The demented politicisation of sports (as well as absolutely everything else) continues apace and is plumbing ever greater depths.
Swimming has thrown up a couple of fine examples so far during this Olympics. One about gender, the other about race.
In part one let’s look at gender and a genuinely interesting new swimming competition, the mixed 400 m relay. The race is between teams made up of two men and two women. Each individual swims one leg, the first being backstroke, followed by breaststroke, then butterfly and finally freestyle. The interest comes with the fact that the teams choose who will swim which leg, man or woman. This means team tactics are a big part the race.
Having men and women in the water at the same time really highlights the disparity between the genders. Here’s a picture of the end of the first length. On this leg lanes 1,2,3 and 5 are the men, 4, 6, 7 and 8 the women. you can see that the fastest woman is a body length behind the slowest man.
Remember these are the very best female swimmers in the world, I’m not knocking them in the slightest. They train as hard as the men; they deserve as much praise for their efforts and their victories. It is simply a fact that the various differences between male and female bodies mean that their times are just a little slower than the men.
There are also disparities between the strokes employed, some are faster, some slower and some show up the gender disparity more than others. So, it makes sense to have your fastest swimmer on the slowest stroke. Even the painfully PC Independent put it like this.
“The optimal strategy is to have a fast man swim the breaststroke, given it’s the slowest discipline and generates the biggest time gaps…”
This is what the British team did and the hugely competitive Adam Peaty swum the breaststroke leg. The USA put the swimming machine that is Caeleb Dressel in for the final freestyle leg and he did magnificently, but even the five-time Olympic champion had too much distance to make up. It was GB 1st, PRC 2nd Australia 3rd. If Dressel had swum the breaststroke leg it might easily have been a different story.
Here’s the race in full. Look at the celebrations at 3:50 especially. James Guy’s testosterone rush almost blows his swimming cap off! Interestingly, I’ve already seen a comment on the Independent’s website criticising Peaty for hugging and picking up his female team mate Hopkins…ho hum. :-/
Of course, this interesting new event is part of the Utopian engineering drive to make everything more “inclusive” and covered in rainbows and unicorn poo. To be sure, the BBC coverage of it came from, shall we say, a certain angle. After the race the studio presenter interviewed the two women, but not the two men. The female presenter actually described Anna Hopkin, who swam the British team’s last leg, as beating Dressel! Now, she did bloody well, as the whole team did, but let’s not kid ourselves. In straight race between Dressel and Hopkin the only way Dressel would lose is if he was attacked by a shark halfway through. To frame it as Hopkin beating Dressel is not only ludicrous, it also utterly negates the team nature of the event.
The ghost of Karl Popper is smiling
The late, great philosopher Karl Popper was known for pointing out that well-meaning attempts to engineer society almost always have unforeseen, unwanted effects, often contrary to those intended by the Utopian engineers. The mixed 400 m relay is a classic example. For all the BBC’s “You go GIRL!” feminist triumphalism the disparity between male and female swimmers is shown very clearly by this event. The very tactics employed to win rely on that disparity.
I love this event, not only is it genuinely exciting, but contrary to the intentions of the powers that be, it is wonderful evidence for what Bill, Scott and Steve, as well as others like Dr Peterson, Ben Shapiro and the great maven Klavan have been saying for years. Namely, that our species is made up of females and males, that these sexes are far more alike than they are different, but that they are different and that we work best when we acknowledge that and work with the grain of humanity, not against it. Kathleen Dawson, Adam Peaty, James Guy, and Anna Hopkin won not because men are “better” than women, or because women are “better” than men. No, they won because they are superb athletes who work hard and swam as a team, using tactics that took advantage of the gender differences.
One final thing, the big, tutu wearing elephant in this room. It did occur to me that I may be wrong in the motivation I ascribe to the creation of this new event. It is possible that someone (a clever, cheeky someone who reads Machiavelli for pleasure and has a fox somewhere in their ancestry) came up with the event precisely because it DOES emphasise, in a positive way, the innate physical disparity between the sexes. This event is a graphic example of why people are upset at the inclusion in trans women in women’s sporting events. Just imagine if Adam Peaty or Caeleb Dressel were to transition and compete as women at the next Olympics! Lowering their testosterone would not negate the various physical advantages they have.
The left has successfully muddied the waters on this with their usual word games, mixing up gender, gender roles, sex and what not. We don’t have separate men’s and women’s events because of how men and women deal with emotions, or because of how they dress, or whether or not they leave the toilet seat up. No, we separate men’s and women’s events because if we didn’t there would be very, very few women at the Olympics or at any other top level sporting event.
With the apparent rise in the number of trans athletes it seems to me the only fair way of dealing with the situation is to have a trans category. If a formerly male runner, or swimmer or weightlifter does not want to compete with the men fine, but for them to compete with the women is simply not fair. As there seem to be an increasing number of trans athletes (male to female at least) having a trans competition shouldn’t be too difficult. Unless, of course, the number of middling to indifferent male athletes that transition to female were to suddenly drop with the creation of a trans category, or am I just being a cynical old poof?
I leave you with the winning times at this Olympics for the three versions of the 400 m medley relay. It shows that, small as they are, at the top level of performance the differences between males and females makes a big difference.
Men 3:26.78 (USA)
Mixed 3:37.58 (GB)
Women 3:51.60 (Australia)
One reply on “Different Strokes (Part One)”
Thanks for your comment. I couldn’t agree with you more!!