There is a real danger here of fetishizing two genes out of twenty thousand, in a way that steers us back toward an essentialist view of racialized sport. Many studies have shown that the versions of ACTN3 and ACE we see in African American and African athletes are far from unique, and a 2014 study concluded that they “do not seem to fully explain the success of these athletes. It seems unlikely that Africa is producing unique genotypes that cannot be found in other parts of the world.”
