As more women entered the world of sport, experts predicted that the performance gap between men and women would shrink, but in the last decade the performance gap has grown, especially in sprint events:
In the last ten years, the gap between the men’s fastest 100m time and the women’s fastest 100m has been around 11 to 12%, whereas the world records suggest a difference of only 7%. A similar thing has happened in the 200m event, where the difference between men and women in the last ten years is also 11 to 12%. So rather than time closing the gap, it’s only getting larger. But there is a potential reason for this…
The reason, as you may have already guessed, has been suggested to be the use of drugs in sport, which was absolutely common-place in the 1970’s and 1980’s. If you look at the world records (which are half the equation in the graph shown above), then you will see that from the 100m event up to the 1500m event, the world record in women’s events was set in the 1980’s. Think Florence Griffith Joyner, Marita Koch, Kratochvilova. We know that doping was rife in the Eastern Bloc countries in particular, and there’s no reason to think it was any less so in the USA. In the middle and long distance events, you have the Chinese of the early 1990’s who hold most of the world records, and that was widely speculated to be due to doping. I suspect that some of these records will NEVER be broken. The women’s 400m record, for example, stands at 47.60 s (Marita Koch of Germany, set in 1985). No one has even come within a second of this since. It’s highly unlikely they ever will.
But whereas doping practices were largely uncontrolled during the 1980’s when these records were set, there are now much stricter methods in place. And although the use of drugs is probably still wide-spread, as indicated by Marion Jones’ story and our recent posts on doping in sport, it is a very real possibility that the reason the gap is widening is because the use of anabolic-androgenic agents in women is decreasing. This theory, proposed by a scientist from Norway (Stephen Seiler) and a market researcher from Chicago (Steven Sailer — a bizarre co-incidence that the names are so similar!), attributes the flattening out of women’s performances to the tightening up of doping control, which has narrowed the “hormone gap”. So while men have continued to improve (the 100m world record has been broken five times in the last 2 years), the women have levelled off, possibly due to the greater control over these anabolic-androgenic agents.
