5 ms·

The important thing to recognize is that fairness is a pretty fuzzy concept and a lot of the boundary between fair and unfair is defined by particular societal

The important thing to recognize is that fairness is a pretty fuzzy concept and a lot of the boundary between fair and unfair is defined by particular societal norms (socially constructed, if you will). All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. People like Michael Phelps and Alex Honnold are specific examples of course, but even after years of training most people cannot perform anywhere near the level that elite athletes do. Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves.

donglong 1y ago
[flagged]
ryandv 1y ago
Exactly. I also support human augmentation, body modification, blood doping, and exogenous testosterone usage at the Olympics. These are the affirmations a mere male athlete can use to transition into an alpha male elite athlete. You can maybe include minoxidil, for those who actually need it.
Empact 1y ago
[flagged]
- mmanfrin 1y ago
  [flagged]
- sunshowers 1y ago
  I don't really engage with people who flatly deny that trans people are honest conveyors of their experiences.
  - Empact 1y ago
    If I said I am a horse, would I be a trans-horse?
- KittenInABox 1y ago
  > Mediocre men-who-purport-to-be-women beating outstanding actual women, is analogous to a mediocre athlete juicing to beat his more talented competitors. Does this actually happen? I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last. I'm not like a huge follower of sports or anything, I just follow the olympics sometimes. I never see transgender people dominating anything there and certainly not to the extent of Michael Phelps. If we want to remove people due to lack of competitive fun we can remove Phelps, it was always really boring watching anything he competed in.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last. What happens when other transgender women (sincere or not) realize that they can compete in women's completions, and that their past testosterone levels gives them an advantage over the typical cis women? The first transgender women contestant might only be 90th percentile, but surely her success will attract people from the 99th percentile and beyond?
    - sunshowers 1y ago
      A 99th percentile trans woman would be competing with other people who have 99th percentile biological advantages, is what I'm trying to say.
      - EnergyAmy 1y ago
        99th percentile men will beat 99th percentile women in sports 100% of the time. There is no fairness.
        sunshowers 1y ago
gruez 1y ago
>Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves. What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  > What does that mean for women's sports? I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
  - gruez 1y ago
    >I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority? Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?
    - giraffe_lady 1y ago
      I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me. I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.
pseudosavant 1y ago
Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have, but we've only known about chromosomes for <200 years. Before the 1900 Olympics, women weren't even allowed to compete. On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".
- lukev 1y ago
  There are plenty of cultures around the world that conceptualize gender differently than we do, as well. Including many where there are options where individuals can choose their gender, in various circumstances or for various purposes. So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.
- cogman10 1y ago
  It's really not new or recent. For as long as there's been gender norms there's been groups of people outside those norms. You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history. Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Morris_Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Morris_Young [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli
  - pseudosavant 1y ago
    I didn't mean to imply that these people didn't exist, just that the scientific understanding detailing aspects of their existence (chromosomes, gonadal dysgenesis, etc) is new.
- drewcoo 1y ago
  > Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.
abeppu 1y ago
Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors! I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale? I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? This is basically how golf works, right?
  - abeppu 1y ago
    But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).
EnergyAmy 1y ago
Michael Phelps has already had his records broken. Women will never break men's records across a wide range of sports. I keep seeing him brought up, but it's in no way comparable. Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.
- sunshowers 1y ago
  Sorry, what?
dissent 1y ago
[flagged]
- sunshowers 1y ago
  > The well being of our daughters should trump the entitlements of transwomen Trans women are also "our daughters" just as much as cis women (endosex or intersex) are. Caring more about cis daughters' wellbeing than trans daughters' is pretty cissexist!
  - dissent 1y ago
    Anybody is free to agree or disagree with that as they see fit. You yourself qualify them as "trans women", after all. However, you can accept them as "real women" without that automatically entitling them to participate in women's sports. It is justified by the importance of women's sports to the well being of the vast majority. They ought to pick a different hill to die on.
    - sunshowers 1y ago
      A lot of ethics is about when general norms like "greatest good for the greatest number" ought to be suspended. These are complex questions.
- aaaja 1y ago
  At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, all three medalists in the women's 800m were male athletes with male physiological advantage. None of the three has, or had, a transgender identity. Fundamentally, this issue isn't about trans. The problem is, competition organizers across many sports decided that including males in the female category is more important than fair competition for female athletes. That's the problem that needs to be addressed.
aaaja 1y ago
You can compare the world records of female athletes and male athletes in almost every sport and see that really this is an empirical observation. To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.
- sunshowers 1y ago
  Well, yes, I completely agree it makes sense to have two categories.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  Sure, but how big is the total pool of female swimmers? If we assume that ability to swim (within a sex, for the sake of argument) follows a normal distribution, the denominator of "people that gave swimming a real try" is going to have a direct relationship with the capabilities of the best ever to try. This is completely ignoring funding, encouragement, and access, and strictly discussing the sheer number of women that have literally tried swimming at a young enough age to discover their talent and have the opportunity to become the best swimmer they possibly could if they have it.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    It is easy to control for that, just look at the best man from a very small population. For example, the fastest male swimmers in Iceland are still much faster than the fastest female swimmers in the world, and Iceland has 10 000 times less people than the world. There aren't 10 000 times more men trying to become elite swimmers than women.
autoexec 1y ago
> We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair That somehow was mostly because people with certain chromosomal characteristics were heavily disadvantaged in sports, but increasingly wanted participation in them. Because those people (who we called "women") would largely be unable to be competitive and/or would face considerable increased risk of physical harm if they played in/against the same teams as everyone else, people with those chromosomal characteristics splintered off to compete in/against teams of themselves. This was extremely successful and many women have been happily participating in sports, enjoying the ability to win games by virtue of their training and the non-sex defining aspects of their genetic make up, all without having to unnecessarily accept outsized risks of bodily harm and injury. It's also worth mentioning that there hasn't been much effort to keep women from competing outside of their own divisions if they're willing to accept the lower odds of success and higher risks of harm to themselves that'd come from that. For the most part, they have been deciding for themselves that it isn't worth it. It's not even as if chromosomal advantages are the only place we've done this. We have weight classes in certain sports. We have teams that only accept people within certain age ranges. We have divisions based on demonstrated ability. We even have things like the special Olympics. These really aren't a problem or a bad thing to have. People can't choose their biology, but they can choose to play sports in a way that's more fair and safe for themselves and the others they play with and that's a perfectly acceptable practice that we should encourage. This is true even when it means that some people are excluded from specific teams or events because of things they cannot change about themselves. There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.
- xracy 1y ago
  > There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to. This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.
  - 1y ago
kazinator 1y ago
> All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. Sure. Meanwhile there's no athletic record of anyone identified as a woman cracking the four minute mile. Not long after Roger Bannister, teenage boys started doing it. It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets. Elite capability does not erase or conceal sex-related gaps. We have male and female divisions at all levels of sport for a reason.
- jfengel 1y ago
  It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500. Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but it does give a good estimate of the mile time.
  - kazinator 1y ago
    What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment. The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA. It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace. That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_in_athletics#Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i... 3:54.52, by a Ling Zhang in China, in 1997. Not sub-4 pace. She was 16 + 188 days old. Not sure where you got 3:34 from; maybe you are looking at a boys' table? A 17-year-old Australian named Cameron Myers hit 3:33.26 in 2023, in Poland. We saw a new women's 1500 m record just this month. 31-year-old Kenyan Faith Kipyegon ran it 3:48.68 on July 5, in Eugene, OR. Note that it it was still 15 seconds slower than the boy. It's about a 4:05 mile pace.
    - jfengel 1y ago
      Yeah, sorry about that. I should have quoted the specific bit I was replying to: "It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets." Most boys won't run the actual mile in a track meet, just because they don't run that event. I hadn't meant to address women at all.

donglong 1y ago

[flagged]

ryandv 1y ago

Exactly. I also support human augmentation, body modification, blood doping, and exogenous testosterone usage at the Olympics. These are the affirmations a mere male athlete can use to transition into an alpha male elite athlete. You can maybe include minoxidil, for those who actually need it.

Empact 1y ago

[flagged]

mmanfrin 1y ago
[flagged]
sunshowers 1y ago
I don't really engage with people who flatly deny that trans people are honest conveyors of their experiences.
- Empact 1y ago
  If I said I am a horse, would I be a trans-horse?
KittenInABox 1y ago
> Mediocre men-who-purport-to-be-women beating outstanding actual women, is analogous to a mediocre athlete juicing to beat his more talented competitors. Does this actually happen? I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last. I'm not like a huge follower of sports or anything, I just follow the olympics sometimes. I never see transgender people dominating anything there and certainly not to the extent of Michael Phelps. If we want to remove people due to lack of competitive fun we can remove Phelps, it was always really boring watching anything he competed in.
- gruez 1y ago
  >I remember seeing the first transgender woman competing in weightlifting, on the olympic stage. So like the most elite of the most elite competition, in a sport where you'd think muscle mass, skeletal size, and testosterone would matter the most. And she finished dead last. What happens when other transgender women (sincere or not) realize that they can compete in women's completions, and that their past testosterone levels gives them an advantage over the typical cis women? The first transgender women contestant might only be 90th percentile, but surely her success will attract people from the 99th percentile and beyond?
  - sunshowers 1y ago
    A 99th percentile trans woman would be competing with other people who have 99th percentile biological advantages, is what I'm trying to say.
    - EnergyAmy 1y ago
      99th percentile men will beat 99th percentile women in sports 100% of the time. There is no fairness.
      - sunshowers 1y ago

gruez 1y ago

>Now, which biological advantages are fair and which are not is determined by society. We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair, even though people have exactly as much control over them as they do over the amount of lactic acid they produce or how their amygdala behaves. What's the implication here, that because the distinction is totally arbitrary, that we should do away with it? What does that mean for women's sports?

giraffe_lady 1y ago
> What does that mean for women's sports? I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority?
- gruez 1y ago
  >I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision. Why does everyone feel comfortable stepping into this conversation with authority? Would you be equally deferential to the organizer/rule-making body if it was some other controversial issue, like whether women could compete at all? As a sibling comment mentioned, women couldn't even compete in the olympics before 1900, so if it came up as a culture war topic would your reaction also be "I don't know, I'm not an athlete, coach, tournament organizer, part of a rule-making body, or one of a number of other roles that would give me insight or authority to be involved in that decision"?
  - giraffe_lady 1y ago
    I don't see the need to create and articulate a universalizeable moral framework to decide how I should react to a specific case in front of me. I listed rulemakers and organizers but also athletes themselves. I don't know much about the history of the olympics but I would guess the desires and probably activism of women athletes played a role.

pseudosavant 1y ago

Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have, but we've only known about chromosomes for <200 years. Before the 1900 Olympics, women weren't even allowed to compete. On the scale of human evolution, this is a very recent situation for society to figure out how to "decide".

lukev 1y ago
There are plenty of cultures around the world that conceptualize gender differently than we do, as well. Including many where there are options where individuals can choose their gender, in various circumstances or for various purposes. So actually on the scale of human evolution, humans have been making different choices about matters like these since we've been humans.
cogman10 1y ago
It's really not new or recent. For as long as there's been gender norms there's been groups of people outside those norms. You can, for example, find examples of trans individuals in Utah in the 1800s. [1] Eunuchs are a pretty well-known concept since about the start of recorded history. Here's an example of a roman cult which practiced self-castration. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Morris_Young https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Morris_Young [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galli
- pseudosavant 1y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that these people didn't exist, just that the scientific understanding detailing aspects of their existence (chromosomes, gonadal dysgenesis, etc) is new.
drewcoo 1y ago
> Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.

abeppu 1y ago

Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors! I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale? I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.

rsynnott 1y ago
> What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? This is basically how golf works, right?
- abeppu 1y ago
  But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).

EnergyAmy 1y ago

Michael Phelps has already had his records broken. Women will never break men's records across a wide range of sports. I keep seeing him brought up, but it's in no way comparable. Pushing for allowing men into women's sports based on gender identity will result in the extinction of women's sports. If you want that, at least be honest about it.

sunshowers 1y ago
Sorry, what?

dissent 1y ago

[flagged]

sunshowers 1y ago
> The well being of our daughters should trump the entitlements of transwomen Trans women are also "our daughters" just as much as cis women (endosex or intersex) are. Caring more about cis daughters' wellbeing than trans daughters' is pretty cissexist!
- dissent 1y ago
  Anybody is free to agree or disagree with that as they see fit. You yourself qualify them as "trans women", after all. However, you can accept them as "real women" without that automatically entitling them to participate in women's sports. It is justified by the importance of women's sports to the well being of the vast majority. They ought to pick a different hill to die on.
  - sunshowers 1y ago
    A lot of ethics is about when general norms like "greatest good for the greatest number" ought to be suspended. These are complex questions.
aaaja 1y ago
At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, all three medalists in the women's 800m were male athletes with male physiological advantage. None of the three has, or had, a transgender identity. Fundamentally, this issue isn't about trans. The problem is, competition organizers across many sports decided that including males in the female category is more important than fair competition for female athletes. That's the problem that needs to be addressed.

aaaja 1y ago

You can compare the world records of female athletes and male athletes in almost every sport and see that really this is an empirical observation. To use one of your examples: Michael Phelps has at this point had his records beaten by a number of other male swimmers. But no female swimmer has come close. Not even Katie Ledecky.

sunshowers 1y ago
Well, yes, I completely agree it makes sense to have two categories.
BobaFloutist 1y ago
Sure, but how big is the total pool of female swimmers? If we assume that ability to swim (within a sex, for the sake of argument) follows a normal distribution, the denominator of "people that gave swimming a real try" is going to have a direct relationship with the capabilities of the best ever to try. This is completely ignoring funding, encouragement, and access, and strictly discussing the sheer number of women that have literally tried swimming at a young enough age to discover their talent and have the opportunity to become the best swimmer they possibly could if they have it.
- Jensson 1y ago
  It is easy to control for that, just look at the best man from a very small population. For example, the fastest male swimmers in Iceland are still much faster than the fastest female swimmers in the world, and Iceland has 10 000 times less people than the world. There aren't 10 000 times more men trying to become elite swimmers than women.

autoexec 1y ago

> We have somehow decided that chromosomal advantages are unfair That somehow was mostly because people with certain chromosomal characteristics were heavily disadvantaged in sports, but increasingly wanted participation in them. Because those people (who we called "women") would largely be unable to be competitive and/or would face considerable increased risk of physical harm if they played in/against the same teams as everyone else, people with those chromosomal characteristics splintered off to compete in/against teams of themselves. This was extremely successful and many women have been happily participating in sports, enjoying the ability to win games by virtue of their training and the non-sex defining aspects of their genetic make up, all without having to unnecessarily accept outsized risks of bodily harm and injury. It's also worth mentioning that there hasn't been much effort to keep women from competing outside of their own divisions if they're willing to accept the lower odds of success and higher risks of harm to themselves that'd come from that. For the most part, they have been deciding for themselves that it isn't worth it. It's not even as if chromosomal advantages are the only place we've done this. We have weight classes in certain sports. We have teams that only accept people within certain age ranges. We have divisions based on demonstrated ability. We even have things like the special Olympics. These really aren't a problem or a bad thing to have. People can't choose their biology, but they can choose to play sports in a way that's more fair and safe for themselves and the others they play with and that's a perfectly acceptable practice that we should encourage. This is true even when it means that some people are excluded from specific teams or events because of things they cannot change about themselves. There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to.

xracy 1y ago
> There are still places for pretty much everyone who wants to play if they look hard enough, even if not everyone is able to be a part of any team or division that they'd like to. This reads to me as "separate but equal" which I think is exactly what's wrong with sports divisions. Sports divisions play out the "separate is inherently unequal" at so many levels.
- 1y ago

kazinator 1y ago

> All elite athletes have biological advantages not afforded to ordinary humans like us. Sure. Meanwhile there's no athletic record of anyone identified as a woman cracking the four minute mile. Not long after Roger Bannister, teenage boys started doing it. It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets. Elite capability does not erase or conceal sex-related gaps. We have male and female divisions at all levels of sport for a reason.

jfengel 1y ago
It's kinda unusual, but only because they don't run the mile event very often. Most track events have a 1,500 meters, 109m short of a mile. But they're definitely running them at a sub-4 pace -- the high school record is something like 3:34 for the 1,500. Most tracks aren't set up to properly measure the mile. It's easier to measure the 1,600 meters, still 9 meters short of a mile. It's not a standard track event but it does give a good estimate of the mile time.
- kazinator 1y ago
  What is kinda unusual? I don't understand your comment. The USA high school record for the female 1500 m event 4:04.62, set on May 17, 2013, by one Mary Cain of Bronxville, NY, in an event at Eagle Rock, CA. It would take something like another 18 seconds to get to 1609 meters at that pace. That's just the USA. Let's look at the World Under-18 records: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_in_athletics#Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_under-18_bests_i... 3:54.52, by a Ling Zhang in China, in 1997. Not sub-4 pace. She was 16 + 188 days old. Not sure where you got 3:34 from; maybe you are looking at a boys' table? A 17-year-old Australian named Cameron Myers hit 3:33.26 in 2023, in Poland. We saw a new women's 1500 m record just this month. 31-year-old Kenyan Faith Kipyegon ran it 3:48.68 on July 5, in Eugene, OR. Note that it it was still 15 seconds slower than the boy. It's about a 4:05 mile pace.
  - jfengel 1y ago
    Yeah, sorry about that. I should have quoted the specific bit I was replying to: "It's not unusual for sub 4 miles to be run by boys at high school track meets." Most boys won't run the actual mile in a track meet, just because they don't run that event. I hadn't meant to address women at all.