ethiopian runners training in the highlands around Addis Ababa?

A genetic explanation model of Kenyan running success has started to seem less and less plausible over time. It does not explain, for instance, why Sweden, which dominated world long-distance running in the 1940s, suddenly won the gold in the heptathlon, high jump and triple jump at the 2004 Athens Olympics. At the time not a single Swede was represented on the IAAF list of the world’s 50 best long-distance runners. Are we supposed to conclude that the Swedes, in a little more than 60 years, exchanged their long-distance genes for jumping genes?

It’s also not hard to see why people might get the impression that East African runners have excelled in the sport ever since it began, given their incredible performance recently. But this is simply not the case. Take, for example, the list of the top five at the marathon World Cup championships in 1999. Four of them are Europeans. The first East African comes in ninth, even though there was no shortage of runners in Kenya and Ethiopia at the time.

Ranking

Athlete

Country

Mark

1

Antón Abel

ESP

2:13:36

2

Modica Vincenzo

ITA

2:14:03

3

Sato Nobuyuki

JPN

2:14:07

4

Novo Luis

POR

2:14:27

(SR)

5

Goffi Danilo

ITA

2:14:50

Just ten years later at the 2009 World Championships the picture is completely different. The top five has been totally taken over by Kenya and Ethiopia.

Ranking

Athlete

Country

Mark

1

Abel Kirui

KEN

2:06:54

(CR)

2

Emmanuel Kipchirchir Mutai

KEN

2:07:48

3

Tsegay Kebede

ETH

2:08:35

4

Yemane Tsegay

ETH

2:08:42

5

Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot

KEN

2:10:46

So the burning question is this: what happened during those ten years? Did the good running genes manage to emigrate from Europe, via the Mediterranean and down through the Sahara to East Africa? Unlikely. And apart from that, what has happened to the British, who used to churn out middle-distance stars such as legends David Bedford, Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe?

These days, British men do not even manage to run into the top ten in their very own London Marathon. It was last won by a Briton in 1993 when Eamonn Martin crossed the finishing line with a time of 2:10:50. In 1985, 102 British male runners ran under the elite time of 2 hours 20 minutes for the marathon; only five managed this same feat twenty years later. British male distance running had all but disappeared. But why? Have previously efficient British genes got lost in evolution? Did British men, or other Europeans too, for that matter, suddenly start accumulating lactic acid in their muscles? Of course not. The genes of the British are as good as they ever have been.

Evidence of the fact that they can still put the Kenyans and Ethiopians in their place is to be found in Cheshire, the birthplace of Paula Radcliffe, British Queen of long-distance running and women’s world Marathon record holder. If the East Africans have a perfect genetic disposition to the discipline, how can it be that a white British woman, who grew up on fish and chips, surrounded by pubs in the British lowlands, has repeatedly thrashed the Kenyans?

Yannis Pitsiladis of the University of Glasgow is one of the leading researchers in sport science. He has dedicated his career to studying the secret behind the East African long-distance runners and the West African sprinters. He is very clear indeed on his conclusions: ‘There is no more evidence of a connection between specific races and specific top performance genes than there is of a connection between specific races and high intelligence. That is to say, there is no correlation whatsoever,’ says Pitsiladis.

In other words: the East Africans’ achievements, it transpires, are in fact much less predetermined than even the most optimistic scientists imagine.

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