What If Men and Women Skied Against Each Other in the Olympics? | Hacker News Reader

What If Men and Women Skied Against Each Other in the Olympics?

fivethirtyeight.com

34 pointshw22 comments

It's a nice idea, but he's using data that is waaaay too abstracted from anything he'd need for comparison.

For starters, he did mention that at that level, the courses are set differently and/or on different trails, so the speed numbers are meaningless, even in aggregate. (if the data are meaningless, don't do the analysis)

Even tho the aggregate speeds may be similar in Slalom and Giant Slalom, it doesn't remotely reveal relevant data.

At the lower levels, women and men do compete on the same course, women skiing first, so the course is in better shape. Their times are consistently slower than the men who run the same course later when it is more chewed up.

Similarly, when women racers occasionally ski as forerunners on the same course, although they're skiing as a course & systems check and not supposed to go flat-out, so might not squeeze out the last few tenths of a second, it's still the same results.

If it were down to only skills, mental toughness, preparation, I'd expect the women to ski as fast, but I'm pretty sure that there are some biomechanical factors in ski racing that will still be critical, e.g., muscle/bone leverage and similar factors that keep women's weightlifting below the men's results.

A lot of it is strength and flexibility, as you have to hold your edge in the ice (most race-courses are deliberately iced so they don't get so chewed up) against some serious forces and vibrations/chatter/bumps. Oversimplifying a bit, more strength allows you to hold the edge in better contact with the ice and generate higher turning forces, while simultaneously maintaining a supple feel for the surface and how your ski is working.

Source: Former USST alpine racer,(mostly DH, also SL/GS/SG).

Why do men and women play separately? My guess is because men would almost always win against women. But in marathons Nigerians have a statistical advantage, should marathons be separated into Nigerians and not Nigerians? In most winter sports athletes from colder climates do better, should winter sports be separated based on the climate of the athletes's home country? People from Russia do better at chess... I assume most people would say that the people in my examples shouldn't be separated. So why should men and women be separated?

I think you mean Kenyans, on the other side of the continent. But the point remains; although I don't think they are equivalent.

oops, that's what I meant. Too late to edit

Men and women have different potential. A woman can put in the same work in the same facility and not reach the level of a man. There's nothing she can do about.

People from different climates/backgrounds have different advantages/disadvantages in life, but on average their potential is the same. A Jamaican team could become the best bobsledders in the world if they spent enough time/money/effort on it, though I do admit they are heavily disadvantaged.

To play the devil's advocate, if you extend the argument the parent commenter makes, you could say that a Canadian sprinter has a lower potential because the ______ ethnic sprinter has a higher percentage of faster-twitch muscle due to genetics. The Canadian sprinter could work as hard has he can but never reach the theoretical limit of the _____ ethnic sprinter.

The same argument can be made for VO2 max, armspan, leg stride, etc. Note that I'm not actually advocating for a combined male/female competition nor a split based on genetic potentials.

The Jamaican bobsled team was the source for the movie Cool Runnings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_national_bobsleigh_tea...

(Unfortunately, in this case, they lost control during a qualifying run.)

Men and women are very different physically, men are almost always going to be significantly stronger. We do not have the same amount of difference between people from different countries. The average man is much stronger than the average women, but the average person from Nigeria is probably not much faster at marathons than the average person from Canada.

Does this argument still apply on Olympics? They are nothing like average people, so I'd guess both genders push the body to the limit.

According to conventional physiology statistics (where you figure most traits are normally distributed) it applies even more to the Olympics — population differences are more pronounced at the extremes, not less.

To put it another way, the difference between a near-average man and a near-average woman (per a normal approximation) could easily go either way. The difference between a top 1% man and a top 1% woman is much more likely to be skewed toward the man.

Yes, but the difference is huge.

Consider the 100m dash.

In 2016 Olympics, in the final heat, the slowest man ran 4% faster than the women's world record (which has remained unbroken for 30 years).

Innate differences between the sexes are enormous, even at elite levels.

Sure, but why does curling need to separate men and women?

Seriously, of all things, this one eludes me completely.

As men courses, especially in SL and GS, often tend to be more complicated, I don't see any value from these analysis. Just my 2 cents, but a better way to prove a point would be to compare results in lower (some national) level races of athletes of similar rank, where they compete in same course (even then women usually start first, but in good weather conditions the quality of track remains the same)

Is this style of diagram in common use? The ones in the second half of the article, I mean, showing course length as a function of average speed...? I can't make any sense of it.

Isn't usually the purpose of drawing lines between the data points to let you infer the approximate value of the function inbetween the data points? But here the lines go backwards, giving conflicting values of the function, so how do you read it?

It's just a parametric plot showing two values changing over time. I suppose it's not too common for noisy data like this, but parametric plots are pretty common.

The reasoning behind it is probably to emphasize that in most cases course length and average speed both increased over time, rather than being correlated.

It's a connected scatterplot. There's quite common in certain contexts (e.g. the Phillips curve in Economics).

The lines indicate the joined points represent successive measurements.

There's a nice paper describing the history and evaluating their effectiveness [1]

[1]: https://eagereyes.org/papers/the-connected-scatterplot-for-p...

Why would that need an official competition? To find out whether women can race competitive a fun race would suffice, I think. It should be easy to find sponsors for that, media attention would be high.

Totally agree. This shouldn't be hard to set up if they really wanted.

Women regularly start before the race as "Vorläufer", even Lindsay did a couple of times already. Those times are known to her. She knows that she has no chance.

But there are nice athletic sports where woman do compete in the same team with men in lower leagues. Table tennis e.g.

I've been watching a lot of curling. The mixed doubles was great. This is a sport where I don't understand why there are separate mens and womens teams. How does size/strength/speed confer an advantage in curling?

Being able to sweep harder is an advantage.

There is probably an upper limit to the force that is beneficial though.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

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