My thanks to Paul for this:
Sir,
Just wanted to point out that for your text on Julie Bentley,
“let’s have unisex running events, where competitors’ starting positions on the track are related to their gender, level of fitness, weight, age etc.”
This is already happening in Canada and has been for a few years (see link below).
It’s called the “Women Set the Pace” series, apparently, as stated on their website a few years back, because they were tired of seeing men win the events and felt they should have a “women only” race series to boost the self-esteem of women:
http://runningmagazine.ca/women-set-the-pace-at-the-toronto-womens-half-marathon-and-5k/
From the article:
The mission of this Toronto event is to invite women to race in a supportive environment where they get a chance to be the first to break the tape. The tagline of the race is “women set the pace.”
Maybe the tagline should be, “Women set the pace… when they don’t compete with men.”
This one small, seemingly-innocuous piece is indicative of the greater corpus of modern thought regarding “equality” between the sexes. Men and women have almost never competed AGAINST each other in sporting events (or indeed much at all) because of the physiological disparities between the sexes afforded by human biology. I don’t think I’m doing much but preaching to the choir here, but crippling or disadvantaging men is the only way a society can achieve comparable results between men and women in almost any forum of performance.
However, it should be recalled that enforcing parity of outcomes between people is precisely what Mao and Stalin were aiming for in their day, prior to presiding over epochs of horrific despair and killing of tens of millions of people through murder, suicide and starvation. Those that think we’ve ever learned from history need to take a hard look at the steadily rising figures for UK incarcerations, state killings and suicides – and that we already have food banks in the UK. Anyone wishing to employ the words “paranoid,” “crazy” or the phrase “conspiracy theory” in this regard might serve the nation best if they dug a hole, climbed in it and didn’t ever get out again. Save ’em a job, mate, please.