This is a neat little article that sketches out why your skin colour doesn’t determine your chance of growing up to become an elite sprinter; but your genetic make-up might:

There are no sprinters of note from Asia, even with more than 50 percent of the world’s population, a Confucian and Tao tradition of discipline, and an authoritarian sports system in place in the most populous country, China. No white sprinter can be found on the list of 100-meter sprinters; the best time by a white, 10 seconds, ranks more than 200th on the all-time list. … All of the 32 finalists in the last four Olympic men’s 100-meter races are of West African descent.

Note the distinction: West Africans dominate sprinting. East Africans do better at distance running. So already, the evidence points beyond race toward a more precise category: population.

As Fray poster Njuzu puts it:

“Race is a very inexact and unreliable proxy for genetics.” Race is not a causal unit [But] the salient level of analysis [is that of] genes. There’s no such thing as having fast-twitch muscle fiber because you’re black. The causal unit is a gene, or a network of genes, or a network of genes and environmental factors. Being black only makes you more likely to have a genetic variant that makes you more likely to have extra fast-twitch fiber. That’s a lot of “likelies,” not certainties.