Monday, September 26, 2011

When is a record not a record?

If you are a female and you have run a marathon faster than any other woman in recorded history, you’ve set a world record. Right?


Wrong! For the time to be a world record, it needs to have been set in an all-woman competition, of which there are practically none. So Paula Radcliffe’s time of 2:15:25 hours is only a World Best, even though she set it fairly.


Which leads me to wonder. If sometime in the future, women marathon runners become faster than men, would the male world records be declared void, because they were set in “mixed events"?



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2 comments:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

Excellent point, Rayna. Doesn't seem fair.

Jemi Fraser said...

Does the same rule apply to men now? If not, that's nuts and totally unfair!

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