There's so much that isn't fair in this world, but most competitive sports make an attempt to provide a reasonably level playing field through the establishment and enforcement of rules and categories. Rules vary from sport to sport but some constants are the elimination of performance enhancing drugs, a degree of safety for participants, and the creation of categories. Some sports allow a certain amount of violence or danger balancing what the fans and athletes want vs modifications to the rules that might make the sport less desirable. In other words there's a social convention. Sometimes that social convention changes after serious injuries or deaths. Positive change has come in world rugby in the past few years, but other sports are more resistant to change.
More recently fairness and inclusivity have come into play. Categories exist to prevent grossly unfair contests. You don't want a wrestler up against someone half their weight. Twenty year olds don't compete with ten year olds or seventy year olds. Men and women usually are have categories of their own in most sports. And para-athletes generally have separate competitions with a dizzying set of subcategories to allow fairness given a wide range of capabilities. Fairness comes first in these, but it allows inclusivity to play and potentially succeed in a given sport. But like so much else in the world there's change.
South African Oscar Pistorius became a below-the-knee amputee in both legs as a child due to a congenital defect. Using racing blades, he became a good sprinter - an Olympic class sprinter. There was controversy about how much of his performance came from him and how much from the blades? Are blades as good as or better than real lower legs? He was charismatic and there was a large amount of social pressure that running should be inclusive. A few calculations were done early on followed by a few real tests with this unusual subject. Some of the early results indicated the energy return from the carbon-fibre blades was the same as the achilles tendon - in other words no advantage. That was the message the public received. The more careful work that followed has shown he had a significant advantage from lower contact time with the ground and added leg length - enough that 'he was probably a good, but not elite runner turning in performances well beyond his athleticism. The blades are performance enhancing prosthetics.
Performance-enhancing blades raise an interesting question. What if a world class runner adopted them? Would a 9.30s 100 meter dash be fair? How about a 1hr 50m marathon? Would elite runners have to get amputations to compete? Fortunately the really elite runners are staying away from this, but now we have another very good runner trying to compete. Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has a great interview with Peter Weyand - one of the best biomechanics physiologists on the science and pseudoscience involved. If you're interested in these things start at about 26 minutes in this episode.
There will be innovation. What happens in field sports that demand good court vision with augmented reality glasses? Will they be banned and in what sports? Will performance enhancing prosthetics for stick and racket sports come about? What is pure and fair and where does inclusion fit in?
And now to a socially charged issue: transwomen and female sports. To first order biological sex has two categories while gender is a continuum. I think that gender should not be a category for discrimination, but that biological sex should be used to establish categories for fairness and, in some sports, safety. There's a good deal of solid science that shows male puberty results in advantages in size, muscle mass, VO2 max and a few other metrics. These advantages are important in most sports and would exclude biological women from the elite and next to elite categories in most sports where men compete.1 Testosterone is cited as the advantage, but suppressing it later in life only results in a small drop in performance (there are a few poorly done studies that claim otherwise). This has become a social issue with a rightwing party calling for blanket bans in many activities including sports. There's been pushback by allies. In some cases female athletes have been threatened by sponsors to not speak out and go along with inclusion rather than fairness. Should transathletes compete with men, females, or have their own category? That seems to be a social decision that only a few sports bodies have addressed at this point.
I'll admit to a bias.2 I believe in solid science and fairness. I think transwomen need to compete with men or have their own category. Politically I'm on the left on most issues and think transpeople should work and live how they want, but that doesn't extend into sport where categories exist for reasons of fairness. Fairness to women overrides scientifically unsupported inclusion in my mind.
__________
1 A chart showing the performance difference between biological male and female elite athletes. Longitudinal studies show a drop in male advantage from 5 to 30% after three years of testosterone suppression and a non-longitudinal study showed a similarly small drop after about 15 years.
In the real world this means a transwoman swimmer who was poorly ranked as a male was able to easily defeat all of his NCAA female competitors even with a few years of testosterone suppression. In sprinting it has been shown that biological Olympic gold medal females don't even make it into the top 2,000 for men. It has been posited man ranked 1,000 could easily beat any women even if he had testosterone suppression that dropped his advantage by 30%.
2 I have an involvement with beach volleyball and love both the men's and women's game. I know a few Olympians on the women's side who sometimes train with amateur men who easily outpower them. The fact the women are less athletic doesn't make their game less interesting.. it's just that the two styles of play are very different.
Comments