Lia Thomas And The Denial Of Biological Reality

 Jerry Coyne, whose Why Evolution Is True blog is linked on the sidebar, has a fine post from earlier in the month outlining the problems with Lia Thomas' swimming record:

While her performance on the men’s team was so-so, Thomas has become famous by cleaning up after joining the women’s team, breaking record after record and beating her opponents by substantial times. She may well break the records of famous women swimmers like Katie Ledecky and Missy Franklin.
…

It’s also clear from recent research (see here, for instance), that many of these advantages are acquired at puberty, and even hormone-blocking after puberty (testosterone suppression) won’t eliminate either physical or performance advantages of males, even after three years of treatment. (The International Olympic Committee used to require only one year of hormone suppression.) While Thomas has had several years of hormone suppression, she still shows the physical advantages acquired as a male who experienced puberty, and there’s little doubt that these advantages are making her a champion.

To deny the above is to deny reality. Thomas’s new record of victory largely reflects the physical and phsiological [sic] advantages over women she gained at puberty. While she identifies as a woman (and should be treated as such in nearly every area save sport), she is winning with the advantages gained as a male. This should be uncontroversial to anybody who knows the facts.

 I somehow missed that "[T]he Olympics has, for the moment, rescinded its rule on transgender athletes and has no rule in place at all", which I assume means the extremely lax rules published last November.

Much to my surprise, Outsports had a surprisingly open response to the Sports Illustrated interview with Thomas that also sparked Coyne's essay (one of at least two he's written on the subject). I say "surprisingly open" because Cyd Zeigler at least recognizes this is not strictly a left-vs-right culture war fiasco.  But her Outsports piece calls legislative efforts to ban transwomen in women's sports "unnecessary". When the sanctioning bodies refuse to understand the differences between men and women, people not under the sway of gender ideology will notice this and act accordingly. When the NCAA and IOC have fallen prey to trans activist bullying, it's time to stand up and be counted.

The New IOC Transgender Participation Rules Are Unfair To Biological Women

 The International Olympic Committee released its new framework for transgender and intersex athletes Tuesday. Hard as it is to believe, it is even worse than the old 2015 rules, which required testosterone level verification — despite the utter lack of science behind this. (The problem is the ineradicable changes wrought by male puberty: even after a year of hormone therapy, M2F transsexual athletes retained the vast majority of their strength advantage.)

The document itself is a pastiche of delusion, starting with its first section. Titled "Inclusion", all else follows from that idea, namely, that anyone who claims to be female should also get to compete with them in athletic events. The rest is filled with rationalizations for how this is to happen and why. Quoting Fair Play for Women's response (emboldening all mine):

UK sports governing bodies now have two different sets of guidance to consider, and on this point they agree. The new Sports Councils Equality Group guidance also concluded that testosterone suppression was pointless. But unlike the IOC, they kept sight of the implications: there is no fair way to include people who’ve been through male puberty in female competitive sport. Women will always be disadvantaged. That’s why a separate category for the female sex exists in most sports in the first place.

The IOC claims it has taken notice of the UK Sports Councils Equality Group’s output. It’s hard to see how. The IOC’s new guidance has abandoned the science and says there should be “no presumption of advantage”.

“No athlete should be excluded from competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.”

What does this mean? It means that being transgender is no longer to be counted as having any relevance at all for sporting eligibility. No one is arguing that we don’t need separate female and male (or open) classes. Without them, females would barely get a look-in. Yet the IOC is saying being born male is not a factor.

“Transgender status” is what permits a male to compete as a female when there’s a massive advantage, ranging from 10% at the low end, in running and rowing, to 35% in weightlifting. This advantage is unaffected by gender identity. It would be laughable, were it not so disappointing, that the IOC has thrown out the fig-leaf of testosterone suppression and ended up with self-identification.

 The gasoline that will keep this car moving is the fact that there is necessarily a limited supply of M2F transsexuals wanting to participate in women's sports. That does not make this any more fair to biological women.

Women's Soccer And "Equal Pay": Clutching Pearls At Obvious Biological Truths

ESPN has a predictably horrified article about a motion to dismiss the frivolous US Women's National Soccer pay imbalance lawsuit, which raises important (and one would hope, obvious) points about difficulty of skill required to play in those leagues:

The motion filed on behalf of U.S. Soccer on Monday reiterated a number of objections made throughout the lawsuit. But among the most stark were repeated assertions that, regardless of any other consideration, players from the two teams do not perform equal work -- either in terms of revenue potential or the actual physical labor required.

As a result, U.S. Soccer said, women's players do not qualify for relief under the Equal Pay Act or Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

"The overall soccer-playing ability required to compete at the senior men's national team level is materially influenced by the level of certain physical attributes," the defense motion stated at one point, "such as speed and strength, required for the job."

That followed the original motion for summary judgment, in which U.S. Soccer stated that women's players did not perform jobs requiring "equal skill, effort and responsibility under similar working conditions."

That the lawsuit got this far is really astonishing, but that these things need to be pointed out is absurd:

1. We already have pay in athletics distributed by ability, not just in the major leagues (starters generally make more money than relief pitchers) but in the overall professional leagues (MLB players make more than minor leaguers). So the principle is not, on its face, absurd, despite attorney Molly Levison's sneering at it as the product of a "Paleolithic era" mentality.
2. Female soccer players get routinely beaten by high school boys in the rare cases where they scrimmage together. This is of a piece with high school boys in track and field commonly breaking world record times by females.
3. The USWNT exists entirely because of subsidies from MLS, which in turn is driven by the male game:
   

   
   Professional soccer players are also paid by privately owned club teams. Megan Rapinoe, for example, plays for Seattle Reign FC, one of nine teams in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL). Player's salaries in the NWSL range from about $16,000 to $46,000 annually, according to NPR. That's not a lot, and it's certainly less than even the lowest-paid players in Major League Soccer (MLS; the top North American men's pro soccer league), who earn a mandatory minimum salary of $60,000.
   
   That pay gap isn't the result of sexism. It's what the market allows. Major League Soccer teams drew an average of 21,000 fans last year, while NWSL games drew about 6,000. The TV contract MLS has with ESPN and other broadcasters generates $90 million a year. While neither league discloses revenue figures, it's a safe bet MLS earns considerably more—and, thus, its players do too.

   For women to earn what men do, it's clear they need to get butts in the seats and watching on TV. So far, that hasn't happened. (Given some of the women's teams' fans, maybe there's a reason.)
4.  Those subsidies in fact are a big reason that the US women's team has won four World Cup titles, more than the US men's team ever (zero). Only a handful of countries pay their female soccer players, and this makes a huge difference in the quality and quantity of training the players can undertake. It puts the players in the interesting position of asking for more subsidy because they already get some.

It's hard to look at this situation and wonder what self-serving snake oil the women's team attorney offered her clients. The bottom line is still the bottom line, and at least one member of the women's team understands this:

"Fans can come to games," [Seattle Reign FC player Megan] Rapinoe said. "Obviously, the national team games will be a hot ticket, but we have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games, you can support that way. You can buy players' jerseys, you can lend support in that way, you can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket-holders."

And that's it.

The Case of Mary Cain

Who is responsible for what Mary Cain became? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that. On the one hand, it's Nike's training program, or at least that of Alberto Salazar, that left her a physical wreck:

“An all-male Nike staff became convinced that in order for me to get better, I had to become thinner, and thinner, and thinner,” she explains in the video. Salazar gave her an “arbitrary number” for her to hit on the scale. She became fixated on her weight instead of her performance. Salazar’s mandates took an extreme toll on her body: She didn’t get her period for three years and, due to a lack of estrogen, broke five bones. “I was emotionally, and physically, abused,” she says in the video of her experience.

The beauty pageant aspects of this story are appalling, as if Nike and Salazar were interested in performance only as a secondary matter. But the fact that this appears to be a frequent occurrence throughout women's track suggests that it's not just Salazar who thinks this way:

Amenorrhea—the term for when your period goes away in the absence of pregnancy—is part of what led elite runner Tina Muir to quit the sport altogether in 2017. “There are SO MANY people out there who lose their cycles, yet no one talks about it,” she wrote in post on her website. She’d seen a slew of specialists, was healthy, and ate plenty. Failed by medical science and wanting to get pregnant, the only option she felt was left was to stop logging miles and allow her “body to come out of panic mode.” One estimate suggests that the majority of female runners might experience amenorrhea, which can affect not just fertility, as Christine Yu explains here in Outside, but can also damage cardiovascular health and bone strength. Bones break more easily when the body has been stressed like this, as Cain’s did. And yet still, losing your period can be “a badge of honor, a sign that you’re tough and working hard,” writes Yu. The mythology around amenorrhea enforces running as an act of control against the body.

Certainly, we should decry Salazar for his approach, but does Cain have some responsibility, too? Barry Bonds gets only opprobrium for his efforts; is the difference the fact that he was so dominant, that he won for so long? Or is it, because he is male (and yes, black), he is accorded full responsibility for his actions?

Australian Cricket Accepts Transwomen In The Women's Game, Gets An Earful

The usual inanity about "inclusion":

Today we take a major step to ensure inclusiveness is at the heart of Australian Cricket.

Learn more about the inclusion of transgender and gender diverse people in the game: https://t.co/XbewXwazH4#ASportForAll pic.twitter.com/cRlM2TKx21

— Cricket Australia (@CricketAus) August 7, 2019

Luckily, @FondOfBeetles is on it:

Kevin Roberts, CEO of Cricket Australia said:
‘It doesn’t make any sense that today, people are discriminated against, harassed or excluded, because of who they are.’

Of course we exclude people in sports. 1/

— Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) August 8, 2019

Full thread at threadreaderapp.

Women's Soccer Players Make Less Money Because They Draw Smaller Audiences

With the US Women’s soccer team doing well at their World Cup bid (and a fracas involving whether or not they want to meet Donald Trump, yick), comes now the accusation that because the women's team has better TV ratings than the lackluster men's team, they should (at least) get paid as much as the men. Eric Boehm has a good explainer on Reason about why this is as it is. For some things (such as per diem and other related travel expenses), there's little justification for gender imbalance:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. men's and women's teams have generated about the same amount of revenue from games played since 2015, although those totals account for only about half of U.S. Soccer's annual income. Yet, as Rosen again points out, the women's team continues to get shortchanged when it comes to the percentage of the federation's budget spent on "advertising and P.R., travel and training budgets, and…per diems for food."

Okay, but those aren't the big ticket item of salary (something Bill DeBlasio recently demanded be leveled):

Major League Soccer teams drew an average of 21,000 fans last year, while NWSL games drew about 6,000. The TV contract MLS has with ESPN and other broadcasters generates $90 million a year. While neither league discloses revenue figures, it's a safe bet MLS earns considerably more—and, thus, its players do too.

Sensibly, Megan Rapinoe has some advice for how to close that gap:

"Fans can come to games," Rapinoe said. "Obviously, the national team games will be a hot ticket, but we have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games, you can support that way. You can buy players' jerseys, you can lend support in that way, you can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket-holders."

Given the terrible, bitter fans (at least that one!), and greater male interest in sports generally, this seems a tall order.

Sunday Linkies

• The ACLU has come out in favor of M2F participation in biological women's sporting events, an announcement that was immediately panned by Martina Navratilova:

  I love you ACLU, but you are wrong on this. Unless you want to completely remake what Women’s Sports means, there can be no blanket inclusion rule. There is nothing stereotypical about this- it’s about fairness and it’s about science. Thank you.

  — Martina Navratilova (@Martina) March 13, 2019

  The ACLU's source for this claim is a data-free essay from ... Everyday Feminism.
• Reason ran a fine essay on sex differences in athletics that probably won't do much to change the current situation, larded as it is with loud advocates resting on spectral evidence that doesn't really address the differences between M2F transgender athletes and biological women. 
• A terrific thread from @FondOfBeetles showing how adolescent boys routinely break records set by the best women in track. Opening shot:

  In 2004, I was privileged to watch Kelly Holmes win the female Olympic 800m gold, in a run that kept everyone on tenterhooks until that final glorious sprint finish. Her finishing time was 1:56.38. 1/ pic.twitter.com/6EkVF5ZFxe

  — Dr FondOfBeetles (@FondOfBeetles) March 11, 2019

• A useful article from T Nation on the subject of transgender athletes:
  

  Most experts say that the average testosterone production for biological females ranges between 0.52 to 2.8 nmol/L. The Mayo Clinic put that range even lower (2). And while experts may vary in what they consider average among females, the consensus is almost always below 3 nanomoles/L.
  
  But remember, federations like the IOC require a male-born person to suppress and maintain testosterone production at 10 nanomoles/L.
  
  So even if a woman was genetically blessed with testosterone levels that reached 3 nmol/L, that would still be less than half of what a trans woman would be allowed to have during the competition. To look at it another way, her male-born competitor would have just over three times as much testosterone, even with hormone-altering drugs.

• Sex differences in the human brain show up before birth. The last refuge of the blank slate-ist is gone.
• Kirsten Gillibrand has zero endorsements. 
• Finland's government has collapsed following failed efforts to reform the country's healthcare delivery system.  This is interesting for a lot of reasons, not least because Finland has better per-capita spending on healthcare than France, which is often used as a model for US single-payer/M4A advocates (the light blue line below is Finland):
  
  
  

Martina Navratilova Backtracks On M2F Transsexuals As “Cheats”

Martina Navratilova backtracked on her comments calling M2F transsexuals competing in womens’ events “cheats”:

I know that my use of the word ‘cheat’ caused particular offence among the transgender community. I’m sorry for that because I certainly was not suggesting that transgender athletes in general are cheats. I attached the label to a notional case in which someone cynically changes gender, perhaps temporarily, to gain a competitive advantage. We should not be blind to the possibility and some of these rules are making that possible and legal. The context may be different, but the case of Lance Armstrong, and the harm he did to his sport, is surely instructive.

Navratilova drifts toward something that she can’t quite bring herself to say — the idea of excluding transsexuals from Olympic (and other) sports on the grounds that adding new categories amounts to a change in the historical categories:

It would be a big mistake for women’s tennis, which of course I know best, to be broken up into too many categories. Male and female, juniors, seniors and veterans, able-bodied and wheelchair, seems enough to me, certainly at the top level.

...

But we should be wary of solving the transgender problem (if I may call it that) by creating further categories. For while they are intended to be fair and inclusive, multiple categories can also fragment a sport and cause confusion.

 The good news is that Navratilova appears uninterested in dropping the subject; "The communists tried to shut me up 45 years ago and look how that worked out...". Neither, apparently, are dumb hot takes like this one at OutSports, which considers multiple cases of trans women suing their way into (or getting bounced from) women's competition as "progress", and hilariously compares Navratilova to Nazis, employing "Joseph Goebbels nomenclature". Once more: the argument against trans women competing against biological women in sports rests on the idea that sports are a game of populations. Just because some trans women were defeated by biological women doesn't mean that, with enough time and trans women contestants, trans women wouldn't eventually fill the record books on games designed to fairly accommodate biological women's different and lesser physical capacities.

More Transsexuals Winning Girls' Events, Martina Navratilova Hates It

• Transsexual sprinters placed first and second at a Connecticut high school indoors event.
• Martina Navratilova hit a fabulous return shot about transsexuals competing in womens' categories and took heat for it. I have asked her for the basis of her Times piece.
• The IOC is okay with transsexuals competing in womens' events, but their own guidelines permit "females" with penises — highly suggestive of their political aims.
• At bottom of a lot of the claims that trans women should be competitive with biological women is a 2004 study in the European Journal of Endocrinology by Louis J. G. Gooren and Mathijs C. M. Bunck studying muscle mass in n=19 transwomen, and concluding that after a year, muscle mass had diminished to the point where "it is justifiable that reassigned M-F compete with other women", while ignoring height, size, and bone differences.
• Update 2019-02-26: A pretty good article at Velo News on the post-Rachel McKinnon landscape on M2F transsexuals competing in women's events. Something I didn't know, and seems to have been missed in the fracas over McKinnon's victory: the reigning women's cycling champion, Sarah Fader (née Caravella), resigned in protest minutes before the races were to begin, despite the fact that she beat McKinnon in both the 200m and 500m preliminary time trials.

  Track racer Sarah Fader believes the IOC’s rules create an unfair situation for cis women (cisgender refers to individuals whose gender identity matches their birth gender).
  
  Known by some cycling fans for her maiden name, Caravella, Fader raced in the U.S. professional road scene from 2006-2015. Fader was set to race against Dr. McKinnon in the masters finals in Los Angeles. She was the defending masters world champion in the event, and she set the fastest time in the qualifying heats. She beat Dr. McKinnon in both a 200- and 500-meter time trial during the weekend.
  
  Fader, however, told me that she felt that racing against Dr. McKinnon was simply not fair. Dr. McKinnon stands six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds. Fader, by contrast, is  5-foot-5 and weighs 135 pounds. So minutes before the finals were set to start, she pulled out of the competition entirely.
  
  “I thought that doing it this way was my own form of protest,” Fader said. “I knew that I personally did not agree with the situation. I don’t want to compete in a sport where the rules are unfair.”

• Included in that Velo News piece is a good link to a Stuff (New Zealand) article interviewing Otego University physiology professor Alison Heather, who says "She is adamant international sporting regulation bodies such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have rushed a decision to include transgender athletes in male and female categories, as there has not been enough research."
• Update 2019-02-27: More linky goodness: the IOC's policy (PDF) has no mention of any studies of the situation, and neither USA Cycling's policy.
• The American Spectator has a fine essay on the subject:

  A transgender training expert says this later in the same article:
  

  “The gender identity doesn’t matter, it’s the testosterone levels,” said Harper, who studies transgender athletes. “Trans girls should have the right to compete in sports. But cisgender girls should have the right to compete and succeed, too. How do you balance that? That’s the question.”

  Harper is wrong. Biology matters. The DNA. The sex of the baby, child, teen, adult matters. The hormones make a difference but they are secondary.
  Think of it this way. Lance Armstrong and the rest of the doping cyclists (which is about all of them, at this point) have extraordinary biology before they doped. A woman with similar testosterone levels could not even come close to the last place male finisher in the Tour de France and cycling is a lower body-focused sport where men and women have more muscle strength/per size parity. The biology of the males before the doping is already an advantage. The extra hormones are a boost.

• Madeleine Kerns at National Review:
  

  In December, Navratilova tweeted: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”
  McKinnon was not pleased by this and began a tirade against Navratilova. In her Sunday Times essay, Navratilova describes this behavior as bullyish and argues that, while she feels able to take a stand, she worries that other women will be “cowed into silence or submission.”
  

  
  

  Likewise, when a spokesperson for the organization Fair Play for Women (FPFW) was invited by the BBC to discuss Navratilova’s comments about trans participation in female sport, McKinnon wrote on Twitter: “I will not participate in a discussion panel that takes them [FPFW] seriously and gives them a platform.”
  FPFW were then disinvited by the BBC, and McKinnon boasted about having the platform to himself.

  What an appalling state of affairs. 
• Speaking of Fair Play for Women, their website is chock-full of resources, including, especially, their science links. I highly recommend following their Twitter account, @fairplaywomen.
• Something FPFW tweeted recently, an excellent summary of the scientific landscape at Medium by Dr. Antonia Lee, including an incredible call for the retraction of a widely-cited paper purporting to justify M2F trans inclusion in sports on evidentiary quality grounds.
• Update 2019-03-02: This keeps trickling on: A M2F transsexual hit the automatic NCAA qualifying time in the 60m hurdles in New Hampshire.
• A M2F transgender woman won a 54 km Dutch beach cycling race (English Google Translate version).

Why Are Winter Sports Gender Segregated? Part 1: The Luge

I've written before about the absurdists claiming, without evidence, that men and women are perfectly identical on the athletic playing field — or would be if it wasn't for socially constructed limitations. This seems to come up every so often in areas where men and women play the same game, or at least similar games with the same name, with slightly watered-down rules for the women. Perhaps nowhere has this been more true than in tennis, as we saw this last summer when John McEnroe disrupted the zeitgeist by stating the obvious: a man at the peak of his game could whip a top woman without too much difficulty, claiming "if [Serena Williams] played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world"¹. This caused a good bit of predictable horrified tweeting from the chattering classes, but to her credit, Williams, who had embarrassed herself as a mouthy teen against #203-ranked Karsten Braasch, recognized the futility of a do-over:

“For me, men’s tennis and women’s tennis are completely, almost, two separate sports,” Williams said. “If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes. No, it’s true. It’s a completely different sport. The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, they hit harder, it’s just a different game. I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls, because I don’t want to be embarrassed.”

But the case for sex segregation in the sports of the Winter Olympics would seem at least superficially different than tennis. Many of them are about going downhill very fast on waxed sticks or sleds, and as the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s² is true for everyone, it would appear those, at least, ought to negate most or even all of any sexual advantage. So, Maggie Mertens asks in Deadspin, why are winter sports sex-segregated? Why, for that matter, are there so many male sports for which there are no female analogues? Why, when men and women do participate in the same events, the course distances, and sometimes even rules are changed?

Luge

These questions need answering at some length. Mertens starts with the luge, which is maybe ideal for her argument. It's just a sled, so why is it that the men's Pyeongchang course (1,344.08m) is longer than the women's course (1,201.82m)?²

The sport in which you lay on a sled and hurtle yourself down an icy track the fastest wouldn’t immediately seem like it has any kind of bias favoring athletes of one gender or the other. But think again! The women competing in Pyeongchang will barrel down a track that’s 10.6 percent shorter than the men’s. That’s a difference of just 142m. And when it comes to doubles, women don’t have an event at all. Apparently only two dudes can lay on top of each other and fly down the ice on a sled.

I immediately grant the unfairness of having no women's double event, and possibly its absurdity, presuming there's no compelling reason to omit it. (There is a mixed doubles relay race.) I also concede the oddity of having a ladies start (reused for men's doubles). So why have sex segregation at all?

Looking at the final results page from the men's and women's luge events (both PDFs), doing the math and equalizing for course length, we find that gold medalist Natalie Geisenberger of Germany had an average speed of 93.4299 km/h, where her male counterpart, Austrian David Gleirscher, went a sizzling 101.492 km/h. That's 8.6% faster! Is the ice slicker for men?

One obvious answer might be that the initial push has a great deal to say about course times, and in fact if you compare the Gleirscher's fastest time (2.595s) with Geisenberger's (4.318s), you'll note that Geisenberger's is 66% longer than her male counterpart. Yet, at the end of the event, Geisenberger's average speed is 92% of Gleirscher's. Also, Gleirscher's averaged start time of 2.547s placed him in the bottom to middle of the pack of start times on each run; the consistently fastest luger at the start, Tucker West of the United States, who had two firsts, didn't even qualify for a fourth run. These in tandem strongly suggest the initial push isn't all that important, and/or we need to look more closely at why that difference might exist at all. So what else could account for it?

1. It appears that women have a longer distance to start their sleds, an artificial handicap. I base this on the fact that the men's doubles event (PDF), which begins at the women's start, has similar but shorter start times. (The shortest start time was recorded by the men's doubles gold medal winning team, Tobias Wendl of Germany, who clocked in at 4.174s, where the best time in the women's single, a tie between German Tatjana Huefner and Korean Aileen Kristina Frisch at 4.310s, is 96% of the men's speed. The average gold medal men's doubles course speed was 92.43 km/h, slightly slower than the women's single time.)
2. The track for the upper 142.86m of the men's course is steeper. I have no way of ascertaining this, and so ignore it.
3. Even if it is not steeper, the drop through the additional 142.86m provides enough boost to accelerate the men's sled to higher speeds. Using the average³ course 10% slope, we can work backwards to an estimated acceleration on an idealized course:
   
   
   A 10% slope is a rise:run of 1:10, or tan^-11/10 = 5.711°
   
   Acceleration due to gravity, adjusted for slope (ignoring⁴ friction due to ice), and assuming no other losses (as by non-ideal course traversal), we get
   
   a = 9.8 m/s² * sin(5.711°) = .9752 m/s²
   
   Distance is expressed by the equation
   
   x = 1/2at² + vt + x₀, where
   
   

   x = position in m
   a = acceleration in m/s²
   v = initial velocity in m/s (0 in this case)
   x₀ = initial position (also 0)

   This reduces to x = 1/2at², or transposing and substituting,
   
   t = sqrt(2*142.86 m/.9752 m/s²) = 17.12 s
   
   The final speed at the base for our idealized luger is thus
   
   v = .9752 m/s² * 17.12s * 3.6 km*s/m*hr = 60.09 km/h
   That's a pretty serious advantage! Of course, this is a back of the envelope guesstimate, without knowledge of the course details.
4. Wind speed on the course (if any). I also ignore this factor as evening out over time.
5. Strength and body control factor in steering and thus navigating the fastest path through the course.
6. Other, unknown factors.

The third element would appear to be, by far, the biggest factor. Looking through the results, you might notice a couple interesting things about the record keeping:

1. Average speed differs from finish line speed.
2. Fastest finish speed is not the same thing as a first place finish. German Andi Langenhan's second round finish speed of 130.5 km/h was a men's solo track best, but he only placed eighth with his time of 47.850.

 As this How Stuff Works article suggests, lugers have intense training regimens that would tend to confer advantages to men (as ever, emboldening is mine):

The start is the most important part of the race. It's the time when the slider is most in control, so his or her training can have the greatest affect on the outcome. Luge athletes build tremendous upper body strength for the start, when they'll propel themselves, their sled and any extra weights onto the course. Hand strength is also required for the start, when the slider paddles as quickly as possible for the first several feet of the course. Since a slider's body faces up to 5 Gs during a run, he must be in overall excellent physical and mental condition to manage the 50-second attack on his body and his focus.

In the summer months, luge athletes train hard to build upper body muscles through swimming, weight training and calisthenics. In the winter months, typical luge training includes practice runs every day. Sometimes, they'll practice only starts, developing strength, agility and technique.

So upper body strength — surprisingly — is the major focus of luge training, as is hand strength. And yet we see no compelling evidence that faster starts correlate to better finish times. As the luge is an event timed down to the third decimal (thanks to a .002 difference in the 1998 Nagano Olympics' womens' singles event, then within the margin of error of the timing system), superior male body control affecting steering could mean women might not end up on the podium very often. Yet at this point, I see no reason to rule it out entirely, either. While I see little reason to believe that male and female records will eventually match for sheer physical contests (in general, male and female records in summer Olympic games have reached a limit of about 90%), it is not obvious that this applies to the luge, at least.

---

¹ An interesting sidebar on Serena Williams' and John McEnroe's public throwdown comes in this Stats On The T post, which favorably compares Williams' serve speeds with those of top male competitors. But as the commenters following point out, service speed is only one part of the game, asserting (without specific data) Williams lacks the three-step sprint speeds of her male competitors. Given Williams' avowed refusal to play men, I take her as an authority.
² The governing body for luge events, the International Luge Federation, or FIL for its French acronym, Fédération de Internationale de Luge de Course, prescribes flexible course lengths in their posted rules (PDF); men's courses may be up to 1,350m, with a minimum of 1,000m for men's singles. All other courses must be no less than 800m, with no specified maximum; presumably the women's start is customarily set after the men's.
³ From FIL rules Supplement 1 §3.1.1, "The average gradient of a track from the men’s start to the low point should not exceed 10%." It could of course be lower, though in §3.1.1 of the general rules it says, "The start ramp should have a gradient of 20-25% and a length of min. 10m and max. 30 m." I don't know whether the start ramp is considered part of the overall time or not, but it seems reasonable that it would be. I have sent an inquiry to the US luge team's offices and await their response.
⁴ An earlier version of this post had an erroneous calculation for the acceleration due to gravity on the inclined plane that included friction, so I simplified it to ignore friction.

You Should Care About This Thing: Transitive Fandom In Women's Soccer

The Women's World Cup (er, sorry, Women's World Cup) is something Americans need to care about even more than the other, bepenised kind, according to Meredith Bennett-Smith in Quartz. She never quite gets around to why anyone should care particularly about this event, though the numbers of late, 5 million viewers, seem to provide plenty of room for optimism on that front.

And yet.

I am tired of having to explain that I’m wearing a women’s national team jersey because, news flash, the World Cup is upon us. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Yes, the women have one too. And by the way, that No. 20 number emblazoned across my back just happens to belong to the greatest goal-scorer in the history of women’s soccer.

This is how you promote your favorite sport and players, by belittling anyone inquiring about it? By shrieking you should already know who this is, you dolt at people who almost certainly don't know the players in what is a niche market of a niche sport? Memo to FIFA and constituent clubs: don't hire this person as a marketing consultant.

I am tired of watching World Cup games in sports bars where the TV screens are split between three other games and bartenders turn the sound off at halftime.

Have you ever tried to be a baseball fan in September? You know, when the postseason races are really heating up — and the tsunami of football drowns out everything else, so that unless it's the local team in hot pursuit, or the Yankees or Red Sox, bars already turn their attentions to the NFL? If it isn't football or basketball, sports bars devote screen space on an as-we-feel-like it basis. It's even worse for hockey. So... I feel your pain, but petulance isn't going to change anybody's mind, or the channel.

But most of all, I am tired of feeling like every four years the very legitimacy of women’s athletics goes on trial, again. With the exception of maybe tennis and a handful of Olympic events, we have not achieved gender parity in professional sports. Not by a long shot. So while Mia Hamm may have once been mentioned in the same breath as Michael Jordan, the US women are tasked with the burden of proving that they—and by extension women athletes in general—deserve to be recognized as second-tier professional athletes, by being the best in the world.

And if that’s not a perfect metaphor for modern-day sexism, I don’t know what is. America’s women and girls (and boys) deserve better. Really.

And this is where the entirety of her argument really runs off the rails. You hear that, sports fans? It's your responsibility to like this thing she likes, because she likes it, and you're sexist if you don't. It's hard to imagine anything more narcissistic. She has a hard road; male interest in team sports remains greater than that of women, despite longstanding efforts to reach parity in that area, and one suspects that translates to spectator sports, as well. The notion that men might find women's soccer interesting in part because of the shape of the participants is met with predictable Victorian horror (Dave Zirin called it "screeching sexism and subtle-as-a-blowtorch homophobia"). Bull Durham's Annie Savoy was so named for a reason, but apparently players-as-eye-candy is strictly verboten when men might be the target audience. If anything, Bennett-Smith makes the case for staying away from women's soccer, if only to steer clear of harangue.