Deer Runner wrote:
more info needed wrote:
While you are in the mood to make up statics, go ahead and tell us what is the percentage of people that classify to use a race chair. Or the percentage of the population that requires a day chair for everyday mobility. And I'll not even ask you to consider the depth of competition when considering ble-bodied 30-minute 5k runners and 5-hour marathon finishers.
I don’t understand the anger here. It’s just math. Far more people run than ride wheelchairs, hence the relative competition in running is more difficult. It is much more difficult to be a successful basketball player in the US than soccer player, but the reverse is true in England.
Im pretty sure that the objections of "more info needed" were:
1) a belief that "not surprising at all" made up the "1 or 2%" figure
2) wheel chair racing almost certainly has way less than 1% of the number of participants, but again, real figures should probably be used, or no numbers should be used at all.
I doubt "more info needed" was suggesting that able-bodied sport and wheel chair sport are equally competitive.
So here is a tiny bit of an attempt to get a better guess, data from the US census bureau:
- 0.6% of US population is in a wheelchair
- less than 0.1% of the population under 18 is in a wheelchair.
Assuming that the best wheelchair racers will be relatively young, say under 35, it is safe to guess that the number of wheelchair users under 35 is closer to 0.1% of the population than to 0.6% of the population, maybe guess splitting the difference at 0.3%.
Assuming equal interest among the able bodied and wheelchair populations, 0.3% as competitive migjt be a reasonable estimation.
In the early days of the olympics, participation was so small that you saw individuals medal in very different sorts of events, akin to a wheelchair athlete medalling in the 100m up to marathon events.