My Take on “Gladwell’s Law” That Elite Athletic Achievement Comes at the Expense of Mass Participation

I think his proposal for changing high school competition is great, but I disagree with the “law” underlying the proposal

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As regular readers of this newsletter may have noticed, I like haggling with Malcolm Gladwell over sports — especially track and field. (We were both competitive middle-distance runners.)

Malcolm recently attended the World Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon — the first time it has been held in the United States. The competition was incredible. There were world records in the 100-meter hurdles, the men’s pole vault (followed by a celebratory flip), and an absolutely bananas world record in the women’s 400-meter hurdles.

On the back of that excitement, Malcolm wrote his last Bulletin post on an evergreen topic among track fans: how to get more Americans interested in the sport. You won’t be surprised to learn that he has grounded his recommendation in a new, intriguing, and intriguingly named axiom: “Gladwell’s Law.” You also won’t be surprised to learn that while I love his suggestion, I also have a quibble or three with Gladwell’s Law.

Without further ado, Gladwell’s Law:

“In any sporting endeavor, elite achievement comes at the cost of mass participation.”

Out of this law comes his proposal — an effort to get around Gladwell’s Law, and it goes way beyond getting more Americans interested in running. It calls for altering high school cross country rules in order to expand competitive engagement to more kids, and in turn create a healthier populace.

Malcolm proposes that high school cross country feature what he has named the “Pied Piper race.” (His explanation for the name: “if you think about it, the Pied Piper was really a very early standard bearer for mass participation.” I aspire to compile a glossary of his coinage.)

The Pied Piper race, in a nutshell: Rather than tallying the places of the top 5 runners on a team to determine a score (as happens currently), each team would be scored based on the sum of the finishing times of 20 runners.

You can read Gladwell’s full exposition here, but his argument is: first, more kids will participate if their performances might matter to a team. He recounts a Revisionist History episode about a plan to elect student councils by lottery, which in some cases led to almost everyone in a school throwing their hat in the ring. The idea is that many more students than actually run are interested in participating — when they think they have a chance to matter.

Second, he argues that the Pied Piper strategy might imbue a lot more kids with the healthy habit of running, and ideally they’d hang on to it for life. And none of this would sacrifice competition at the top of the team, since the best runners will still have plenty of incentive to run as fast as they can.

Ok, so, I really like this idea. I tend to be in favor of experimenting with youth and high school sports in the interest of increasing engagement. We give a lot of lip service to the life lessons of sport — from joining with diverse people for a common purpose, to the health benefits of exercise. But I think we often fail to cultivate those basic lessons, and instead make youth sports increasingly exclusionary.

I would legitimately like to see the Pied Piper race in action, and we can always go back to today’s rules if it doesn’t work. That said, I want to add a different view on a few of the issues Malcolm addressed.

Lifelong Exercisers?

I’m not sure that engaging more high school runners would produce more lifelong exercisers.

I don’t know of a ton of data on this, but I do recall a 2015 study by Shawn C. Sorensen and others, which found that Division I college athletes reverted to normal American levels of physical activity after their competitive days. Not good. Another study from 2020 found that former athletes (especially men) actually revert to worse dietary habits than non-athletes following their competitive days.

That research is bleak. That said, I’m not ready to extrapolate it to high school athletes. The Sorensen et al. paper noted that, in the 1980s and ‘90s, research showed the opposite pattern – elite athletes did maintain high levels of physical activity even after they retired. What changed? According to Sorensen and Co.:

“Year-round, specialized, structured, and supervised training for a single sport or position/event has become more commonplace in recent years, with dedicated training patterns routinely adopted in youth sports. This could make transition from sports training to sustainable lifetime physical activity more difficult.”

That doesn’t sound to me like it applies to the 20th-fastest runner on a high school cross-country team. So I don’t think we should extrapolate it to them. At the same time, I don’t think it’s a given that the 20th fastest runner on the cross-country team will develop healthier habits for life either. I just don’t know. I do, though, think they’ll have healthier habits in high school!

(*Update: As runner/data scientist Karis Jochen pointed out, a study specifically of former college cross-country runners may well look different. I didn't find pertinent research — still looking! — but Karis makes an important point.)

Lifelong Fans?

In terms of boosting the fan base for running, I pretty much disagree.

Running is already a massive participation sport. For the 2020-21 academic year, there were about 42,500 men competing in college cross-country and outdoor track and field, and about 44,500 women. No other college sport has close to that many total athletes. (*Football, however, has more male athletes.)

Outdoor track is easily the biggest sport for high school girls — approaching a half-million athletes. And more than 600,000 high school boys participate in outdoor track and field, which makes it second only to football.

Track obviously has the advantage of allowing for more competitive spots than most sports. Malcolm is arguing for still more competitive (or at least competitively relevant) spots in cross country. That’s great, but the large-scale participation that already exists has failed to convert to large-scale fandom in this country. I doubt adding more to the ranks of participants is an important lever.

On the bright side, if I had to choose between my favorite sport having massive participation or massive TV viewership, I’ll take the former all day. I used to argue with colleagues at Sports Illustrated about whether track/running was a “popular” sport. If “popular” includes participation that extends beyond the remote control — in 2019, there were 17.6 million registrants for U.S. road races — then it is enormously popular.

I Call for Judicial Review of Gladwell’s Law

My last thought is the quibble I promised with Gladwell’s Law — the idea that elite achievement comes at the expense of mass participation.

In my estimation, Norway is the most impressive sports country in the world right now. With a population of 5.4 million (that’s smaller than the Miami metro area) Norway has dominated the last two Winter Olympics. In 2018, Norway won more medals than the U.S. and China combined, and only missed repeating that feat by a few medals in 2022.

You knew Norway was good at winter sports, but the country also performed well at the Summer Games. At the last Summer Olympics, Norway won eight medals, including a few in sports you might not immediately associate with Scandinavia. Norway won gold in men’s beach volleyball. ...I can already feel you booking your next beach vacation at the Unstad Arctic Surf lodge.

Norway also boasts Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who just won the 5,000-meters at the World Championships and is the best miler in the world, and Karsten Warholm, who demolished the 400-meter hurdles world record at the last Olympics. Norway finished 12th on the medal table at Worlds last month.

And, as I wrote in a previous post about Norway:

“Participation and fun are the priorities. Costs are low, and optional. And there is — get this — a national prohibition against keeping score or ranking kids before age 12.”

Mass participation doesn’t seem to be getting in the way of elite achievement.

A final point: Malcolm is half-Jamaican, so I feel obliged to point out that the Jamaican sprint factory is powered by youth “sports days” at school where literally everyone tries sprinting in an atmosphere geared toward fun. (Sometimes there are potato sack races, and adults join in.) None other than Usain Bolt wanted to be a cricketer (his second choice was soccer), but after he started blowing away his peers in sprints at sports day, he eventually went for track and field as a teenager.

This is not to say that Jamaican high school track isn’t highly competitive. About a decade ago, I attended the Jamaican national high school track and field championships, known as "Champs." It was nuts, and one of the most fun events of any kind I’ve ever attended. The final day filled a 35,000-person stadium. It was extremely competitive, with Olympians traversing the stands to cheer on their alma maters. But almost all of those Olympians I spoke to fondly recounted finding out they were fast at a school sports day, but then waiting until later to focus on sprinting. In Jamaica, every kids gets to try sprinting in a fun atmosphere.

I think keeping the talent funnel wide for as long as possible benefits both participation and elite achievement. And — bonus — you don’t even have to lure the children with a magic pipe!

I showed Malcolm this post before I published it, and he said he'd respond in his next post, so look out for that at his Bulletin. (*UPDATE: Malcolm did indeed respond. You can read that here.)

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If you’re interested in more on the tradeoff between short- and long-term development in sports, and how the best adult performers often weren’t the best youth performers, I wrote about an excellent new study here.

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Until next time…

David

[photo credit: duncan1890/Getty Images]