Quotas are shaming

DEAR SIR — Your quite readable cricket correspondent Telford Vice clearly has a bee in his bonnet about racial quotas — an approach to life given to the world by the late and unlamented Adolph Hitler and adopted by the equally unlamented National Party.

Clearly there are so many outstanding cricketers of colour from, for example, the West Indies that anyone who suggests that blacks are inherently not able to be great cricketers is delusional. Think of Brian Lara, Viv Richards, Constantine Learie, Darren Sammy, Lance Gibbs, Constantine Walsh, Michael Holding, Curtly Ambrose and so on, and you quickly could select several teams ranking among the greatest the world has known.

Many elements are at play in sporting and other achievements. In the US almost 90% of basketball players are black while blacks constitute 12% of the population. At the Olympic Games the eight finalists in the 100m track are invariably all black, led at present by the incomparable Usain Bolt, and built on the legacy of the great Jesse Owens.

In the swimming pool finalists are invariably white or, occasionally, Asian. Perhaps Mr Vice would care to extend his demands for racial quotas to all areas of human activity.

It occurs to me that no self-respecting sportsman/womanwould wish to be selected on anything other than merit. And this doesn’t mean for a moment that reparations for past evils must not be made. But such reparations should be calculated to enable the individuals concerned to advance on merit, not on race classification.

Stephen Mulholland

Via e-mail