Kevin Williams
3 August 2024
(If I was still working, you would likely be reading this in your Chicago Tribune this morning. But I am retired, so you get to read it here for free. Ta-daaa!)
My new favorite thing with the people who begrudgingly admit that they MIGHT have gotten things wrong with the Olympic boxing hysteria is, “She MIGHT not be a man, but still has a biological advantage over the other women and that is unfair.”
Athletics is inherently unfair. We celebrate biological advantages. Should Sha’Carri Richardson or Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce run more slowly? Should Jordan have jumped less high, Phelps and Ledecky swim more slowly?
Biological unfairness is at the core of the reason we watch athletics. Nobody wants parity. We want the gifted people to light up our screens with their exploits. Yes, everyone should have been born being able to run a 10-second 100 meter. Daughters should have been born being able to do what Simone Biles does. They weren’t. But they can still watch on TV and work hard to be as good as they can be given their particular set of athletic gifts.
Part of being an adult is the ability to admit that you were wrong. People often say these days when they are wrong, “Well, people can think what they want to think, but … ” “2+2 equals four? Well, I think it should equal six.” That isn’t how it works.
An Olympic athlete posted on social media something based in incorrect facts about the boxing situation, so he removed the post and apologized. When asked why he said, essentially and simply enough, “I should have read and researched more. I reacted too quickly and got it wrong, so I took down my post.”
In the real world people are better, stronger, faster, have longer arms, bodies more capable of performing certain athletic acts. Unfair? Sure, at the core of it. They won the genetic lottery while someone else can barely run to the corner grocery. Life is unfair. Maybe Biles wanted to play rugby when she was young, or admired pole vaulters. Who knows?
Athletes train with the bodies they have been given. If a boxer has a longer reach than another boxer, that other boxer will try to work in close to maximize their advantage. That is how sport works. Athletes overcome their disadvantages, or work to make them advantages. Someone wins. Everybody else loses.
But the rules can’t change because the woman that you asserted was a man but is in fact a woman was born with a different body, doesn’t make anything unfair. Precisely nobody polices men’s athletics in this way. Let women of ALL body types be athletes and let the better ones excel without their success being suspect.
Ilona Maher shouldn’t have to post teary-eyed affirmations on social media because people are calling her a man or trans because she was born able to become tall and muscular. That is her body and she has made the most of it. You want to support women’s sports, let them compete, get their asses kicked by better athletes and go home. Suddenly, any woman athlete who excels is suspect unless she fits notions of how women are supposed to look. And other women gleefully perpetrate this. Katie Ledecky is being called “trans,” or “a man.” Know what they called Phelps? Champion.
This body policing has been going for decades. Martina Navratilova was called a man. So was Serena Williams, which is one I still can’t figure out, because … damn. People say that Biles “looks like a man.” Are women athletes or not, because athletes have all kinds of bodies. If you support women’s sport or claim to care about women in sport, act like it.
Michaela Blyde of the Black Ferns and Maher competed in women’s rugby sevens. They are different athletes with different bodies. Blyde and her team won because they were better. Both hit like a truck in tackle and compete like lions, with the body they were given at birth. That is how it is supposed to work.
What makes athletics fair is the opportunity to compete on the same field, leaving aside doping and other forms of cheating. The more gifted athletes will win. And that’s fine. Ones who aren’t as gifted will lose. That is also fine. Do your best, try your hardest and go home proud.
The saddest thing for the Italian boxer who kicked all of the madness off is that — and maybe she already does — regret at not having done her best. She took a hard shot and gave up. She wasn’t going to win a medal, just as her opponent isn’t. But every four years come the Olympics. So for three years and 364 days, an athlete trains for that one moment. I suspect she regrets her action in a way deeper than what motivated her apology, which was almost as bad as her boxing, but was an apology nonetheless.
Try, lose, fail, but never give up. Work to be the best with what you have and live with the result. That is how it works. That is the essential right and fairness of athletics, and allegedly why we love it so.