Truly an apples-to-oranges comparison. Did the lesser boys’ team ever play the state champ girls’ team?
I watched the US womens’ team the last couple of years and I have to say I expected to see a higher level of skill. It was like watching a really good HS game.
If “long distance” means 20+ miles, I would have to point out that the most popular long distance race - actually, the ONLY really popular, major-sport-level race above 20 miles - is the marathon, a 26-mile-and-change race, and the top women in that event are badly outclassed by the top men.
Not to my knowledge, but there were definitely a couple of girls (two sisters in particular) who could kick the butts of any of the boys in one-on-one. They were much more nimble.
Of course, this proves nothing overall.
Are they single (sorry, male humor).
I look forward to an ever advancing womens’ division just so I can see someone from the US make it into the finals. Actually the mens’ team didn’t do too bad this year (short term memory loss).
RickJay- that was swimming only, not running.
Rhum-Ok if a jockey is an athlete-I guess so.
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doctordoowop, there aren’t actually that many female jokeys. Some, but the numbers are far from even. There are a lot of femal exercise riders though. I’m not sure why more women aren’t jockeys. And jockeys are athletes in that they are incredibly strong, and riding in a race (balancing on a tiny saddle with your stirrups jacked up while a 1200 lbs horse pulls against you) takes a lot of strength and stamina.
In the Olympic equestrian sports (show jumping, dressage, and eventing) women and men do compete on an equal basis and the numbers are close to even. Are riders in these disciplines athletes? Absolutely in that you need to be very fit to ride well. But it is a sport where incremental improvements in physical strength aren’t as important as finesse and (at least in jumpers) having a good sense of rythmn and spacial distance (to grossly oversimplify it, you have to choose the tightest-yet still ridable turns and paths to your jumps, then get the horse to the right take off spot depending on his/her speed, and all the while put the horse it the proper “frame” to jump either long and flat for a water jump or short and high for a vertical). The fact that not only do men and women compete equally but that you see riders compete well into their 50’s has got to mean that what they lack in physical strength they make up for in experience and finesse.
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Badly outclassed, Rickjay? You call a 10 minute difference between world records for men and women badly outclassed? At this rate next year, Ms. Radcliffe may need elite Kenyan runners to pace her.
I love watching the women play, but they’re nowhere close to the men. Here’s a cite that show a Canadian U16 club team easily beating the Canadian women’s national team. I seem to remember the U.S. women losing to U16 teams too (though I can’t find a cite). Comparing them to a high school team is apt.
More back on topic, speed and strength are quite important in soccer - and size helps too. I remember playing around 12-14 years old as a kid. This was just around the time that some of the “boys” had the bodies of men… one guy I remember had the build of a weight lifter and a goatee even.
If these more powerful guys had normal coordination, they were very hard to compete with. They’d simply blast by and outrun you, and could give and recieve much harder passes and shots. And though it’s against the rules, they could intimidate you by “accidently” flattening you once or twice when you challenged them for the ball. The ref’s would watch, but their not being able to see everything caused you to be more inclined to not charge in full force for fear of getting run over “accidently” again (this was also about the age when the guys started their acting careers in taking dives and making things look like accidents). We did have an ambulance drive out onto the field once.
Hmm… what about snooker? There’s bound to be a women’s snooker league somewhere. It doesn’t require strength(compared to say… breaking in 9-ball or 8-ball pool), endurance, or people to be of a certain stature. Or archery? Both require good hand-eye coordination (I don’t know any statistics of hand-eye coordination between males and females, though. Maybe we’ll have to dig some up).
How about bowling?
OK, my take on it is this. In the ameteur soccer game especially, men do have a distinct advantage over women - they’ve been playing soccer since they could walk. Women have not. In fact, its only very recently that in the UK more women are getting into football. When I was a young girl (read about 7), we had a seperate area for playing soccer. Girls were absolutely, under no circumstances, allowed in this area to play soccer. Girls found in this area were escorted back to the main play yard, and had to stay there. I kid you not, and I’m not that old either before anyone asks!
In my 11 a side ladies’ team as an undergrad, I was one of very few girls who had ever played soccer before, (at primary school, because of a particularly outspoken teacher who managed to get the school to allow girls to play soccer), but with the training we did, we were able to beat our men’s 2nd side, just.
As a postgrad, our ladies’ team again consists of one or two players who’ve played before, but a few who’ve never even kicked a ball before. We train with our men’s side, and we found that the men were consistently faster and stronger. I found it very difficult to stop goals aimed at me by the men, but playing against a ladies’ team, its been much easier.
There is a strong physical difference there, men are faster and stronger than women, and this does give them a definite physical advantage when playing soccer. That, and all the practice they’ve had.
I always wondered why men and women compete separately in competitions where there is clearly no gender disparity. Pool and bowling are good examples of this. (My friend I debate with a lot says that “no man wants to lose to a woman”, though he didn’t use the word woman.)
As far as equestrian events, women also compete with men (fairly well, I believe) in car racing. Both of these “sports” carry the burden of the human not being the primary athlete: the horse and the car do all the work. So I think those examples could be ignored.
Archery, darts, pool, bowling, all seem to be gender neutral. But I wouldn’t consider any of them sports. If you consider them sports, you might have to accept video games as sports as well.
As far as physical, athletic competition, you would think that there would be no sport in which women could compete with men, but as has been pointed out, women rule the endurance swimming, and judging by the huge chunks of time the women’s marathon record is being improved by, marathons aren’t far behind. Women seem to have more endurance, probably due to higher body fat.
Aside from endurance, though, women just can’t overcome the larger lungs, larger wind-pipe, larger muscle mass, and lower body fat of the men. Men just have the evolutionary edge for sports. (And also the necessary instinct to compete.)
I also dislike any female competition that requires so little body fat as to prohibit ovulation. Just seems wrong. And that, I believe, would be a prerequisite to competing with men.
Apotosis, I’ve played on teams with shoet goal keepers, their size is a definite disadvantage in some areas, but they were quite often more acrobatic which made up for it, but at a pro level height is almost essiential.
IIRC women can perform at the same level as men in ultra-long distance running, but there is only one sport in the world at the moment were a women holds the world record for both sexes- free diving.
In terms of darts, physique isn’t any adavantage (unless being overweight somehow gives the dart players better balance to lean further forward) and there are many good women dart players though again probaly for other reasons none of them would be able to compete with the top professionals like Phil Taylor (then again the men can’t really compete with Phil Taylor who rarely loses a match). There was a row in snooker when a woman was refused admittance to the top 100, though the governing body said it was because she was not skilled enough.
I thought a woman holds the world record in long distance swimming, as well. By a large margin, even.
For a number of years a women held the record for swimming English Channel, but that record is now held by a man.
I’d disagree with the “women haven’t been playing soccer as long” argument, at least as it applies in the US. I, currently 22 years old, am within about 2 or 3 years of the average age of the US National teams in both men’s and women’s soccer, and every girl that I grew up with, who had any desire to play soccer, has played since the beginning. In fact, in the US, when I was a kid, soccer was seen as almost “a girl’s sport”, and the guys got made fun of for playing it.
I was on an Under-8 team that was mixed. Same, I think, for U-10. U-12s split up by sex, and by then, the girls had to try out and compete to make the team, so many of them were trying to play.
And yet, the US women’s team isn’t even in the same UNIVERSE as a mediocre college men’s team.
Well, yes, wouldn’t you? Ten (and a half) minutes is a pretty big difference; Ms. Radcliffe has basically zero chance of ever winning a men’s marathon. It’s like a 1-second difference in the 100m dash or a half-second difference in luge; what seems like very little to you or me is a vast gulf of performance at the elite level. As pointed out already, though, I didn’t read carefully enough; the poster meant long distance swimming.
Hey MC Master of Ceremonies,
I’d say that the disadvantages your keepers suffered were a testament to their lack of skill, not their lack of height. As for height being almost essential for keepers at the pro level, I suppose we’re just going to agree to disagree.
-Apoptosis
No a tall centre forward will beat a short keeper to a cross everytime, our current goalkeeper used to be semi-pro and trained with a pro-club he’s exteremly skilled but his height is a disadvantage.
Ok, just checked my assertation on the average height of golakeepers
Out of the ~250 golakeepers registered to English professional clubs (the Premiership and 1st, 2nd and 3rd divisions) in 1994 the avaeger height was 6’1" with a standard deviation of 1.5 inches, the shortest keeper was 5’8" with a handful of 5’10"ers as well, though in general the Premiership goalkeepers were taller than their lower league counter-parts.