Fri, Oct 01, 2004 page22

• Women set to overtake men in short sprints

  TAKE NOTE Women athletes' 100m times are falling faster than those of men and scientists mark 2156 as the year they'll leave their male counterparts in the dust

  • AFP
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  Make a note for your descendants: the 2156 Olympics will be the one to watch, for it may well mark the first time in human history that women will overtake men as the fastest runners on the planet.

  That's the confident prediction of British scientists who have plotted the times for the Olympic 100m since 1900 and say a century of ever-improving athletic prowess in this discipline is set to continue.

  They say the figures point to "remarkably strong linear trends:" a steady improvement by both men and women that runs like a straight line surging up a graph.

  In addition, women are improving faster than men, so a century and a half from now they may well be the world's fastest sprinters, the team say.

  The winner of the 100m women's sprint in Athens this year was Yulia Nesterenko of Belarus, with a time of 10.93 seconds. The men's winner was Justin Gatlin of the US, with 9.85 seconds.

  In the 2008 games, according to the computer model, the 2008 women's champion will come home in a range of 10.34-10.80 seconds, and the men's champion in a range of 9.586-9.874 seconds.

  "Should these trends continue, the projections will intersect at the 2156 Olympics, when -- for the first time ever -- the winning women's 100m sprint time of 8.079 seconds will be lower than that of the men's winning time of 8.098 seconds," they say.

  That scenario could happen as soon as the 2064 or as late as the 2788 games, they caution.

  The authors, led by Andrew Tatem of the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology, acknowledge that their computer model does not take into account "numerous confounding influen-ces" such as environmental variations, national boycotts and the potential use of illegal drugs.

  But they say they found no evidence to support popular assertions of a plateau -- that sprinters today are now close to reaching the upper limit of human capabilities.

  Nor, they say, do they find anything to back allegations that women improved quickly in the 1970s and 1980s because of doping and that this improvement began to sag as soon as rigorous drug testing was introduced.

  Overall, there has been a continuous, straight-line improvement by women ever since the first female 100m in 1928, they say. The 1928 100m final in Amsterdam was won by Elizabeth Robinson of the US in 12.20 seconds.

  Although the first modern Olympics were staged in Athens in 1896, the data for the males' 100m starts with the 1900 Games in Paris, won by Frank Jarvis of the US in 11.00 seconds.

  In addition, the scientists point out, only a tiny proportion of the world's female population has been allowed to compete in top athletics.

  If the net is cast wider so that better potential candidates come through, it is only logical that women's performance times should improve, they say.

  The study was to appear in yesterday's edition of Nature, the weekly British science journal.
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