In most track sports, the men are about 10% faster than women - this is pretty constant from 100m right up to the marathon - the differences in relative records and times are in that sort of range.
I just had a quick look at some recent Fell- and Sky-running results. In Fell running and Sky-running the differences between Male and Female times at the elite level are often greater than 10% - probably because there is a bigger focus on strength in climbing the hills, which favours males.
There is no evidence in any ultra-marathon sport that women seem more suited to these pursuits than men. What happens often is that at the extreme end, there are very few participants, so it is easy to say ‘Wow! There are only 10 men in the world better than her!’.
The only person that I can think of where a woman beat men in competition on absolutely equal terms is Beryl Burton.She would do this pretty regularly too.
She was from just down the road from me - couple of miles. We used to see here round and about in events and training for many years.
She held the 12hour time trial record outright. When she did that, there were grown men shouting and cheering and crying when she passed Mike Mcnamara who was on his own way to setting a best mens record for the event - that was a very emotional event, I can tell tell you.
As a measure of her achievement, the record set over 40 years ago is still a world record for women, and all but a very few men would be very happy with a ride of that distance, even today
It’s started as a way of ensuring a player breathes out at the point of striking the ball - it helps set the core muscles for the shot and means better balance.
I believe boxers do something similar (breathe out on the punch).
King was 30 years old in 1973, Riggs was 55. I don’t know how you know King wasn’t trying to “compete on equal footing.” I’d like to see your source on that. Intuition? Gut feeling?
I don’t buy this, because most tennis players don’t grunt obnoxiously when “breathing out,” most notably, IMO, Roger Federer, who doesn’t grunt and plays an excellent game, presumably “breathing out” every shot.
Men are generally stronger than women. If you have difficulty accepting that, you need to discuss the issue with God, Mother Nature, or your biology professor. The more interesting issue, IMO, is that they segregate by sex in events such as chess, for example, where, presumably, a man does not have an inherent advantage over women.
Interestingly, men tend to vastly outperform women in many areas where there’s no obvious natural advantage.
You’d EXPECT that male PGA golfers would hit longer drives than the women of the LPGA… but what often surprises people is that the male pros are waaaaay better with the putter and the irons than the women. There are a few women like Laura Davies who can hit very long drives, but their short games are nowhere near good enough to enable them to compete with the men.
Similarly, there are separate tournaments for men and women in billiards. There’s no obvious reason that women shouldn’t be able to compete head to head with the men, but the reality is, they can’t!
It all depends on your presumption. There is one woman who’s ever been fit to be ranked, even temporarily, in the top ten in the world, and that’s Judit Polgar; but she’s slipped back through the rankings since she was at her peak, and as far as other women are concerned it’s Eclipse first and the rest nowhere.
Going back a few decades, Vera Menchik was head and shoulders above all other women in playing strength - indeed, no other woman was fit to punch Menchik’s clock; in seven Women’s World Championship tournaments she lost one game, a record any male World Champion would kill for - but in open competition she fared poorly. It was tempting fate for Albert Becker to propose sarcastically, when Menchik was invited to play at Carlsbad 1929, that men she beat ought to form a special club; he promptly became the founder member. Otherwise, beating Jacques Mieses in a match proved even less about chess than King did about tennis, given that Mieses was 77 at the time and not playing competitive chess any more.
Otherwise - nope. We can talk about social and cultural factors if we like, but then we have to explain where Vishy Anand came from given that India hadn’t a grandmaster to its name prior to 1987, or why China have become a world superpower when they didn’t start playing until the mid 20th century.
The article mentions two of substance:
She hadn’t qualified for the men’s race in the way all other entrants had to.
She didn’t want to give up her chance to compete in a later women’s race on the same course, and a rule says you’re not allowed to ski a course in the week prior to racing on it.
Nowhere is it stated that she wasn’t allowed to compete because the race is only for men. Indeed, it’s clearly implied that this is not the case.
I said it’s how it started… a lot of players then took it to extremes, but the juniors at my club are taught that a small grunt helps you make sure you’re breathing out.