Transgender women are out (alas, only from swimming)

I have almost chosen "Stop the steal" for the title of this post but at the last moment I hesitated and opted for a more tame one. Letting transgender women participate in women's competitions is stealing from the "real" females. Don't get me wrong. I have a great respect for the members of the LGBTQ community. I think that they are really courageous to affirm their difference and opt for a non-standard mode of living. Homophobic slurs make me bristle just as sexist or racist ones do. However when it comes to competitions that's where I draw the line. Men who made the transition to women should not be allowed to participate in women's competitions. 

Faced with the problem, FINA, the international Aquatics federation, decided to bar transgender women from female competitions if they have experienced male puberty. In a very detailed document, which explains the rationale of the decision, FINA decided that male-to-female transgender athletes can compete as women only “provided they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 [which marks the start of physical development], or before age 12, whichever is later”. This is a groundbreaking decision coming after the one of the international Rugby federation: they have also banned transgender women from  women's competitions. 

As expected LGBTQ activists are fighting back calling the FINA eligibility criteria "discriminatory". To my eyes this is ludicrous and somewhat sad when such arguments come from a group called "Athlete Ally", showing that they do not care about sport and are just using it in order to support their agenda. They go as far as seeking scientists who start splitting hairs about the choice of the age of 12 years for the deadline of the transition. 

FINA, in a quest for fairness, has promised to create a working group to establish an “open” category for trans women, a category that would help promoting inclusion.

Why did I talk about "stealing" at the beginning of the article? Let's see what scientific research can tell us about the differences between men and women. To put it in a nutshell: genetically male athletes are (on average) 40 % heavier, 15 % faster and 25-50 % stronger than women. B. Kay, notices, ironically, that doping confers an advantage of "just" 9-12 %. 

The story of CeCe Telfer is edifying. Craig Telfer is a 400 m hurdler. Participating in the NCAA Division II competitions he was ranked 200th in 2016 and 390th in 2017. He skipped 2018 and transitioned to women's category in 2019. And, lo and behold, she won the national title. Of course the NCAA regulations concerning testosterone suppression are rather vague. And in 2021 Telfer was ruled ineligible for the US Olympic Trials since she did not meet the eligibility requirement. But it remains that CeCe Telfer had a personal best of 7.67 s over 60 m as a man and 7.63 s as a woman (which her coach explains as due to assiduous work and high motivation).  

But let's come back to the testosterone suppressing measures recommended by the various governing bodies. Their effect is estimated at a mere 5 %. Of course, when a gold medal is decided at less than 1 % those 5% can prove crucial. We have seen this is the case of C. Semenya, who had trouble breaking the 2 min barrier when she (temporarily) underwent hormone therapy. But the fact is that being a man confers an enormous (and unfair) advantage. Ross Tucker, the arguments of whose I am summarising in a post of mine, is explaining that playing with testosterone levels us useless. Once androgenisation has occurred, during puberty, it is already too late. Lowering testosterone levels does not bring fairness into sport because testosterone has already done the work.

Unfortunately the IOC framework on fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination based on gender identity and sex variations, is drafted mainly from a human rights perspective, with less consideration for medical/scientific issues. In fact, the IOC plays a totally hypocrite game transferring the responsibility for gender classification to the international federations. The latter must provide evidence-based eligibility criteria while in principle allowing athletes "to compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity". But having no gender eligibility rules, that is, allowing for self-identification would amount to a free choice to compete in any gender classification, and as a consequence women would disappear from sport.

So, where do we stand in Athletics? Curiously the majority of transgender women participate in track events. A nightmare scenario I am revisiting in my head is for a mediocre javelin thrower, one with a 60 m personal best, to transition to women's category. Throwing with the 600 gr implement she would expect performances around 70 m, an instant conversion from Mr. Nobody to World Elite. Let's hope nobody concerned reads these lines and gets the idea on how to destroy women's throwing events.

Lord Sebastian is preoccupied with the current situation, fearing that the “integrity and future of women’s sport” is at stake. He called on the IOC to introduce regulations that can be applied across every sport and insisted that “gender cannot trump biology”. In his own words:

“My responsibility is to protect the integrity of women’s sport. We take that very seriously and, if it means that we have to make adjustments to protocols going forward, we will. And I’ve always made it clear: if we ever get pushed into a corner to that point where we’re making a judgment about fairness or inclusion, I will always fall down on the side of fairness”.

And he hinted at possible changes to the WA regulations, changes that may impact also DSD athletes:

“We have always said our regulations in this area are a living document, specific to our sport and we will follow the science. We continue to study, research and contribute to the growing body of evidence that testosterone is a key determinator in performance and have scheduled a discussion on our DSD and transgender regulations with our council at the end of the year".

I have disagreed with almost all of Coe's decisions since he took the reins of World Athletics. However, were he to decide to ban transgender athletes from women's athletics, I will be in total agreement with him.

Lasitskene's lament

I did not plan to comment on the exclusion of Russian athletes from international competition. But then I read Lasitskene's letter and I decided that I had to share it with you. Let me be clear on this point: I strongly believe that athletes (or scientists, or artists) should not be punished for the misguided decisions of autocratic heads of state. Sports should always be above politics.

Dont' tell me they are not friends

Mariya Lasitskene, World, European and Olympic champion is certainly the best high jumper of the past decade. She missed the 2016 Olympics because of the decision of World Athletics to sanction collectively all russian athletes, following the doping scandal of the russian federation, and ban them from the Games. And she is going to miss this year's World Championships because, once more, the russian athletes are collectively banned.

Her letter to the IOC president Thomas Bach is excellent. She is writing in a very clear way without mincing her words, quoting Bach himself in order to show how his previous declarations are in conflict with his current actions.

Upon reading the letter one thing particularly drew my attention. Lasitskene is saying that over the past seven years she could participate in international competitions for about four years in total. Those are too many missed occasions.  An athlete can hope to have more or less ten years at the highest level. (Of course, sacred monsters like Merlene Ottey, with more than a quarter century careers do exist, but they are the exception). And some seasons are bound to be underwhelming due to injuries. So missing out even one or two years for political reasons is a disaster.

Being an athlete, I do feel deeply the frustration accompanying missed occasions. The competitions cancelled due to the epidemic are gone for ever. And the clock is ticking. So, let's hope that the people who have the power to decide will put an end to this unfair punishment of those who are already the victims of the situation.

On fossil records

Ross Tucker, a South-African physiologist whom I greatly appreciate, published six years ago an article entitled "World Records: Fossils, stagnation & a tale of two drugs". It was inspired by Ayana's world record over 10000 m at the Rio Olympics. His analysis came with the warning that "a stopwatch alone is not enough to definitively conclude that a person is doping", since Ayana's performance was extraordinary to the point that many viewed it with some skepticism. 

Tucker listed the world records, as they stood prior to Ayana's 10000 m and K. Harrisson's 100 m hurdles records established in 2016. The list is quite informative. Eight women world records established in the 80s were still standing in 2016. (K. Harrisson had just broken the 1988 record of Y. Donkova). 

(There was also one men's record standing unbeaten since the 80s, that of the discus).

So, I decided to find out what the situation was today. Well, you will not be surprised to learn that nothing has changed. The 8 women's world records (and the one of J. Schult in the men's discus) are still standing. J. Kratochvilova's 800 m record may well celebrate its 40th anniversary (but then, A. Mu may decide otherwise). 

Event	Fossil		Recent
100 m	F. Griffith-Joyner 1988	10.49	E. Thompson-Herah 2021	10.54
200 m	F. Griffith-Joyner 1988	21.34	E. Thompson-Herah 2021	21.53
400 m	M. Koch 1985	47.60	S. Eid Nasser 2019	48.14
800 m	J. Kratochvilova 1983	1:53.28	P. Jelimo 2008	1:54.01
High Jump	S. Kostadinova 1987	2.09	B. Vlasic 2009	2.08
Long Jump	G. Chistyakova 1988	7.52	T. Kotova 2002	7.42
Shot Put	N. Lisovskaya 1987	22.63	V. Adams 2011	21.24
Discus Throw	G. Reinsch 1988	76.80	V. Allman 2022	71.46

In some cases there has been recent progress and a hope to see the record broken in a near future. However in the case of the throws there is absolutely no hope. V. Allman's performance is 72nd in the all time list, and V. Adams 21.24 m throw figures at the 183rd position!

Tucker explains the situation as a result of doping. The driving force behind the explosive progress in women's records were steroid hormones. (Tucker points out that this was not an Eastern-Bloc exclusivity and hints at the case of Flo-Jo). For him the reason that doping was so successful at that time was that there were no out-of-competition tests. Once such tests were introduced performances plummeted. The graphic below (from a paper by Y. Schumacher) depicts the situation in the case of women's discus throw. 

While doping was most effective for women it did not have the same effect on men. This is understandable, since men already posses muscle mass and strength. As Tucker puts it "in women, you’re adding something to nothing, whereas in men, it’s less effective to add some to a lot".  

So concerning records the only reasonable solution would be a "tabula rasa": erase everything and start afresh. I have even proposed a subtle way to do this in my "javelin option" article. But, of course, nothing like this will ever happen.

Just before finishing, you may have remarked that Tucker's article is a "tale of two drugs" (and I must say that I did like the tribute to Dickens). Why "two" drugs. Well, Tucker talks also about EPO. The latter did not make its appearance till the 90s and was not easily detectable for almost a decade. But this is a story we are not going to tell here. Perhaps some other time.

A brief history of the IAAF/WA scoring tables: 1932-1952

In the presentation of the evolution of the scoring tables in the World Athletics scoring manual one encounters a section on "Developments in the Theory of Scoring Tables". I reproduce it below verbatim.

From 1920, three concepts became prominent in the theory and development of scoring tables. These have, in varying degrees, influenced all subsequent tables.

1) The fact that each unit of improvement in an athlete's performance gets increasingly harder as the athlete approaches his ultimate. This can be expressed statistically as follows: the probability of any athlete achieving or exceeding a given performance rapidly gets less as the performance rises towards the record. The score for a performance can be derived as the inverse of that probability. The resulting scoring table is progressive but, applied simply, this leads to an exceedingly progressive scoring table, and the main challenge has been to control this excess.

2) The need to be able to compare the performance of an athlete in one event with that of another in a different event or, indeed, in a different individual sport.

3) The wish to have a really "scientific" basis for any scoring system. With the growing research into human physiology and sports science, it seemed possible that a basis could be found in physiological parameters, such as heart beat, breathing rate, oxygen uptake or oxygen depletion and so on.

To me these paragraphs can only have been written in recent years, once (after various blunders) the approach to scoring had sufficiently matured. The most important point is the one I have presented stressed in bold, linking probability to scoring. In some future post of mine I will return to this point and show how a consistent theory of scoring can be constructed based on that principle.

At the end of the 20s it was becoming clear that the linear tables that were in use for 20 years were not providing a fair scoring. People were feeling that the lack of progressive character in the tables was a serious drawback. Fortunately at this point the Finnish Athletics Federation proposed a new set of tables. They were based on the work of J. Ohls and corresponded to an exponential relation between points p and performance x: 

At long last it was realised that the proper quantity on which the scoring should be based for track events was the velocity. And thus starting from 1934 (that was the date the tables were officially approved) the track events did not have a regressive scoring anymore. 

And, given the indecisiveness of the the IAAF, the new progressive tables were not used in the 1936 Olympics where the decathlon was scored with the superannuated, linear, tables. (And in case you were wondering, the linear tables were used in the 1938, 1946 and 1950 Europeans, despite the fact that the 1948 olympic decathlon was scored with the Finnish tables).

Curiously, after having used the new Finnish tables in just one Olympic Games, the IAAF decided to change them. The new tables (known as the Swedish ones) were the work of G. Hölmer and A. Jörbeck. They were approved in 1952 and were used right away in the 1952 Olympics. Curiously they were even more progressive than the Finnish tables, in fact exaggeratedly so. The scoring formula was one involving a square root

a very bad choice indeed, when it comes to fitting the scoring to existing results.

Even the progressive character of the tables turned out to be a failure: on two occasions (R. Johnson 8683 and C.K. Yang 9121) the world record was improved after just 9 events. 

Quite expectedly, the pendulum was going to swing in the opposite direction and I am going to tell that story in the next post of the series.

When I decided to write the history of scoring for combined events I was faced with a major problem. How can one find the tables from 1952, 1934 and before? The oldest tables I had in my possession where those of 1962. And it had not been easy to obtain them. As the faithful readers of the blog know, I have been as scoring buff since my childhood. At some point, in the mid 60s, I set out to find the official scoring tables and went to the headquarters of the Hellenic Athletics federation. I met the person responsible for statistics, who received me with visible mistrust, his only remark being that the tables are copyrighted. At least he let me copy the address of the IAAF headquarters. Thus several years later, already living in France, I asked a british colleague to buy me a copy of the tables whenever she happened to be in London. (Things have become much simpler since that time). Still, the question remained on how to obtain the old tables. 

Fortunately I had, over the years, a few contacts with B. Mallon, the well known Olympic historian (nobody is perfect) and I asked him whether he had copies of the old tables. He did and he graciously provided me of copies of all the tables that had been in use up to 1985. Thus I could set upon writing this series on the history of scoring.