99 YEARS OLD AND STILL HAS HIS FINGER ON THE PULSE...

IHAVE just been reading a piece of academic research published last year which confirms my suspicion that they have got it all wrong in Rio. It’s all to do with finger length.

Since the early 1950s, psychologists have loved to measure men’s fingers. The point is that the relative length of a chap’s fingers seems to depend on how much testosterone he was exposed to before birth in the womb: the more testosterone, the longer the ring finger grows. Since testosterone is the hormone associated with aggression and competitiveness, this idea has led to much research on what you can tell about a fellow from his finger length and many results seem to confirm that the relative length of index and ring fingers can be crucial in predicting an individual’s success in a competitive environment as well as in other factors relating to personality.

Men with short index fingers and long ring fingers, according to one recent study, tend to be nicer towards women, showing significantly more agreeable and less quarrelsome behaviour in their interactions.

Men with short index fingers have also been found to have more handsome faces, greater reproductive success and also to do better at a variety of sports.

Long index fingers, however, have been linked to better exam results, better verbal fluency and a lower propensity to become addicted to video games.

The latest research published in the journal Plos One, in a paper entitled “Can Persistence Hunting Signal Male Quality? A Test Considering Digit Ratio in Endurance Athletes”, looks for an association between finger-length ratio and half-marathon success as a way of exploring the role of testosterone in our evolution as hunter-gatherers.

The researchers report “Digit ratio was significantly and positively correlated with half-marathon time in males and females” though the significance was far less strong in females. In fact, for men, the ratio of index finger to ring-finger length was found to be a reasonably good predictor of time taken to run a halfmarathon.

Which brings me to the implications for Rio. I have long maintained that running distance races anti-clockwise unfairly favours athletes whose right legs are slightly longer than their left. When running anti-clockwise round the stadium, the right leg has to travel further than the left, so having a longer right leg must be an advantage.

We now know that having a long ring finger in comparison with one’s index finger can also convey an advantage. Weight-lifting, boxing and some other sports have different divisions for contestants of varying weights. Surely it would only be fair to measure each contestant’s fingers before an event, calculate the ratio of index to ring fingers and either assign them to different divisions or modify their times accordingly, much like handicapping in horse races.

Or perhaps the Paralympics could include Fingerlympic events for those abnormally gifted in the index finger department.