SEX, SCIENCE AND SPONSORS
Samdive is too kind - what I actually said is that my personal performance goal in freediving is "always to be better than the worst girl", which is, if anything, rather more provocative in certain quarters.
This is, indeed, my personal performance goal. I think it is a fine one, a motivating one, and one which will soon be beyond my reach and will remain so until that day ( one which will be celebrated in those same certain quarters, I'm sure) when I take my leave of this world.
My goal, thus stated, is a frank acknowledgement that the most likely state of affairs now, and in the years to come, is that all of the female competitors will surpass me. It is, after all, a salute to all of the splendid competitors on the scene today. At 52 years of age ( and the astonishing abilities of my dear friends Annabel, Aharon and Bill notwithstanding ) I am simply waving a fond farewell to the field as it leaves me behind. Perhaps, I think wistfully to myself, if I work at it I'll be able at least to keep the stragglers in view, and wouldn't it be a fine thing if on occasion I weren't the one at the very bottom of the results list ?
Some may take offense at the word "girl". This sensibility seems to be something left over from the early days of what was then called the "Women's Liberation" movement, circa 1965. I remember it well. I think, though, that we can all relax a bit now and enjoy one another's company. Boy and girls, after all, are youthful, fit, exuberant, tireless and graceful. Men and women, well, may be those things but are sometimes creased, decrepit, depressed, consumed and clumsy. Look at me, for example. I'd rather be thought of as one of the "boys" than as one of the men. When it comes to athletes, dancers, acrobats, and entertainers, it seems to me that "boy" and "girl" are the terms in general use inside those professions. Can we be at peace with this ?
Others take offense at the implication that the bottom of the results list will always be a female preserve. Several contributors to this forum have described a perfected world in which sex does not predict performance, an idealization with which this implication is, of course, inconsistent.
Eric Fattah has explained, and no doubt can be induced to explain again, the numerous well-documented differences between the population means (male and female) of variables
thought to determine athletic performance, and why this makes it likely that male athletes will continue to dominate the top of the lists in almost all sports, as currently configured, for the foreseeable future.
Males are, on the average, bigger/stronger/faster/longer/higher/deeper/etc. and etc. than are females. What of it ? This is biology, not sociology or politics.
Where things like politics and culture come into it is in the way we attach VALUES to performance.
It is by no means clear that genes compel us to most highly value the absolute depth to which an athlete dives over the grace with which she dives. That seems to me to be a cultural artifact rather than a genetic imperative. While I have great difficulty imagining a future world in which women hold the absolute world records for constant ballast, static and dynamic, I am easily able to imagine a world in which new freediving disciplines, emphasizing grace, finesse and other esthetic values are totally dominated by the girls. Think of gymnastics.
Which brings us to sponsorship. Samdive's characterization of the sponsorship market viz. the boys and the girls is quite accurate. I spend a lot of time, in the water and in the living room, with top female freedivers ( and windsurfers, and pros in a few other sports as well) and am well acquainted with this situation.
My view is that in a free market, supply finds demand. Sponsors are people who want to purchase attention to their products or services. They do this by attracting attention with athletic spectacle. Greed makes people very, very good at figuring out how to get the most bang for the buck, and I am confident that athletics sponsors are quite right when they place their bets on male athletes - male athletes doing things males are good at attract more attention than do female athletes doing things males are good at. Experiments with asserting government control over the flow of money into sport, aimed at forcing an arbitrarily-defined "equality" of outcomes by sex ( e.g, the infamous Title IX experiment in the USA) have all failed miserably.
The strategy I've proposed is an entrepeneurial effort to develop events that emphasize and leverage the things in which female performers excel. I'm certain that this can be done.
Gymnastics, again, took a step down this conceptual road. There were probably few people on this planet who did not know who Nadia was in her heyday, but who could have named the top male gymnast ?
In our world, no-limits has been probing in this direction. Tanya, Mandy and Audrey were building a media space dominated by women, and had that awful day (October 12, 2002, lest anyone forget) turned out differently, I think we'd have been well on the way to the Girl Power regime of dreams. No-limits may yet
take us there, but there are problems there which numerous forum contributors have commented on most astutely and at great length.
Samdive ought to work on this idea - she, for example, may not be the deepest or longest diver in the tank, but in a recent session at HMS Dolphin her power and style left all of the men in her dust. If there were a freestyle discipline in our sport, I have little doubt that a) it would be dominated by the girls, like Samdive, and that b) the media and the general public would be more interested in this discipline than in CB, static, dynamic or NL. I know I would be. Let's make this happen.
Got to go - back to the Stairmaster. Cyprus approaches, and that worst girl is now only a tiny dot on the distant horizon. Lots of catching up to do. It is quite hopeless, of course, but the value is in the trying. God willing, I'll be there next year, too, and the year after and the year after until I'm no longer able to fill out the application or until the committee rejects it.
Cheers.
Paul Kotik
Plantation, FL USA
