Today the men\u2019s record is faster than the women\u2019s record, but by less than 10 minutes\u2026 a much smaller difference than the one hour difference that we saw when women were first allowed to compete.\u00a0 The rate at which they’ve been catching up with men has slowed though. Still, who knows how fast they\u2019d be running if they hadn\u2019t been excluded from competing for the 64 years between 1908 and 1972. \u00a0In any case, the quickening of both men’s and women’s times over the years shows just how contingent athletic performance can be.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We often think of athletic ability as innate, something people are born with. \u00a0In fact, athletic performance is a combination of (at the very least) ability and opportunity. Case in point: the marathon. The first Olympic marathon occurred in\u00a01896. A Grecian named Spyridon\u00a0Louis won that race with a speed of two hours, 58 minutes, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2102,8092,253,108],"class_list":["post-40573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-sports","tag-history","tag-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40573"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58576,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40573\/revisions\/58576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2011\/10\/1.gif\" "\\"\\"")
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