No. of Recommendations: 8
And you never answered my question - are you going to further break down categories based on hormones produced? Just how are you going to account for all of the variations out there. What if greater than 50% have some abnormality - do we even have a normal?
Not at the Olympics. At that level of competition, in many sports the winners are always going to be athletes that have some degree of genetic advantage over their competitors. None of them are "normal" compared to the population at large.
For example, Katy Ledecky is six feet tall (fewer than 0.5% of women are that tall in the U.S., fewer globally). My wife is only five foot two. Had my wife trained just as hard, with just as good of resources, for just as long as Katy Ledecky from birth, she never could have competed with her (assuming for this hypothetical that they had been contemporaries). Ledecky's genes make her better suited for competing at that level than my wife's.
Is that an "unfair advantage"? We obviously don't sort swimmers by height the way we do martial arts competitors by weight class. We just let the ones that have a genetic framework that gives them an edge take advantage of that genetic edge. We sort on some things (men vs. women) - and then within that framework, if you've got genes that make your body more optimal for your sport than other competitors, then that's perfectly fine.
For many (but certainly not all) sports, the most elite athletes will always have body types that are near-optimal for that sport - genetic advantages that "normies" will not have. We don't really express sympathy or support for the "normies" who have to swim against a Ledecky or a Phelps without having the advantages that their genes give them. All of the athletes at this level engaged in gobsmacking amounts of training and sacrifice and have enormous skill....but in many elite physical competitions, it doesn't matter how hard you work or train if you don't have the accompanying optimal (or near-optimal) body type for that sport.
