Response to Last Issue’s Junto

Sadly to say, I tremendously enjoyed and was amused in the extreme by Michael Ganeles’s openly biased and slanted article (Volume 66 Issue 8, The Junto: Special Olympians).  Although articulated well, the theory that women are genetically “predisposed” to athletic inferiority is a completely groundless assumption with no scientific backing (of course, now that it has been printed in The Commentator, I am no longer so sure). 

How else does one explain the seeming discrepancy between the results in the male and female competitions?  A simple explanation is that while young males are encouraged to indulge their proclivities towards sports, young women are not.  Hence, traditionally, a smaller number of women see excellence in sports as a major end in life (although with the emergence of Women’s sports, such as the Olympics, this is beginning to change).  As fewer women play sports seriously, the talent pool is going to be smaller.

A second explanation, which would be true even if we presupposed Michael’s sexist comments, would be that “World’s fastest skater” is a very vague designation.  Is the fastest skater in the 500-meter race the fastest?  Or perhaps the fastest racer in the 2000-meter?  The answer is that the definition of the world’s fastest skater depends on what physical circumstances the race is held under.  Being female is just as much as an obstacle as racing with a 100-pound weight around one’s neck.  Just as the latter is worthy of a separate event, so is racing while ‘female.’  How fast of a skater would Dan Jansen have turned out to be if he were born a female and discouraged from becoming a “jock?”

While technically this argument could apply to the Special, Jewish, Junior, Olympics, the truth is that none of those constituencies are large enough for the appellation of “world’s fastest” in that category to have any consequence.  We must applaud women for how far they have come and how close they are athletically to men, not to denigrate and to relegate them to the faux-competition of the Special Olympics.

Amitai Bin-Nun
YC 2005