In a previous post of mine I presented a summary of my work in collaboration with Y. Charon which was published in New Studies in Athletics and which aimed at a comparison of the performances of men and women at the highest level.
After having published that post I ran across a reference to the work of I. Hammerman who set out to perform the same comparison essentially for locomotion sports but not restricting himself to running. His conclusion is that there is a constant ratio of the performances of men and women over a very large range of distances and for all the sport examined: men locomotion records are shorter than those of women by a factor of 0.89. The graphic he presents for running events covering three orders of magnitude in distances is really telling. (Moreover he is working with velocities instead of times which is an indication that he has a grasp of the underlying physics). In our work with Y. Charon, we have found that the ratio of women to men velocities was varying between 0.88 and 0.91, in excellent agreement with the findings of Hammerman.
Having established this I asked the question whether the "magic" ratio was typical of the world-record class athletes at the height of their career or whether it persisted throughout their whole life. I performed thus the same analysis a Hammerman for the masters' world records. In the two graphics that follow I show the results for the 100 m and the 10000 m where I have plotted the men's records velocities multiplied by the factor of 0.89 of Hammerman. The agreement is striking but for the 100 m we observe what we already have identified with Y. Charon in our analysis: for young runners, say less than 50 years old, the ratio of women/men velocities appears to be larger than 0.89. (We had found a ratio of 0.91 for elite runners). Past 80 years old there is a more pronounced dip in women's performances, something I would have the tendency to attribute to the fact that there are fewer women practicing high level sports at those ages as compared to men. The same dip is present also in the 10000 m and in fact it starts even earlier.
Having established the validity of the Hammerman result for running events it was natural to ask the question whether the same situation occurs in the case of jumps and throws. In the graphic below I compare men's and women's masters records where I have multiplied the former by a factor of 0.83, which is the factor obtained by Y. Charon and myself in our NSA study. Again the agreement is spectacular: what is valid for young elite is valid for the elite at every age.
Finally comes the question of the throws. In a previous post I have showed how to deal with the fact that various age groups use implements of different masses. Using the formula L=a/(m+f), which should by now be familiar to the readers of this blog, I have converted the throws' records of men and women to ones that would have been obtained if they were realised with the implement of senior weight. Once this was done it was straightforward to compare the records of men and women as a function of age.
In my post, mentioned at the beginning on this article, I had compared the ratio of women to men performances, for elite athletes, converting the performances of the ones to the mass of the implement of the others. I obtained there a value of circa 0.70. This result was corroborated by the fact that the ratio of weightlifting records leads also to a ratio of 0.70. It was thus interesting to remark that in order to have men and women shot put master records follow the same line as function of age (once converted to the same implement mass) a factor of 0.60 must be applied to the men's results (with the exception of the record for 35 years where the ratio is around 0.70 and for 40 years where the ratio is 0.66).
There are indications that hormonal transformations in women may lead to a relative loss of muscle strength after 45 years of age. The fact that menopause occurs shortly after that age and that leads to a massive reduction of oestrogen (which is the female counterpart of testosterone) could provide an explanation as to why the ratio of performances of master women throwers to those of men is less favourable than the one of the senior elite.
After having published that post I ran across a reference to the work of I. Hammerman who set out to perform the same comparison essentially for locomotion sports but not restricting himself to running. His conclusion is that there is a constant ratio of the performances of men and women over a very large range of distances and for all the sport examined: men locomotion records are shorter than those of women by a factor of 0.89. The graphic he presents for running events covering three orders of magnitude in distances is really telling. (Moreover he is working with velocities instead of times which is an indication that he has a grasp of the underlying physics). In our work with Y. Charon, we have found that the ratio of women to men velocities was varying between 0.88 and 0.91, in excellent agreement with the findings of Hammerman.
Hammerman's comparison of running velocities
Having established this I asked the question whether the "magic" ratio was typical of the world-record class athletes at the height of their career or whether it persisted throughout their whole life. I performed thus the same analysis a Hammerman for the masters' world records. In the two graphics that follow I show the results for the 100 m and the 10000 m where I have plotted the men's records velocities multiplied by the factor of 0.89 of Hammerman. The agreement is striking but for the 100 m we observe what we already have identified with Y. Charon in our analysis: for young runners, say less than 50 years old, the ratio of women/men velocities appears to be larger than 0.89. (We had found a ratio of 0.91 for elite runners). Past 80 years old there is a more pronounced dip in women's performances, something I would have the tendency to attribute to the fact that there are fewer women practicing high level sports at those ages as compared to men. The same dip is present also in the 10000 m and in fact it starts even earlier.
Men (blue)-Women (red) comparison over 100 m
Men (blue)-Women (red) comparison over 10000 m
Having established the validity of the Hammerman result for running events it was natural to ask the question whether the same situation occurs in the case of jumps and throws. In the graphic below I compare men's and women's masters records where I have multiplied the former by a factor of 0.83, which is the factor obtained by Y. Charon and myself in our NSA study. Again the agreement is spectacular: what is valid for young elite is valid for the elite at every age.
Men (blue)-Women (red) comparison for long jump
Finally comes the question of the throws. In a previous post I have showed how to deal with the fact that various age groups use implements of different masses. Using the formula L=a/(m+f), which should by now be familiar to the readers of this blog, I have converted the throws' records of men and women to ones that would have been obtained if they were realised with the implement of senior weight. Once this was done it was straightforward to compare the records of men and women as a function of age.
Men (blue)-Women (red) comparison for shot put
In my post, mentioned at the beginning on this article, I had compared the ratio of women to men performances, for elite athletes, converting the performances of the ones to the mass of the implement of the others. I obtained there a value of circa 0.70. This result was corroborated by the fact that the ratio of weightlifting records leads also to a ratio of 0.70. It was thus interesting to remark that in order to have men and women shot put master records follow the same line as function of age (once converted to the same implement mass) a factor of 0.60 must be applied to the men's results (with the exception of the record for 35 years where the ratio is around 0.70 and for 40 years where the ratio is 0.66).
There are indications that hormonal transformations in women may lead to a relative loss of muscle strength after 45 years of age. The fact that menopause occurs shortly after that age and that leads to a massive reduction of oestrogen (which is the female counterpart of testosterone) could provide an explanation as to why the ratio of performances of master women throwers to those of men is less favourable than the one of the senior elite.
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