DarkSpeedWorks wrote:
I am getting confused. You want to engage but then you don't want to engage but then you want to engage? What's up here?
As you might guess, l am not nor never claimed to be an expert on world sport. The article that l linked in the OP (did you read the article? -- it is very short) mentioned a tremendous lack of black riders in European professional cycling teams. Your links are very interesting, but are you saying the statistics mentioned in OP article are wrong?
I think l mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. Europe has a population of nearly 750 million people. That is A LOT of people, well over double the population of the United States. Not sure exactly how many African Europeans live in Europe and how many are immigrants and how many are native born, but l imagine that both numbers are a lot more than zero.
Anyway, out of all this, according to the claims of the article (the one linked in the OP), there are just 10 black professional road riders in Europe. Why exactly this is the case we can discuss forever and never know the answer.
Just 10 black pro riders.
Call me crazy, but to me that seems low.
Hey, I did not read this entire thread, but there is also some level of self selection bias in terms of activities that new immigrants do when they arrive in a new country. You could also say there are zero cyclists of South Asian decent on the british Cycling team yet the English Cricket squad is filled with South Asian and Black players. How do we explain that. The German soccer team has many black players. The French soccer team is literally half black players.
If these societies were completely shutting out minorities from sport, there would be only white players on these national teams, but this is not the case. How come Dutch pro soccer has so many black players but no one on the Dutch speed skating team is black. We can say the same thing about the Canadian speed skating team. We have a lot of black players in track and soccer, but zero on our national speed skating team.
While sport barriers may exist, there is some amount of selection bias. How come there are so many South Asians in silicon valley doing tech jobs and so few South Asians doing pro sport in the USA. Its not that they are all bad athletes (if India can be world champions from time to time in cricket, they can play pro baseball if they choose to...exactly the same skills). So what about minority self selection bias. (for the record, my family is South Asian descent....I see almost none of us in cycling, triathlon, skiing, swimming anywhere in the western world, but we're all over Silicon Valley and Wall street....I can't get my ethnic group to get off their asses and do sport even though many could be fantastic athletes).
So its not all the fault of white guys holding us back.
