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westmeadboy

Listed below are comments made by westmeadboy between Sunday, 13th July 2008 and Sunday, 1st November 2009.

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Cycling's problematic pursuit of equality 07:18am on 01 Nov 2009 Hi Matt. Thanks very much for your response. I appreciate it.

In your response, replace "man" with "young adult" and "woman" with "child". Or maybe, use weight, or maybe height, or maybe disabilities. You get the same argument. My point is why use gender as your discriminator and not other factors? I would imagine a short man would have no chance against the best women high jumpers. So where's the level playing field there?

The olympic motto is "swifter, higher, stronger". You can take that to mean one of two things. One, the swiftest, fastest, strongest in the world. Two, the swiftest, fastest, strongest any individual can be given the limitations they currently have (catchy?). The first is covered by an "open" event. The second, requires people to only compete against themselves. No two people have the same limitations. We are all unique in this sense.

Both of these are intriguing in very different ways, but anything in between (e.g. discriminating on gender) doesn't make logical sense to me. Indeed, it starts to break down like in the huge mess surrounding Caster Semenya.

My final point is about women not being encouraged to take part in sport. I agree that's true for most countries and for most sports. But what about men not being encouraged to do synchronized swimming. Using the same argument we should insist on men's synchronized swimming.
Cycling's problematic pursuit of equality 3:30pm on 31 Oct 2009 @akaeyenstien - well said!

The problem is more in the labelling. The mens events need to be renamed "open" events where "theoretically" anyone, regardless of gender or whatever, can enter. Because these events do not discriminate they should be treated in a different way to those events that do discrimate (on things like gender, weight, age, disabilities etc).

The problem is that nearly all "open" events are labelled "mens" and so people expect them to be given the same privileges as "womens" events.

I don't know what the situation is like in cycling. But I would not expect an even number of medals if there are significantly more people (doing that sport day in day out) of one gender than another.
Sensory overload at the opening ceremony 11:33am on 12 Aug 2008 sandcastlejim - Great point there. Of the first 211 comments, 3 were removed which leaves 208 comments agreeing with Tom's opinion.

Have you actually read the comments?
Dose of long jump joy relieves Chambers headache 1:01pm on 13 Jul 2008 A lot has been said that he knew the BOA rules before he decided to cheat...

Of course he should be able to challenge it. Maybe he didnt agree with the rule before but do people really think he should have spoken out in the early days before he was caught!?

If the courts agree with the BOA then Chambers will not go to the Olympics, no problem.

If the courts disagree with the BOA, then Chambers will go and the BOA should be heavily criticised for bringing in an illegal ruling.

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