Debating CNBC's Darren Rovell

Darren Rovell, a CNBC sports writer wrote a piece on April 13th, 2007 on why he thought Kenyans dominated the Boston Marathon:

The Wall Street Journal's Allen St. John brings us a great stat about Kenyans and the major marathons. Kenyan men have won 14 out of the last 16 Boston Marathons. A Kenyan woman has won six out of the past seven years.

...While St. John offers up another reason -- Kenyans can train against each other versus other runners who are forced to train against the clock -- he doesn't offer up the most obvious reason why, at least in my opinion, Kenyans win these races. WHY, specifically, there are so many more Kenyans than people from other countries who excel in this sport.
It has nothing to do with race, with the air in Nairobi, with a specific diet. No, the Kenyans win because they care the most. They care because the Boston Marathon's $100,000 winner's prize is a king's ransom in their native land. It's retirement for life. It's fame and glory and permanent legend.

I wrote to Darren and respectfully disagreed. He was graceful enough to sorta admit getting it wrong and to also publish my rebuttal in his next blog. Follow this link and then scroll all the way down to the sub-heading About Those Kenyan Runners

About Those Kenyan Runners: My blog on Friday about Kenyan runners winning marathons because the $100,000 winner's prize meant more to them resulted in a flooding of my e-mail box. And the fact that Robert Cheruiyot won yesterday -- extending the Kenyans winning run in the Boston Marathon men's race to 15 out of the last 17 races -- didn't do anything to slow it down. I'll share with you two of the notes that I feel will keep this conversation going.First, I'll share with you a note from reader Wilson Kiriungi: "I agree with you that Kenyans do generally care more than say Americans when it comes to the marathon but that alone does not conclusively explain their consistent success in the sport. Being a Kenyan, I know that not all Kenyans can run. Put it this way, the same way basketball is dominated by African Americans, only Kenyans from a small tribe called the Kalenjin make the best runners. They are not historically known to put a lot of stock in materialism in the modern sense of the word; cattle is their real measure of wealth. As a matter of fact, if money were the sole fuel that keeps the Kenyan athlete's engine running, we would expect to have more runners from the Kikuyu tribe who are known to be the most enterprising tribe in Kenya. The question of what makes Kenyans such good runners (in my case the Kalenjins) still puzzles me like a lot of other people. One thing I can certainly say is that if it was about the money, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this email. I would probably be somewhere in Boston sipping Margarita, reveling in my perennial 15 minutes of fame."