My Annual Make Track Segregated by Gender Thread

Okay but which is better? The mens or womens 1500m? Lets track and field gets an hour to broadcast on NBC two times a year. Would it be better to show the mens events or the womens events?

On a very cold and windy April day in 2014 I was at a meet at West Point. My son's school was there. The temperature was barely above freezing. The track was next to the Hudson. There was a great and unobstructed view of the river and absolutely nothing to break the wind which blew constantly.

There was one entrant in the women's 5,000 and two in the steeplechase. Other women's events had more entrants. I've always believed that meets are for competitors first and spectators second but I'd bet most everyone there that day would not have minded if the meet had been men only or women only and took half the time.

I do think this is an issue for nearly all track meets. Go to a multi team indoor meet, high school or college, and you can spend over an hour watching dozens of heats of the 200 and have a similar experience with the 50 yard dash. Again, I've never complained about this because I believe the meets are there to give people who want to compete a place to do it and if it's too long for you to watch nobody's keeping you from leaving.

But I doubt many people would mind if meets took less time, including a lot of competitors who sometimes have to wait for hours before their event is run or for hours after their event is run while the rest of their team competes. I do think my own college running experience was better than what today's athletes have. We ran mostly dual and tri meets, only men, at most two heats in each sprint or hurdle event, often just one, and were done in under two hours. The only time we spent the amount of time at a meet that today's athletes do was at our conference meet and even then the meet wasn't as long as today's ones are because again, it was only men competing.

I think the length of most track meets is a real problem. What other sports are there where competitions last an entire day? Or longer? (Maybe cricket? Does anyone know?) For years baseball fans complained about games taking too long and we're talking about something between three and four hours. Those two hour meets I ran in were pretty consistent with the length of most other sports competitions.

None of this is an attack on women's track. If there had been women's track when I was in school I think having their own meets, ones where they were done in two hours or so, would have made it a better experience for the women too.

1. This works with field and sprints. A 10,0000 at every meet won't work. Neither the fans or athletes want it. They wouldn't even want a 5000 or steeple at every meet. The meets can't be just as long. And if they were, they would lose fans, who don't have double the time to watch the events they want. I want to watch the mens 15 and the womens 400 hurdles. With your plan, I need to commit time on 2 days or 2 periods of time to do it. It won't work as well.

2. Stadium availability is a major factor in scheduling for these leagues and their attempts at expansion.

3. Fair argument. I don't have enough data to say 10 Athlos meets a year won't work. I think adapting some of the things they did like streaming on X and youtube would work even better for mixed gender meets.

4. I didn't mean to imply that. Fans are asked to watch twice as many meets in the same time span so the season won't be longer. Your solution is to add more events to the meets in case fans can't catch some diluting competiton, making the meets less exciting, and making athletes race more often resulting in fewer world class performances all so we can uphold some antiquated views on separation by gender. Women and men both want to compete at mixed gender meets except in rare circumstances where lots of money is on the table. Oh and your ideas require more prize money, more appearance fee money to support smaller audiences.

5. Road racing is inherently tied to track. The pool of road racers is the same as the pool of 1500-10k runners. Doing things differently just because they are on the track doesn't make sense. We saw that with women not racing farther than 3000 and eventually moved towards equity in competitive events at the elite level. You want to swing the pendulum back though.

6. What you are suggesting lowers the audience and might increase the cost of those track only streaming services to make up for the missing revenue or might increase the number of streaming services as fewer will be interested in streaming events that have lower audiences.

This isn't like basketball where events are too long to show men and women back to back.

Let me guess, your supposed college-aged daughters you bring up in every other thread who supposedly love the idea of dudes competing with them in their sports support this idea, so we should too!

Track meets and marathons are different. You aren't adding to the amount of time required to complete a marathon by having men and women running at the same time.

Its not that simple. You notion is that showing mens events followed by womens is akin to showing a mens quarter followed by a woman's - but it isn't. Part of the game is tiredness, a long break would completely change the sport. In track, events are completed, athletes don't run 2 laps of a 1500, take a break for the women to run 2 laps, then finish the race.

Basketball and football are more popular because of the subject matter, not the lack of having to watch the other gender.

If we took WNBA viewership numbers we might get the opposite of your argument - if men and women played back to back, viewable for the price of one ticket, the amount of fans at the wnba games would increase. Its almost like you arguing only men's sports are worth watching. You are free to watch cycling where men and women often compete at separate competitions if the women bore you or watch track meets after they air and skip what you aren't interested in. Your interests are far different than most fans' though which is why men and women have been competing in the same meets for decades now. You had the chance to watch a meet in the format you describe with Athlos in September which was heavily talked about on letsrun, on X, etc. and didn't even know about it...

You are wrong. Each male event is more entertaining than the corresponding female event. There is a limited amount of broadcasting which will ever be dedicated to track and field (certainly with its current popularity). By forcing a percentage of that viewing time to women (probably 50% or more at this point), you provide the audience with something less entertaining. This limits its popularity. Its that simple.

You can come up with all kinds of reasons why some particular situation might result in a more entertaining female event being shown relative to a boring male event, but on net, the mens is much much more entertaining. This is because the men are better athletes primarily but also that the viewing audience of sports is men. Men should not be forced to watch women do things. Men are not out there forcing women to watch more male reality stars or whatever the hell women watch.

Swimming does it the same way as track. Both of these are hugely popular sports in the US during the Olympics, and the fact that both males and females are competing obviously does not hurt viewership. It may in fact help.

Most non-Olympic swim and track meets follow the same format as the Olympics when it comes to males and females competing at the same time. But these have a tiny fraction of the viewership.

So we are somehow supposed to draw the conclusion that this lack of viewership is due to the male-female mix, which doesn't hurt Olympic viewership?

Perhaps the better conclusion is that the lack of viewership has nothing to do with male-female participation at all, but is rather due to the fact that IT IS NOT THE OLYMPICS.

Lenny,

Because World Athletics is the organization in charge of all things running, jumping, and throwing, we must care. Personally, I do not find mountain running competitive, but there are world championships in that discipline just as there are in Cross-Country, Road Racing, and Track & Field. Those linguistic terms have caused part of the problem in America. Athletics is the worldwide name of the sport of events inside the above mentioned running, jumping, and throwing competitions. Americans bastardized the word to include all physical sporting activity. Acceptance of the word by the NCAA, high school athletic departments, and even the Oakland A’s muddle the identity of our sport. Gridiron football players are simply ball players. Golfers play golf and swimmers swim. These participants, and race car drivers, downhill skiers, or anglers are not athletes. An athlete is a person who competes in any discipline of Athletics which is incorrectly called Track & Field in the USA.

The marathon and other Road Race distances are a part of Athletics. However events contested on the road have become a shell of a competitive event. Imagine the participation and fan base of Athletics (your Track & Field) if during the running boom administrators embraced guys (and later women) who chose to compete post collegiately on the roads instead of labeling them as “road whores” and discounting their achievements because they were not running on the track. Penn Relays and Kansas Relays have both featured marathons in the past. Getting marathon (or 5km or 10km) finishers into the stands of a college meet in todays climate could generate a new fan base. Why did Paris24 have a citizen’s marathon in the days following the Games?

Small time college track meets will often run men and women's 5s and 10s concurrently if one gender has a small field size. Big meets will almost never have fields where an event isn't filled. We are talking about the DL, Stanford, Oregon, the 10, night of 10ks, etc. meets here not a freezing meet in upstate new york.

There are shorter hs and college track meets too. I competed in a college 5k at an indoor meet that was only like 4 hours long this year. Some meets minimize the time it takes by holding distance events the night before, not having a full slate of events, etc. When I was in college I had to stick around all day after running my 10k first thing in the morning, but there were times I was glad I had teammates still around when the 5k was the penultimate event of the day. A lot of coaches don't make the whole team stick around all day at every meet too - so unless an athlete is doing like a 5k/10k double, its a coach imposed limitation.

Even if the format of low key college meets changed though, it wouldn't change the fact that having men and women race pro and semipro track events at the same meet on the same days is more exciting and what most fans and athletes want.

Close. I am saying that they are more interesting than women's sports. People can make up their own minds whether they view them equally.

You are the one with the strange interests. His point is that the overall popularity of the sport is hurt because of its ideological commitment to equality, something that you share. If we wish to suppress the popularity of track by bringing the women along for the ride, we can do that. Who it would hurt is the athletes at or near the top, who could be larger celebrities, make more money, etc.. if it was a male only league, but its really their grievance. If they have issues with how the sport is set up, they should be making the noise. Until they do, I dont care that much. Like you said, I dont have to watch the womens events if I dont want to.

You miss his point. Other sports like basketball also have men and women competing at the Olympics but basketball is also popular outside of the Olympics because their league is not hitched to the WNBA.

Lets say the female fans say the same. Now the advertiser has lost significant viewership of their ads. I don't know what to tell you if you think track & field should only entertain a subset of viewers with this mindset.

Then men are going to make significantly more money when a significant portion of the viewership doesn't tune in? Letsrun, which provides a safe haven for views like yours, doesn't represent track viewership at large. A few hundred sexists on letsrun vs tens of thousands of fans, hmm. If you think these kind of views on letsrun are mainstream, you could quickly be disabused of that notion by discussing the topic with at your local running club.

The fans did make noise when they had issue about how the sport is set up - there was a long struggle to allow women to compete - which is why the sport is not men's only. I don't think regression to satisfy some antiquarian set of values is good for the sport. Just watch the event you are interested in and stop demanding the sport cater to only a few like you.

I know we're kind of talking about different things and pro track is not the same as your typical high school or college meet. And I know that pro meets are designed to fit into a TV "window," much shorter than a high school or college meet.

But I don't believe we can say conclusively that pro meets would be more or less popular if they were men only or women only. Once women's pro track came along meets have been coed with very few exceptions, few enough that there's not really a large enough sample size to draw conclusions.

When I look at the overall sporting world I don't see sports where men and women are competing at the same time in the same event and I wonder why track does. The popular sport where you do have men and women competing simultaneously in the same events is tennis. It seems to work there, though differently than it's done in track. I'm not sure what I make of the OP's idea but I think it's worth consideration.

Yea, I could make an entirely different thread about the “Olympic-ness” of athletics being a detriment.

long story short in that respect: the Olympics should not be the highest exposure for your sport. Furthermore, you should not try to model your sport the other 47 months of a four-year cycle to try resemble the Olympics in format. The Olympics are a novelty.

You're mistaking correlation for causation. Running is an individual sport. Outwith temporary interest in generational talents, there just isn't the same pulling power of team sports like basketball and football. A Boston Celtics fan will show up to two games 10 years apart with little regard for who is actually playing, there is a tribal attachment. For running, we can only rely on individual stars. Cutting that roster of individuals in half as you propose can only do damage to individual meets. Tennis is significantly more popular than running and has women and men competing during the same day's televised events- would you propose they ditch their model too?

As for the other boring sexist guy acting like women's running is inferior and we all secretly dislike it, I'm a man and the most invested I ever got in a track race ever was watching Laura Muir get silver at the Tokyo Olympics. I'm sure that makes you angry but not everybody thinks like you.

I'm not sure what your point is. A bunch of non fans aren't going to suddenly become fans of track because they don't have to watch women compete. There are 2 different audiences here. Track has a significantly higher participation rate among women than basketball. Only in an echo chamber like letsrun could men's only track be seen as what the sports needs. These gender segregated track meets would not be analagous to the nba and wnba because the audience for track is more egalitarian by gender, more world wide, more educated, and more progressive. Only in the letsrun conspiracy theory poster conservative news only viewer bubble of track fans - which doesn't exist offline mind you - would anyone even think this idea is marketable. This is why it would be better for you to just watch only the events that interest you rather than demand the rest of the world change to suit some views that haven't been in vogue in the west in 50+ years.