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Running: A race against gender - Can men and women race fairly?
Submitted by Broadsword on Fri, 2010-09-24 22:25
Article here. Excerpt:
Can men and women ever compete fairly in a sport like running? Yes, but it requires a little bit of maths know-how. "What time did you get?" It is the first question runners ask of each other when the race is over. But is it the right question? You see, distance running is unfair.
Men experience this unfairness as they get older. Ten miles into a half-marathon, older men can only struggle on with growing irritation as younger men - men who would not have stood a chance against them in their prime - sail past. For women, the feeling of injustice comes as soon as we start racing.
Men have bigger hearts and can take in and move around oxygen much more efficiently than women can. So men can beat us even if we are "better" runners. So is it possible to adjust for age and sex to level the playing field? To solve this maths problem I challenged my 52-year-old colleague David Lewis to race against me, a 28-year-old woman, in the Great North Run half-marathon.
...
Alan's numbers give us the secret to a fair race. For example: if you compare the best possible time for men and women over a half marathon you get a factor of 0.8995. The age-factor for a 48-year-old man is also 0.8995.
So a young woman (younger than 30) can race against a 48-year-old male happy in the knowledge that it is a fair contest.
"Of course, it is fair anyway," says Alan. "If he runs faster than you, he runs faster than you. That's the nature of a race."
I chose to ignore that bit, as David and I made our way to Newcastle.
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Comments
Victory by committee
In essence she advocates for a set of "adjustments' to be made to cover for age and sex. The "winner" will be selected after looking at times and these factors, not at who crossed the line first.
Sounds like affirmative action applied not just to sports (see: Title IX) but to within a given sporting event itself. Unlike war, sports (which was devised centuries ago as a means of replacing smaller wars and battles to settle issues not requiring full-on bloodshed) is something that happens within a context of rules and a larger social milieu that is fairly peaceable. So it's simple: Change the rules, you create different outcomes. Happens all the time. Only now, instead of the same set of rules being extant for all players in a sporting event, there will be different rules for different types of players ("types": sex and age -- well, to start with; I imagine, ethnicity will be mentioned next).
Like I said: affirmative action not just for sports but within a given sporting event. Same $hit, different day.
Typical double standard
I wonder if she feels the same about social security (or the UK equivalent). Women live 6-7 years longer than men, so perhaps they should be required to pay more into the system. Somehow I doubt it. Discrimination is only allowed when it benefits women.
I ran cross country in high school. The teams were coed. In races, there was the "A" race (fastest 7 runners on the team), the "B" race (next 7 runners), and the "C" race (everyone else). At a large meet with 20 teams, there might be 1 or 2 girls in the A race, a few more in the B race, and perhaps a 50/50 girl/boy mix in the C race. Races were segregated by ability, not sex.
If a girl/woman can run as fast as me, I see no reason why we should be differently treated. If I'm not good enough to win or receive an award, tough luck for me (and tough luck to the 99% of boys/men who are also not good enough to win). The same rules should apply to her.
give her the trophy!!!
I've said it many times but the only group given a serious handicap is women. Why are they the only weak competitors who get to compete in the Olympics, professional tennis, and so on. They were born with less physical ability than the top male athletes but the same is true for most people. You can group those weak competitors in any like you like but the fact remains they were all less physically adept and want to compete.
Now she wants to change the time based on gender which is nothing more than God given ability. Obviously this isn't a threat but I guess the entitlement thinking is quite telling. She can't handle being worse at something because of her gender. She has a large ego with no respect for competition. Winning by changing another person's time... what a stupid brat.
I have a vagina so I get to win
Next we're going to lower the standards for women in the Nobel prize for physics.
Fiction come to life
This is straight out of Kurt Vonnegut. I'd wager that Vonnegut assumed his writing was so far out there that nobody would see it as a vision of how the world should operate.
Yet, here we have it - Harrison Bergeron come to life.
Because I read about this:
I have long lost the article, but it was about men vs. women in track and field. It found that women's Olympic level world records would be around the junior male world records (junior world is 15-16 year old boys). Compared to Olympic level men, women wouldn't even make the qualifying times necessary.
In reply to the ever asked question: "When will we stop with the 'female' athlete and just call her an athlete?"
A: "When she could even qualify if not for the special Olympics called Women's Olympics."
This whole conversation is
This whole conversation is kind of silly. I would think that every athlete knows that they should strive for personal best, especially in running.
What next, we start making considerations for height, leg length, bone density, lung compactly, etc for each individuals. Can you image if every basketball and football team got measured up before competing to see which team should be given a "handicap' due to biological inequities.
Sure it is great to be "the best" at something and beat another human being, but I think the woman that wrote this has too much time to think about stuff like this.