If you care to look at ethnicity in sport, this week was a good one. You could have asked why only one person outside male African-Americans or Africans won a gold medal on the track at the World Athletics Championships in Seville.

You could have asked what happened the Europeans, who just 15 years ago dominated athletics. Brendan Foster told us as much on BBC's coverage from Seville on Wednesday night as the men's 10,000 metres final was in progress.

"Seven of the first eight finishers were European athletes in the 1983 championships. There are only six in the final tonight who are European," he said by way of explaining the wave of African runners setting the pace.

He was right and the best a European could do was fifth, which is where Portugal's Antonio Pinto finished, the peerless Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie winning his fourth consecutive track championship.

You might then have asked why African athletes don't generally win the sprints or why African-Americans dominate explosive running events with such ease and why African-Americans can't win the longer distances or why Europeans can't sprint. Who knows?

You might also think it is race related. That seems perilously simple given the disparity in affluence between the nations as first-world and third-world athletes are asked to face each other. One of the issues Foster touched was the relationship between the two.

The issue of affluence or class was also central to The Union Game screened last Sunday week and last night. There are two more episodes to run. This programme addressed Rugby's idyllic birth into a class-conscious England and its troublesome maturation. There were similarities between rugby and athletics.

Middle-distance runners from Africa, mainly Ethiopia, Kenya and now Morocco, have a work ethic that is difficult for Europeans to equal. European runners who have observed the Kenyans, particularly, have been startled by the their ability and willingness to train exceptionally hard and by their frugal lifestyles. Without exception, African runners originate from humble backgrounds.

In rugby a similar principle applied at the turn of the century. In the North of England the game was played largely by miners and steel workers. The physicality of the labour in the North, we were informed, was transferred onto the pitch where hardened young men excelled at the sport. They saw it as entertainment and subsequently as a way of earning money.

In Wales, where the industrial revolution was bringing with it a burgeoning national pride, the classes mixed. The game was inclusive and united people who wanted to face other countries on a national platform.

The middle and upper class of England saw the game through the eyes of one of the founders, Thomas Arnold of Rugby School. He believed in the suffering but also in the ethic of self control. The manly game was played by an agreed and narrow social base where young people could meet their own economic and class equals and play the game in the spirit of muscular Christianity. Re-arranging the social relations in the game as they were doing in Wales and in the North of England cut deep and was shocking to the founders. And they suffered.

"The Great War of 1914," we were told, "was seen as one big away game."

Rugby players went and were slaughtered as quickly as they emerged from the universities and public schools.

At international level, Wales began to hammer class-ridden England, the soft elite being unable to handle the bite and boot of inclusive Welsh sides.

The North simply went their own way to Rugby League.

In athletics a similar gene expresses itself, at least in middle and long-distance running where endurance involves pain. In the global economy, first world means first class, third world third class. Like the rugby players from Leeds and Bradford and Manchester, so the Africans have a different vision and by necessity different motivations. Without the cost-ridden technical expertise, the specialised nutrition and the high-tech applications that shape sprinters, African runners have welded unique physiologies to torturous regimes and against "soft" first-world Europeans have excelled. Simple formulae cannot totally explain the phenomenon in running but coveting a substantial portion of international athletics has been their reward and the sport has not suffered for it.

The only pain involved in soccer these days is choosing which personalised number plates makes the perfect statement. What else is there to do?

Compete in the Super Cup, of course. RTE and BBC, two stations eager to serve up what they can get, broadcast the match between Manchester United and Lazio on Friday evening. No wonder Des Lynam left.

The game was about making two rich clubs even richer. Gormless television stations pay big bucks to broadcast rubbish competitions if big names are involved.

United's strike force registered three shots on goal and two corners in total. They lost. Thank goodness for Seville.