The winners in the Paris Olympics (2024) gold medal for Canada in the four by 100 were Andre De Grasse, Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, and Brendon Rodney.  For those sports fans who were Rip van Winkling it, in this relay race, each athlete runs for about 100 meters, for a total of 400 meters, once around the roughly quarter-mile track.

On what basis were these four athletes chosen to enter this event?  Were they the four fastest sprinters in the Great White North?  That is roughly correct, but not exactly.  Rather, they were the four fastest athletes in that country who could be relied upon to safely pass the baton to one another while running at just about top speed.  This latter calls for no mean level of coordination.  The stick must be passed from one runner to another within a given space on the track.  Miss that, and the entire team is disqualified.  This means that the recipient of this piece of plastic must know almost exactly when to start off, how fast to run, the time to reach top speed, when to place his hand behind him, when to grab it.

The competing American team had faster runners.  Several of them had won individual sprinting medals in the 100 and the 200.  But all three of their passes were the pits.  In contrast, none of the Canadian team runners was as fast.  None of them ended up on the podium for any of the two sprints, 100 and 200 on an individual basis.  But their coordination was a marvel to behold.

By the way, all four of these Canadian gold medal winners are black.

Suppose that the Canadian coaches were required to engage in affirmative action.  They would not have been able to choose the four best athletes for this event, who all happened to be black.  Instead, they might have selected one Eskimo, one Asian, one white, and one black.  Or possibly a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, and an atheist.  Would such a team have won the gold medal?  Not bloody likely.

As it happens, the coaches, happily, labored under no such restrictions.  They just wanted to field the best Canadian team possible.  As far as they were concerned, they would not have cared if any given sprinter had green skin with pink and blue polka dots.

Why am I writing about affirmative action in this context?  A friend of mine is on his last legs, dying of cancer.  I know that eventually a cure for this dread disease will be found.  But will it be in time to save his life?  Not bloody likely.

Why not?  This is due to the fact, at least in large part, that our country suffers from affirmative action.  We may choose athletes for important contributions based solely on their ability to perform the task assigned to them, but we may not do so regarding biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and others who are likely to kick cancer’s butt.

It was a good day for Canada on the track, certainly at least in this one event, but it is a sad day in the laboratories and universities of all nation now suffering under wokism.  Happily, political correctness has not (yet?) infected our athletic institutions.  Praise the day when this fairness applies all throughout society.

Image: Pkd2016 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.