Level the playing field

Women athletes have made an awful lot of progress in the past few decades. They routinely run marathons, which were once considered far too challenging for such fragile creatures, and compete over the same distances as men in track and field.

But there are still some pockets of resistance. As the Star’s Kerry Gillespie reported this past week, female cross-country runners (they run courses over hill and dale on natural terrain) are still being discriminated against as too frail to run the longer distances male runners do in competitions. Sound ludicrous in 2015? It is. And it needs to change. “It’s based on old perspectives that women couldn’t do as much as men,” says exercise physiologist Greg Wells. “But there is absolutely no reason why they should be running different distances.”

Still, at the Canadian championships in Kingston, Ont., today, senior women will run only eight kilometres to the men’s 10. That sends out a message that women are weaker.

Sadly, though, it’s the message Toronto public and Catholic schools, perhaps unwittingly, are sending to young girls based on race lengths established by the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations. Up to Grades 7 and 8, boys and girls run the same distances in cross-country. But in Grade 9 boys run five kilometres while girls run three. The discrepancy gets worse at universities, where men run 10 kilometres and women run only six.

There is hope. The International Association of Athletic Federations has just set 10 kilometres for senior women and men (athletes aged 20 to 34) at world races, instead of the old eight and 12. But that won’t start until 2017 when the next World Cross is held. And bizarrely, junior women will still run six kilometres while junior men will run eight.

Hopefully by that time athletic governing bodies in Ontario and Canada will have gotten the message that girls can run as far as boys. It’s long overdue.