this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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so that's really what people should be grouped based on in these sports instead of gender.
Well it is more complicated than that. After puberty female bodies usually have more fat and less muscle mass, than similiarly trained male bodies. Also the metabolism and "energy management" of male bodies is more advantageous for most sports. Note of course that these are also spectrums, and women who train well outcompete men who don't.
So it does make sense to group athletes by gender too. But like somebody else said in this thread, there is no factual reason, why gender should be the only or the main grouping criteria.
all the things u list are still just individual factors, thst can be indicidually measured. gender does not play a role for them. make leagues based on these factors and not gender.
So how do you want to do it? I cannot see it as particularly inviting that athletes are grouped by body fat ratio, or needing an extensive medical analysis on how their metabolism performs.
Why not at the pro level?
I did sports semi professionally at some point. The people in my club who did so professionally were already fucked bad enough, with the anti doping agents having to know where they were at all times.
Imagine on top having very sensitive information from your medical records public. Imagine you are dropped out of the most prestigous top athlete bracket, because your body fat ratio increased half a percent too much after you had an injury.
Also imagine at say the swimming world cup there isnt just 2 dozen different competitions already seperated into men and women, but with another 4 subsections. These things also mean that the attention to the sports have to be spread among more people and outside of the popular sports that will drop many people out of attention and money spent on the sport.
Isn't that already a thing for sports with weight classes? Having fairer matches makes things more interesting in all divisions.
You don't even need more divisions. Just more precise ways of making them.
weigth classes are much more broader. Your weight does not tell more about how your body is constituted than can be seen from the outside already.
It gives no more information than body fat percent. Unless you're already making an assumption about body fat %, muscle %, height, etc, you can't guess someone's weight from the outside.
For the top end of cycling (and probably other endurance sports), things like V02max for top athletes seems be pretty common knowledge already. But I'm not sure how objectively that can be measured if someone is intent on suppressing it to stay in a certain bracket. So height would still probably be more useful, at least for flats.
Imo, either make divisions based directly on factors that matter, which varies from sport to sport but most often comes down to things like height and weight, or get rid of them.