Feel free to Google it, little went out, but it is telling that women were frequently let in and then shut out of sports in the past.
It's not just testosterone. It's well noted that women, due to breasts, have a different layout of chest muscles. Which is why women have less upper body strength than similar men. It does seem to be evolutionary, prehistoric women had insane arm strength, and prehistoric men were more leg based (External Link/Members Only a guardian article that simplifies the research).
I do not think there is any misogyny in saying men are generally stronger than women, as in my last reply, the way we are built is such. That is the way genetics have led the body to build muscle and bones.
As for the grunting, I certainly notice it a lot in men's tennis, the same way I notice men grunting an awful lot more at the gym in the weights section. It may just be that you're used to hearing it, so you don't notice it as much.
I've Googled. I think you'd agree, the Runner's World article seems to provide a fair description of what happened, certainly in its tone as well as the detail. With the subsequent banning of the 800m race in future Olympics until it's reintroduction over 3 decades later, what that shows (and its no surprise whatsoever) is the level of discrimination against women at that time, and what a male dominate society expected of women at that time.
That distance had only just been introduced for women, there would've been very few women involved in competitive sport anyway compared with today, and training for women would've been even less enlightened than it was for men in those days. So of course the women would've looked exhausted at the end of 800m, and one or two of them may have fallen over. That's no different from today of course, you push yourself to your limit based on what you've already achieved, and if that's a very small pool of athletes who've only just started racing an event, with probably crap training and nutrition, then it'll all look a bit silly compared (unfairly) with the men in the same 800m event. And the thing about the 800m is that it's not really a distance event, it's in that grey area between a sprint and endurance event, very, very tough. Add all this together and you get a bunch of ill-prepared athletes with only a couple of them able to compete meaningfully, the others look like a ragtag bunch.
And the ignorant comments about women's reproductivity being affected (and in therefore losing their 'usefulness' in society as childbearers) are based in truth to some extent: women athletes who are pushed to their limits in training will frequently stop menstruating. To an unenlightened public of the time this would've been rather alarming! Of course, there's no long term damage and top female athletes of today (and then) will recover their
femininity (I use the term ironically, as an indicator of the gormless views of the time).
I can't find any evidence of women challenging men's times and therefore being seen as a threat to male ego, hence them being shunned from many sports.
Every so often (just as with men) a top female athlete can emerge who transcends all expectation and can actually challenge some top men. Please spend 20mins Googling Beryl Burton, she was amazing. But as I say, unless there's some genetic freakery going on, in top sport men will always out-strength and out-endure women (the endurance thing slightly less so, and that has a lot to do with the way women hold and use fat, as well as the way women have developed over 10s of 1000s of years within the male species).
It's no big deal, these days top women are just as amazing as men and (I think) are just as good to watch. That's because in virtually every sport there's now a large pool of female talent, and sports science for women (which is slightly different from men) is highly evolved.
But without drugs or genetic engineering (or maybe a few more thousands of years of evolution where the human species goes down a different path) women cannot compete meaningfully in the same races as men.
