Laurel Hubbard debuted in the female category in 2017, and posted a new world record in the W35/super heavyweight category at the IWF Masters that same year.
For this performance, she was named the best lifter in the entire female competition (all ages and weight categories).
Her lift total of 280 kg absolutely smashed her category competitors.
It wouldn’t have been out of place in the corresponding male category.
In fact, Hubbard’s 2017 lift was entirely routine over ten years of the male competition, and a huge outlier in the female competition over the same ten years.
For those asking, this first (incomplete) part of the story shows how, controlled for age, Hubbard is lifting well outside female range.
The second part is, of course, that Hubbard has earned an Olympic spot, despite her advanced age.
There will be more charts...
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Why male advantage in sport is not a social construct: height.
Height is a key difference between males and females. What is nature v nurture? What does that mean for sport?
Bigger skeletons are most obviously driven by longer bone growth. Key bones like those in your thigh (“long bones”) grow from their end to get longer, making you taller.
The site of bone lengthening is called the “epiphyseal plate” or “growth plate”. Here, cells divide/enlarge, making new tissue that pushes the bone ends apart. This tissue calcifies and is replaced by bone, leading to lengthwise growth.
Let’s set a concrete example: the 10 second barrier (100m sprint).
Wiki - allowing for small errors - tells me that around 200 male sprinters have broken it. We know, of course, that no female sprinter has been close (Flo Jo record 10.49s).
For the following, I’m going to ignore the premise that humans might be close to biomechanical limits over a 100m sprint. It’s just an illustration.
If we follow world record progressions, we see trends (not just in sprinting, the graph below is from a swimming event).
As the latest on Olympic boxer Imane Khelif is reported, a diagnosis of 5ARD is almost certain. I and others first raised the likelihood of this DSD a few months ago.
Understanding how the developmental biology of DSDs interacts with sports categorisation is crucial.
I spoke about this with Andrew Gold during the competition:
And I recently gave a talk at a meeting, on DSDs, male advantage and sports categorisation. I will add some slides below.
In August, we were invited by the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports @WileyGlobal to make an argument for screening for eligibility into the female category.
We proposed a cheek swab screen of DNA, performed before an athlete is thrust into the spotlight, with follow up care in the case of unexpected results.
@WileyGlobal This month, two responses to this editorial have been published side-by-side.