My current take about sports segregation is that it should emerge organically. As in, if a homogeneous group has so much advantage that no outsider can compete with them, the group should be then relegated to their own category or class. While there diversity, there's no reason to discriminate against any kind of people.

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 6 points 1 week ago (9 children)

In my opinion, sports segregation stems naturally from obsessive competition. Everybody is born differently, and some people will have an unfair advantage over others due to their natural genetics. The problem isn't how to have fair competition because that's impossible. The problem is with competition itself. Maybe people should just accept that the end goal is for people to have fun, and just let everyone in and whatever happen.

[–] Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Separation by height & weight/BMI and skill makes the most sense, they're the most reliable predictors of comparable athletic performance regardless of gender

[–] Crotaro@beehaw.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think we could even be more specific in the sports seperation and let each sport figure out specific physical qualities to group their competitors into. Let me try an example: Runners could be grouped by leg and arm to body ratio (I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that long-legged and -armed people have an inherent advantage in running on flat ground) Probably the same for swimmers....and spear throwing...okay, fuck, maybe I don't know enough about sports to find a differing example or there's no olympic sport where small and slender people have a natural advantage over talls. Maybe archery? I could imagine that a beefy upper body is more important in archery than having long arms (or at least more important than having long legs)?

I wanted to continue with "have these physical qualities as baseline groupings and allow individuals who over- or underperform despite their physicality jump into a higher/lower grouping", which I still think is a good idea and I'm not sure if that isn't already a thing. I'm not a sports people, as you may gather by reading this

[–] Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

I'm not any more qualified than you are but that sounds good to me, we can hire some sports scientists and make them figure it out

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