Given that racists and slavers used the “natural physical strength” of black people to justify putting them on hard labor and some medics still think that blacks has higher resistance to pain, I wonder if when black athletes started to join mixed race sport teams, some racist would have used the same “biological advantage” argument that now transphobes use against trans athletes to claim it was “unfair” for black to compete against whites to justify segregation.
Northern Europe perspective: This was a minor but ongoing part of public discourse until well into the 90s, to my recollection.
It didn’t take real root, and my theory of that is that our racists are generally fascists who consider physical strength and fitness to be high values. Intellect and arts are for weaklings. Going into detail on how the Africans had an advantage on speed, strength and agility but were still somehow inferior required too much mental gymnastics.
Classic fascist narrative: The enemy is both strong and dangerous, and weak and dumb.