The article makes a good point that yes, that idea is racist, because you explicitly chose to look first at the correlation between sports performance and race,

The article makes a good point that yes, that idea is racist, because you explicitly chose to look first at the correlation between sports performance and race, rather than other, far more finegrained and predictive factors. If it weren't a visually obvious and culturally ingrained distinction, nobody would bother with such a poorly-defined coarse-grained factor.