Humans have long kept track of who’s the best—in the world, on this course, in this pool, in this incredibly niche event. Those benchmarks largely reflect what men have accomplished in sports. Men’s achievements have become the de facto measuring stick and framework to organize and understand athletic performance and progression, and women are judged by this standard too. Women have never been given the space to test their potential and to set their own benchmarks without the weight of expectations that have been tainted by what men have accomplished or misconceptions about women’s bodies.
What could women achieve if they were given a blank slate and nothing to compare themselves to? What if women were given the freedom to launch an entirely different athletic trajectory than men?
In the early 1990s, physiology professors Brian Whipp and Susan Ward looked at the progression of men’s and women’s world records in running events ranging from the 200 meters through the marathon. They found that men lowered their times at a fairly predictable rate across all events. Yet the rate of improvement for women,…
