Rating The Best Woman In Each Sport Part 1

[David Sklansky]

Where would the best woman in each of the following sports be ranked if the rankings were unisex?

Tennis

Golf

100 Meters

Marathon

Softball

16 lb Shot Put

[ALawPoker]

I don't have the desire right now to do justice to an actual estimation, but I'll list the sports you give in order, from where the female would rank the highest down to the lowest (this is without looking up times/marks/and inter-sex records, so it's possible that I'm missing something obvious):

Golf

Marathon (only the select demographic of male that trains himself in the marathon has a shot, so this one's high, not as high as golf though imo)

Softball (this is weird, it basically comes down to pitching... how many males are there, in highly competitive soft-ball leagues presumably, who can pitch as well as the best professional female... then you have to roughly double that number to make up for the number of offensive players who are equally valuable... this is the one I'm least sure about)

Tennis

Shot put (not many compete here either, but differently than the marathon, any male who did at one time... high school, college, whatever... throw shot put and is still in reasonably decent shape will still be able to beat world class females, if he was very good at it in the first place, i.e. you do not lose as much [compared to the marathon] if you are not in peak shape... I don't know a whole lot about shot put marks, but I'd imagine plenty of talented college throwers would outperform world-class females... with the marathon, the only people who have a shot are people who are conditioned for it currently, and that isn't a large sample)

100 M (even talented division III male sprinters would beat a world class female... every single division I runner would also... then add in the professionals and etc., and I think this one is definitely the lowest)

[MexKrax]

I think coming up with a ranking for the marathon would be easiest since we can just compare the times of the top male and female runners. With a quick google search I found that the winner of the women's marathon in the last Olympics finished in 2h 26min. If she ran the same time in the men's marthon this would be good for 62nd place.

As far as I know the men and women ran the same course in the Olympics. I also think it's a fair assumption that all (or a great majority) of the world's top marathoners were competing in that marathon. So I think it's pretty fair to say that in a unisex ranking of marathon runners the top woman would be somewhere around 60th place.

[ALawPoker]

[ QUOTE ]
I found that the winner of the women's marathon in the last Olympics finished in 2h 26min. If she ran the same time in the men's marthon this would be good for 62nd place.

[/ QUOTE ]

That being the case, I change my answer to put marathon above golf. I didn't realize the top female would be quite so high. And yes, I'm pretty sure you're right that they use the same course for both men and women (I think it's simultaneous, if not, weather conditions are potentially a factor).

OTOH, I wonder if all of the best marathoners actually compete in the Olympics. With most track and field events, there are athletes who don't qualify for the U.S. team (because they only take so many) who would still outperform many athletes who do compete. I'm not sure if this is the case with the marathon, both because of the relative less interest, and the fact that the USA is not dominant in this event as in most others. There might be other issues though, like some of the African countries not being able to afford to send a large team. I'm not really sure. But we should contrast this result with the male/female results at the New York and Boston marathons.

[KUJustin]

[ QUOTE ]
I found that the winner of the women's marathon in the last Olympics finished in 2h 26min. If she ran the same time in the men's marthon this would be good for 62nd place.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ugh. This is a truly disgusting attempt.

There are absolutely hundreds of men that can run faster than the fastest woman. According to the link provided earlier the best woman's time this year was 2:19:36. Roughly 1,000 men ran faster than this.

[ALawPoker]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I found that the winner of the women's marathon in the last Olympics finished in 2h 26min. If she ran the same time in the men's marthon this would be good for 62nd place.

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]

Please don't attribute quotes to me that are not mine. I replied to this post, and went on to explain some of the reasons that the 62nd place in the marathon doesn't mean much.

[paddymcg21]

I think a lot of people are under estimating wome here. 10,000th for tennis i saw some1 say. That's ridiculous. I cant play tennis to save my life but i could probably practice and be ranked 10,000th in the world, and the top women tennis players would destroy me and spit on me when im on the floor exhausted. Also I agree that golf is quite an up and down sport, i play quite a lot and believe it or not i reckon id beat Tiger twice if I were to play him in 100 matches (yes im saying i could beat Tiger Woods) but golf is a game of consistency. Rankings are not compiled from 1 tournament, they are compiled over years and years and players who consistently make leaderboards and win titles are unsuprisingly on top of these Rankings.

[Klyka]

[ QUOTE ]
I think coming up with a ranking for the marathon would be easiest since we can just compare the times of the top male and female runners. With a quick google search I found that the winner of the women's marathon in the last Olympics finished in 2h 26min. If she ran the same time in the men's marthon this would be good for 62nd place.

As far as I know the men and women ran the same course in the Olympics. I also think it's a fair assumption that all (or a great majority) of the world's top marathoners were competing in that marathon. So I think it's pretty fair to say that in a unisex ranking of marathon runners the top woman would be somewhere around 60th place.

[/ QUOTE ]
Sorry about the long quote. I failed in getting the essence of it from a shorter quote.

However, this is terribly wrong. Women would do a lot worse than this. First, one of many reasons why you can't draw a conclusion based on this data: The mere fact that a majority of the top runners don't participate in the world championships. Usually the very top runners of every country do participate, but a lot of the worl-class but not world-champion-class runners don't show up.

As an example, I, myself, have a Swedish championship relay running bronze medal, and I'm nowhere near even top 100 in Sweden.

Anyway, lets look at some facts. The world record for women is 2:15:25. In 2006 so far (list updated 08/12/2006) 452 men has made a marathon faster than that (see link below).

Actually, 2:15:25 (womens world record) is not a very good result for men. You might win the Swedish national championship, but you have no chance internationally. There are so many men that perform way better than that on a regular basis that even the biggest athletics geek couldn't keep track of all of them.

Reference:
http://www.iaaf.org/statistics/toplists/...al=A/index.html

[Shandrax]

Men and women are equal, that's why they perform equally well in everything.....NOT!

[JaredL]

[ QUOTE ]
As far as I know the men and women ran the same course in the Olympics. I also think it's a fair assumption that all (or a great majority) of the world's top marathoners were competing in that marathon.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't know about the first, I think it's true as well, but the second assumption is bad. In all track and field events, they restrict the number from each country so the field is nowhere near all the top people. A better measure of this would be the major marathons:

NY:
Marilson Gomes dos Santos (29) PDAN, BRA time: 2:09:58.
...
Jelena Prokopcuka (30) NIKE, LAT time: 2:25:05

Her ranking was 32 overall. In 2004, she finished 24th overall with 2:24.

Boston:
Top dude: Robert Cheruiyot 2:07:14
Top Woman: Rita Jeptoo - 2:23:38
Her rank: 24 (note that spots 24,25,26 were all women of the top 50 9 were women)

London:
Top guy: Felix Limo - 2:06:39
Top gal: Deena Kastor - 2:19:37
Her spot: 28th overall. Next highest is 34th - 37th.

Chicago:
male: Robert Cheruiyot - 2:07:35
female: Berhane Adere - 2:20:42
her place overall: 47 (48 was other woman in top 50)

Berlin:
male: Haile Gebrselassie - 2:05:56
female: Gete Wami - 2:21:34
her spot: 16.

These are the top so the top marathoners in the world will run one or more of them. There isn't a ton of overlap, it's not normal to run all 5 of these, but there is some. The top females finish about 2:20 (it's going to vary a lot by course), which is about 5:30 per mile pace. If you put all the top people in a race just guessing the amount of overlap it looks like it would be 80-100.