I was watching the Canadian French CBC coverage of a mixed relay. They had an athlete giving his opinion that mixed events are a bad idea since the athletes are less likely to push each other to better times. He claimed that men push men and women push women because they are close in ability and times. In the mixed events there might be bigger distances between athletes.
I do not agree. It is true there may be bigger distances at times between athletes. But the relay distances are short. Surely Olympians can push themselves for a gold medal chance having trained for so long to do that. I found the different strategies interesting, and the experiment worthwhile. But I would favour limiting it to relays and shorter events.
I took that more that the athletes often pace themselves off of their competitors rather than providing motivation. When racing against the same gender, the abilities will typically be close and an athlete will know where they should be in in the field and can go faster or slower as necessary. But with mixed events the spacing is going to be a lot more random and the athlete can’t use their place in the field as a basis for how they should tune their performance. But these are world-class athletes, so I’m sure they’ll figure it all out. It seems more like something they’ll do for fun rather than train specifically for it.
There was a relay race a while ago in which each nation had to run 2 women, 2 men.
Most countries used man-woman-woman-man as their preferred sequence order. Poland opted to use man-man-woman-woman instead. The idea was to build up a big lead first, then hope the two women could maintain it. Instead, the last woman couldn’t do it and was overtaken by all the remaining men.
People were critical of the strategy, saying that you need a man to finish the race. But others pointed out that it shouldn’t make a difference because everyone is running with all their might and at top speed no matter what. But if what filmore says is right, perhaps the psychological factor is that a man will psychologically run faster when he’s running against other closer men who are closing out the relay.
In the mixed 4x400 semifinals in the Olympics recently concluded, Nigeria ran M-W-M-W. They kept it close the first two legs, went out way ahead in the third, but their anchor runner got passed on the final turn and straightaway by the entire rest of the field.
The psychological factors are interesting - I wonder if Nigeria timed their 3rd-leg runner to see if he was making maximum effort on his 400 meters. Also, note that Poland changed their strategy to the more standard M-W-W-M in Tokyo and won the gold.
I read a book a short while ago (already forgot the title), and it opened with an account of softball pitcher Jennie Finch absolutely roasting MLB batters. They just weren’t used to those pitches.
I think a man competing against women would basically extend the range of what they win, and that’s it. So a sprinter might take a couple middle distance races, but they lose long distance races and get destroyed in anything else.
Now, does weightlifting fall into the “range” of what an athlete does if they do it for practice? Or if a sprinter was a youth soccer player? I’m leaning towards the women winning those, but it’s not clear to me, especially the weightlifting.