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Mar 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The next session at @SloanSportsConf is on Title IX, which, according to the programme, is “a law rooted in equal opportunity and prohibiting discrimination based on *sex*”. Perhaps the panel will explain when and how this changed, to the detriment of Women’s sport…
The Massachusetts AG just said “this law was significant because it was the first to ban discrimination based on sex”. Everyone KNOWS it’s based on sex. This is why conflating sex with gender is a necessary tactic to discriminate against women. It breaks the law otherwise
Dear panel: in addition to social and economic challenges faced by women in sport, is there anything biological that might have led to the law specifying “SEX” as the basis for protection? Could you commit to some thoughts on what you’re protecting against? #poweroftitleix
The US Secretary of Education just said that the same should be true for the support of trans women, namely that we should all rally around and support TW inclusion in women’s sport, and not just leave it to girls and women to support. Do these leaders live in lead-lined bunkers?

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Ross Tucker Profile picture
Feb 18
Here are the 50-yard splits from the medalists in the women’s 500-yard freestyle final at the Ivy League champs. A 15-year old pool record was broken. Pacing strategy 101: Which of these patterns suggests a significant reserve capacity and likely underperformance?
If you said, gold, you’d be right. In events lasting longer than about 3 min, negative pacing strategies and the characteristic endspurt (where we speed up at the end) are suggestive of someone who has maintained a reserve, producing a controlled effort below max for the race
A larger endspurt and a greater negative split reveal that a greater reserve was held. In effect, it speaks to how much “was in the tank" at the end. It’s produced when we tap into a reserve. Typically, max or optimal performances are achieved with slight negative or even splits
Read 5 tweets
Ross Tucker Profile picture
Feb 11
So RUSADA lifted the provisional suspension after a positive test for medication used to treat angina. In a 15-year old. Who’d have thought that RUSADA, who oversee anti-doping for “Not Russia” (because of doping) might do such a thing? Can’t wait to hear what comes out at CAS.
The question is how does a 15-year old get hold of and use trimetazidine? Will they claim contamination at a pharmacy? Wrongly prescribed drug by a doctor? If ever there’s a case to throw everything at the entourage, this might be it. Or…they can “sacrifice" the teenager
From @seaningle, a time line of the doping controversy.Most important in the reasoned decision is why RUSADA’s disciplinary committee overturned their own provisional suspension? Is there convincing evidence of accidental ingestion (contamination), maybe doctor accepted fault etc
Read 4 tweets
Ross Tucker Profile picture
Feb 2
Much will depend on how they apply this clause. One reading of it, as per Jon below, is that TW will have to provide evidence of NO advantage, which, *if* the scientific evidence is applied honestly, would not be possible, so it would achieve the appropriate protection of F sport
An alternative approach will be if the scientific evidence showing retained advantages is relegated to “part of a bigger picture”, which also ignores fundamental biology, & instead they try to use a case by case approach, which would be murky and likely NOT achieve fairness.
That’s because cases would be torn between “championing…inclusivity while…also fervently supporting…equity” (this quote is in the statement). The next step from there is to weight the results & outcomes ahead of process and science, which is poor misleading thinking, and would
Read 4 tweets
Ross Tucker Profile picture
Jan 21
I want to try to explain something about testosterone and performance, since it has become the ‘fixation’ and the ‘the fix’ for inclusion policies for both DSD and trans athletes. So here’s a thread to ‘debunk’ and explain why T level, per se, is not quite the right place to look
First, testosterone is clearly a significant driver of the biological, and hence performance, differences between M and F. Nobody should dispute that (yet they do - more on this later). What sport has done, understandably, is to try to capitalise on this “cause-effect” concept to
…resolve the tension that exists between self ID and entry into the closed women’s category. Recall that women’s sport exists to exclude people who do not experience androgenisation during puberty and development. So sport said “If we can reverse the T levels, we can achieve...
Read 23 tweets
Ross Tucker Profile picture
Jan 20
Michael Phelps, whose biological traits fall within norms for the men he swam against, recognises advantages of trans swimmers who retain many biological male traits

Remember. Advantages DO matter if they cross category boundaries. Sport does not exist to celebrate testosterone
Just like boxing does not exist to reward size/mass Paralympics do not exist to reward the absence of disability, and youth sport does not exist to reward maturation. We separate groups into categories/classes so that we can reward what is meaningful, unconfounded by what is not
This is, of course, the reason that we can celebrate Phelps for exceptional performances. And why we celebrate Ledecky for the same reason, even though if directly matched, only one would be rewarded. Hence, we ‘remove’ the effect of testosterone with a category that excludes it
Read 4 tweets
Ross Tucker Profile picture
Dec 28, 2021
Interesting thing about this argument (which tries to turn the desire to protect women’s sport into some kind of disparagement of women) is the irony that it’s only a CLEAR separation of the sexes that allows us to celebrate athletic achievements of women. It’s only when we (1/
…blur the lines and try to deny biological realities that we invite direct comparisons between male and female performance (which, in a further irony, is the premise for the necessary separation!) that women’s sport is undermined. For instance, nobody should have an issue (2/)
…celebrating a Wimbledon title for Williams as equal to that or Federer, or the 100m gold to Thompson as equal to that of Bolt. They exist so distinct from one another that they carry the same weight, one is not lesser. So categories in fact PROTECT the merits of a performance
Read 4 tweets

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