What Jamaican Sprinters Can Teach Us About Upward Mobility [Podcast]

Conversation Highlights

Responses have been edited for clarity.

On the ‘Ladder of Opportunity’

Success has got nothing to do with genetics. It's got nothing to do with geography. It's a much more complicated story of building an open-access infrastructure of participation and competition.

Successful “ladders of opportunity” like in Jamaica, take runner kids with potential and interest step by step. The first step, which is accessible to all kids, is the school level running meet, which happens every year. It's organized on a calendar of the Jamaican Athletics Federation. The kids may be running barefoot, but the timing equipment is world-class. The judges report to the Jamaican Athletics Federation. Kids who do well here move up to district level competitions where talent scouts from high schools are roving. They pick the best talent and take (them) up to the next step of the ladder, high schools. The step beyond is professional clubs set up in collaboration with universities. 

Each time a step was added to the ladder, Jamaican's Olympic records ratcheted upwards. The performance is directly correlated to investments in the “ladder of opportunity” and the inference seems to be that if you build it, people will come. You build a “ladder of opportunity” and the talent will arise to climb it.

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What About Kids Who Aren’t Good Enough to Be the Best?

Only one person in several thousand is going to become a world champion, but there’s still a very carefully designed strategy in the ladders I have studied. Elite athletes in training are simultaneously taking college classes that prepare them for alternative careers. In Jamaica, these “off ramps” from the ladder, which I call “soft landings,” have given rise to alternative careers of coaches, managers, journalists, sports journalists, historians, chroniclers, managers of businesses related to sports. There's a huge sports tourism industry - at a rough guess, among Jamaica's total of three million people, 50,000 people are employed in its sports economy. It's not just running, it's not just for glory. It's an absolutely important sector of the economy and there's even a separate chapter about it in the national plan.

On ‘Scaffolding’ for Social Mobility

Social mobility theory as it exists today considers social mobility in terms of an individual's capability to climb a ladder and focuses on supporting early childhood nutrition, better role models, higher quality education... All of those approaches make a person more powerful for climbing the ladder, but you still need the ladder. 

In fact, you need multiple ladders, right? Individuals are differently abled. Not everybody can ace the standardized examination, but people can be great athletes, people can be great artists, people can be great coders, people can be great musicians. And why doesn't a child growing up have an environment in which they can try out different ladders and pick the one they're happiest and most fulfilled? To me, underdevelopment and poverty persist because talents are squelched. They are not connected with commensurate opportunity.

On currently emerging Ladders 

There's a newish ladder of opportunity for chess players in Chennai, India which has already produced several grandmasters. And the related “soft landings” has produced more than 10,000 good jobs for coaches, online commentators and so on, which is now a sector of Chennai's economy. Imagine if a private employer were to come in promising 10,000 new jobs? That's what chess is doing already. There’s a newish ladder for female golf players in Thailand, and one for cyclists in Kenya, each elevating hundreds of individuals to higher status. The possibilities are endless.

• Read the complete episode transcript.

Credit, top photo: 100 m heat, Moscow, 2013: Usain Bolt (Jamaica) during the 100 m heat of the 14th IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Moscow, Russia. Image courtesy Tobi 87, Wikipedia.