It seems that the Winter Olympics isn't quite as bad as a GOP convention, here.

Obviously, it should not be that surprising that there are only a handful of black athletes participating in the Winter Olympics, and that the reason has almost nothing to do with racism, at least as that word is typically defined. The sports being spotlighted in Turin are, for the most part, activities that originated in Scandanavia, Finland, and the Alps; had Austria or Norway possessed colonial empires in Africa, rather than Britain or France, we would be seeing more than our fair share of Nigerian speedskaters* and Kenyan cross-country skiiers in these Olympics. Sports, like other cultural activities, generally reflect the socio-political environment, and since the period in world history that first featured the growth of global empires was also the period in which athletic competition was first being developed (the mid-Nineteenth Century), African nations play soccer, not ice hockey.

How dominant a role colonialism plays can be seen where you look at those few countries in which soccer is not the predominant national sport. Those nations can be put into two camps: countries that were part of the British empire, that picked up another pastime of that country, such as rugby (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) or cricket (India, Pakistan and the islands of the Caribbean), or countries that were part of the American sphere of influence, which favored baseball. Almost without exception, every country in which baseball is the most popular sport was occupied, at one time or another, by the U.S. military: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Japan, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, the Phillipines, etc. America was locked out of having an African empire, and South and Central America were part of European empires that predated the existence of the U.S., so our sports (which were themselved descendents of British sports) have had to play catch-up elsewhere, while soccer, rugby and cricket, so popular everywhere else, are, at best, marginal pastimes here. And just as the West used the Third World as little more than trading outposts where we could plunder their natural resources for the benefit of our economy, so too are the athletes of Africa and Central America used today as little more than raw material for soccer and baseball teams in the Home Countries.

In fact, as the world's only superpower, the sport Americans have had the most success exporting in recent years isn't baseball or our own version of football, it's basketball. Like soccer (and unlike baseball or football), basketball is inexpensive, can be practiced individually, and is easy to follow. For the most part, the rules of both sports can be written onto the back of an envelope. Even the physical skills required in both sports are the same: both feature almost constant running by the participants, and movement by players without the ball is of paramount strategic importance. With the exception of Lithuania, the top countries in basketball are also soccer powers, including the Gold and Silver medalists from Athens, Argentina and Italy (as well as, I should point out, the U.S.).

Hence, the games of the Winter Olympiad are largely a Eurasian phenemonum. The leading countries in most of the sports are those in which the activity (skiing, skating, etc.) is tied into the culture, where the athletes take up the sport at an early age, and where, unlike the U.S., there is no class barrier connected to the activity (such as skiing). Historically, those countries do not have a significant immigrant population from Africa, so the competitors are, for the most part, white. And, as I mentioned earlier, these sports originated in countries that did not have colonial empires, so there is no competition from African athletes.

And of course, there isn't a lot of snow in Africa, either.

*A bit of a stretch, but, assuming that a hypothetical Norwegian empire could have existed, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they would have also had the technology and wherewithal to build ice rinks in sub-Saharan Africa.