Pity poor Eero Mäntyranta, who grows up above the Arctic Circle, survives the Nazi occupation of his native Finland and a life of such isolated poverty that his family shares a single fork at the dinner table, and goes on to become one of the great Nordic skiing champions of his generation, a seven-time Olympic medalist.

In the winter of his life, Mäntyranta enjoys a modestly comfortable old age, content in the knowledge that all his success was the fruit of hard work, focus and an indomitable will to win … until the day David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, shows up at his door, eager to tell him otherwise.

It turns out that researchers have learned that Mäntyranta’s athletic prowess was fueled not only by all his lonely labors and steely determination, but also a rare gene mutation that assured his overtaxed body a steady supply of oxygen-rich blood — a boon to any endurance-sport athlete — as surely as if he’d done the doping of which he was once suspected.

Epstein doesn’t set out to rain on Mäntyranta’s gold-medal parade, any more than he wants to drain the romance from every underdog-overcomes-all tale of athletic triumph.

It just works out that way in The Sports Gene, a book born of an article in Sports Illustrated and inspired by the quest to understand the sudden death of a high school teammate, as Epstein examines the complicated relationship between genetics and culture in sports … a modern twist on the age-old nature versus nurture debate … one DNA test at a time.

The book’s title, it turns out, is something of a tease, as there is no single, identifiable gene that can guarantee greatness on the track, the basketball court or the snow-covered tundra where Eero Mäntyranta earned his skiing triumphs.

In that, at least, we can take some small but temporary comfort, knowing that if a magic formula existed, some cyclist, shot-putter or baseball player looking for a shortcut to fame and fortune would’ve found a way to ingest it.

The truth, as Epstein and his scientist friends explain, is far more nuanced.

The Sports Gene confirms some of what we’ve already intuited about inherited abilities in sports. And scientists, it seems, are less squeamish than most of the rest of us when it comes to ascribing those advantages or disadvantages to specific ethnic groups.

So, yes, the long, lean tribesmen in parts of Kenya and Ethiopia have a genetic predisposition to running long distances, built in over thousands of years of adapting to their warm, high-altitude environment.

And, yes, that advantage is compounded in rural societies where children grow up running or walking long distances just to get to school.

But along the way, Epstein also debunks some of what we thought we knew from watching our favorite games. To wit, while baseball players as a group are blessed with superior eyesight, none of them — not even the vaunted Ted Williams, rumored to be able to read the label on a thrown ball — can follow the flight of a good fastball all the way from the pitcher’s hand to home plate. Nor do they have superhuman reflexes that allow them to make the solid contact needed to hit home runs.

Rather, the thousands of similar pitches they’ve seen over years of games and practices have imprinted a mental database that allows their brains to predict when and where a given pitch will cross the plate … and, consequently, when and where to swing.

That explains why the best hitters of their generation, Albert Pujols or the steroid-aided Barry Bonds, can’t touch ponytailed softball pitcher Jennie Finch, whose underhanded deliveries perform in ways that are counterintuitive to everything their subconscious has learned.

So, until science comes up with a one-size-fits-all pill, the surest route to distance-running prowess is to be born into a warm climate, at an altitude somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 feet ... in a neighborhood where kids think of running as basic transportation.

And because a “hungry” runner is a motivated runner, it doesn’t hurt to grow up near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Kind of like Anthony Sandoval.

The Sports Gene tells the story of Sandoval, a wisp of a runner with a powerful heart and lungs, a near-perfect running machine, who grows up in an adobe house with no phone in the high country of New Mexico, often herding his father’s cows into the mountains on foot. At the 1980 U.S. Olympic trials, Sandoval wins the marathon with a time that makes him, for one moment, at least, the fastest distance runner in the world. Only a United States boycott of the Moscow Games keeps him from competing for Olympic gold.

Years later, the head of USA Track and Field’s physiological testing program struggles to frame Sandoval’s unique combination of physical gifts and high-country upbringing in ways a layperson can understand.

“He’s a Kenyan,” David Martin says at last.

“That’s what he is. He’s an American Kenyan.”

Jay Price, a longtime, award-winning columnist at the Staten Island Advance, is the author of Thanksgiving 1959. A resident of Manasquan, N.J., he’s working on a book about the town’s response to Hurricane Sandy.

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