This sounds so intellectually deep and all, but did you even take roughly 30 seconds to think about what happens when you combine men and women in athletic competition?
Hint: Men will dominate (just about) everything.
Hint: Men will dominate (just about) everything.
So what if you can run 1 second faster than some other human on a predefined course. You are still better than 99.99% of the rest of the humans.
Humanity is multi-valued, what your abilities are in one narrow (and ultimately useless) field should not in any way degrade the people lower in the 'ladder' and it should not reward those higher up.
Competition sports are historically good for two things only (and 'good' is up for debate), inspiring nationalism in people and paying exorbitant salaries to the competitors because of the media spectacle.
edit: Our capability to measure time is what drives this crazy competition forward, if we were limited to say 1 second intervals plenty of women and plenty of men would be able to compete just fine (only not in the same race, but for instance simply against the clock).
The differences between all humans competing in these races and the 'rest of us' is essentially so small as to be meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of human potential. When I see people performing on levels I can't think of reaching, it gives me a fuzzy feeling. But we've gone past that in society, to the point of fetishizing achievement. I think it's awesome, for instance, that Michael Phelps broke the records he did. It's what he loves doing, apparently, and the technology behind his suit was pretty cool, and the spectacle was fun. But we aren't really given a choice about what to find fun, are we, when every media station heralds it for a week at a time. I'm sure other cool things were happening that didn't involve milliseconds in an expensive pool. Then the fame gets so ridiculous that his using marijuana became a scandal in and of itself, and he had to apologize not primarily for using but for letting kids down.
I'd like to see society move past these anal little obsessions. It's awesome that some people like some competitive sports, but I don't think it should be the center of our society. (I really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.)
This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...
> really don't think society should have any center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.
I don't think that's crazy at all. We value things like beauty, speed, strength and so on. But everybody has a story, and when you dig deep enough everybody has hidden strengths, all it takes is the right circumstances to bring them to the surface.
What we need to recognize is that 'spectator sports by the clock', beauty contests and so on have essentially become so meaningless that what you wear in a race (or in a beauty contest!) will make the difference between winning and losing.
I'd like to see a guy like Lance Armstrong compete on a 70's racing bike. Those bikes were plenty fast, but I highly doubt he'd make a chance.
All that drives it now is money and some weird nationalistic drive.
Let's refocus from sports to stuff that actually matters (and no in the /. sense), let's hold a competition who has done the most good for their neighbourhood. Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.
All that energy going towards slicing .01 of some record or other it fails to excite me.
Let's have countries outcompete each other on slashing their defense budget, on minimizing their crime rates and political record.
I find it sad that Americans aren't competitive in things like that. We're, what, #37 for health care satisfaction? Push it up again! USA! USA!
This started about a week ago, maybe a bit longer, no matter what I write, first it will go to -1 or -2, then slowly back up. Weird...
That means you've made it on HN! Either there are bots, or your name is well-known enough to provoke random downvoting. When I tried using HN with a second account for several months, I was surprised that I wasn't bobbing under -1 every time I posted in a popular thread. Now it's back. Oh, well.
Athletes are - I'm sorry - overrated. Yes, it is great that they can do what they do, and I'm happy for them that they achieve their goals. But I'm just as happy for some local kid competing at ping-pong and winning, there is not much class difference there (in my opinion).
Sports are a means of finding your own limits, then exceeding those limits.
The media indeed messes it up, and for all those other categories you listed as well.
The guinness book of records might make you believe otherwise, but it really does not matter who ran a little faster than his fellow humans.
Without Nabokov, Bach or van Gogh though, we'd all be a little poorer.
Lolita took all of four months to type. It took years to create. (Phelps swims 100 yards so fast because he's trained for years.)
If we were all robots capable of performing brain intense activity all the time with no need for leisure activity, you may have a point about sports being pointless. However, we obviously are not. Sports are easy to relate to, easy to participate in, easy to admire and easy to watch. And since sports have remained popular for so long and now have such specialization, the differences amongst the most elite athletes are now only microseconds or centimeters. There is nothing wrong with measuring or finding entertainment from such small differences. I argue it makes it even more exciting.
There are good reasons to have highly competitive sports. It lets people see what our bodies and minds are capable of, and it helps gives us an identity as individuals and as humans. Not to mention that entertainment is not pointless. Unless you're only going to look at it from a philosophical perspective, then yeah, pretty much everything we do is meaningless.
Physical well-being
Mental well-being
Self-esteem, self-worth, self-satisfaction.
Pure fun
Personal motivation and accomplishment
Social interaction
Entertainment
Proxy for real violence
Most athletes are not paid exorbitant salaries because most competition does not result in media spectacle. Yet sports remain an important part of life for people in nearly every culture on the planet, as they have for thousands of years.
To answer your question, what I'd like to see is for people to realize how silly the current set of sports are -- virtually all slight variants of either "person moves an object downfield into a goal" or "person runs/jumps/lifts very fast for short distance" -- and a shift towards sports which are more equal to all people. Where are the sports that reward balance and rhythm and endurance more than speed and strength? Where are the sports for which sufficient training negates virtually any genetic luck?
For example, most of the best rock climbers and martial artists I know are not just short, but downright tiny. In races, women do better relative to men when distances are longer: I doubt I'll ever see a woman make up the 0.9 seconds to overtake the fastest man in the 100m, but I also doubt I'll ever see a man make up the 5 hours to overtake the fastest woman in the decaironman.
If you start with the set of sports for which men hold a huge relative advantage (like any professional team sport in the USA), no categorization will ever truly make up for it. The fix, then, is to change the sports. This isn't as radical as it might sound, e.g., (American) football started with a round ball which gradually got pointier as people decided they liked passing more. We get the sports we optimize for, and I don't know what we're optimizing for but it certainly isn't sexual equality. As long as we have sex categorization, that's basically impossible.
In general men's times are significantly better than women's for ultra-ironman races, including the deca. The one woman who did set a bunch of records, Astrid Benöhr, is a verified cheater.
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/ultramentor/results/mexi... >Marco Flores reports: "During the Deca, Astrid Benöhr was disqualified due to taking shortcuts during the running trial. This was done in the middle of the night and was observed by athletes, maintenance people and support crews. Nobody reported this to the organizers until, finally, one of the members of Guy Rossi's support crew was surprised by the disappearance of the athlete on the course and reappearing very soon after Guy's arrival. This was reported. The times were checked and this gave way to suspicion, on behalf of the organizers, who stationed inspectors all night. They confirmed the occurrence and a video was taken of this athlete taking a significant shortcut of the running course, which is run in a loop. Subsequently the athlete was disqualified."
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/ultramentor/records.html...
This link is a bit dated, but it does show records as of 1997 for ironman, double ironman, triple, quadruple, penta and deca events. Men are ahead in all of them.
In 1999, Astrid Benöhr set records in the quintuple and the deca. If her victories were legitimate, a possible factor may be that she limited herself to only about 8.5 hours of sleep for the entire 187 hours of her race. It reminds me somewhat of how a 61 year-old farmer, Cliff Young, won a grueling 875 km race from Sydney to Melbourne, despite the fact that the competition included professional athletes. He absolutely crushed the field and set a course record. Was it because old men have a biological advantage? No. It was because he was the only runner who chose not to sleep.
http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young-the-61-ye...