Jctriguy wrote:
devashish_paul wrote:
Jctriguy wrote:
Is that the message you hear as a man, or what women have told you they hear? Why does shorter imply inferior?
That is the message I have heard from the teenage girls who I coached. Also the shorter distances favour some girls with different fast/slow twitch muscle fiber composition vs others.
That message isn't very loud then. It rarely came up at the national level, and the topic of women in sport was huge. People were much more concerned about equal opportunities existing for men/women in terms of team and trip selections.
With some of the younger categories, the distances can certainly be quite short on the women's side. That can easily change without dealing with FIS. The local organizers and provincial bodies can make those changes. Above the younger categories, the difference in results between 5, 10 and 20k races is very minimal. Even the 'sprint' races are basically the same group of athletes that win and fill the top 6. Northup won the sprint and 50k this year.
My guess I you are hanging out with a different set of people. Imagine the outrage in the running community if we told women they can't do the marathon. Women would rip the IOC and IAAF apart instantly. Perhaps women in the ski community aren't quite as vocal because the "marathon" on skis is not perceived as being the same level of achievement in the general population so the rank and file woman athlete does not aspire to doing this distance as much. Seriously though, imagine if Messick made the woemn's IM distance 2 mile swim, 100 mile bike and 18 mile run because for some patriarchal antiquated reason men decided that women are not strong enough to "handle" the same distance as men. I do certainly blame the top elite women for not pushing this harder...Grete Waitz, Allison Roe et al...and they were much more vocal about what women were able of and wanted equal opportunities to "suffer too".
But just because you don't hear it with the people you hang with does not mean women at the lower tiers of ski racing don't care...elite women may not want to rock the boat and mess with the opportunities they have.
As for changing things at the lower levels, it's not that easy because at the Olympic level women race shorter then men, so it all flows down from there. They stick with the status quo because "it's the way it is...look at the Olympics". Meanwhile the same teenage school girls race the same distance as the boys in the club tri circuit. How is it possible that the same girls suddenly are too weak on skis?