![]() The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.Įpstein tells the story of Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7’ 3.25"-practically a world-class height. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They respond more effectively to training. In “The Sports Gene,” there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, “never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.” In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals-three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes-and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles-a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. ![]() It is a “shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,” and evocative of “the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.” He is a remarkable-looking man.” What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. “The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. ![]() “Everything about him has a certain width to it,” Epstein writes. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. Toward the end of “The Sports Gene” (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Élite sports is a contest among athletes with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages.
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