Are Indians inferior athletes?

Biology may explain Indian athletic performance:

From the Indian thrifty gene to our finer bone structure, from our cereal-rich diet to vitamin-deficient status, doctors like Shashank Joshi blame "Indianness" for our droopy sporting history.

"It's a question of biology," says Dr Anoop Misra from the New Delhi-based All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

An expert in metabolic activity, he was approached by a British researcher to study India's poor sporting performance vis-a-vis that of the white and African populations.

"If the study had materialised, we would focus on the growth hormone as a factor for poor performance in sports," he says.

He points out that "any athletic effort requires muscle power in terms of bulk and oxygenation capacity".

And – you guessed it – Indians don't have enough of this.

"Ethnic Africans are natural sportsmen as they have muscular bulk," he says.

This, in effect, puts paid to Indian hopes in the boxing arena or even the 100-m dash.

Dr Shashank Joshi, endocrinologist with Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai, blames the thrifty genes that Indians have developed following bouts of famine and epidemics over the years.

"As a genetic conservation mechanism, our genes learnt to hoard fat in order to survive," he says.

But the thrifty genes are now making Indians living in a zip-zapzoom urban milieu susceptible to obesity and more-fat-less-muscle creatures.

"Indians have 33 per cent body fat compared to 25 per cent in Caucasian or African ethnic groups," says Joshi, who is studying the metabolic activity of ethnic groups in India.

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