Why Are Some Sports Divided and Others Are Not?

Surely it's down to skill and talent, not your sex

On the news this morning was a piece about trying to get more girls into sports.

My eldest daughter loves sports, she has been riding horses since she could sit up, is on the school netball team and has just started doing athletics.

I am grateful for her being into sport as there isn’t anything better for teenagers to get them off their phones, into the fresh air and boost their confidence.

Being around horses all her life has helped especially as we own horses she has to take care of them as well as the riding and it gives her some responsibility.

My daughter has competed, mainly in show jumping, pony club and some dressage and there are mostly other girls competing against her, you see the odd boy here and there.

In equestrian sports women and men compete alongside each other.

I’m not sure why this is and speaking to my sport-obsessed husband he doesn’t know either.

In theory, according to other sports men should be stronger and therefore should have better control of a tonne of unpredictable animal but women are lighter so less for the horse to carry.

Is it because they are both on horses so the sex of the rider doesn’t matter?

My husband knows so much about sports, he played semi-professional football when he was younger and is a devout Liverpool fan, he also loves Formula One racing but he knows almost everything there is to know about most sports.

It is actually quite disturbing how much he knows especially when he can’t remember what year his daughter is in at school but he will know what team won the FA Cup in whatever year and can name the whole team!

So I was interested to hear that he agrees that many sports don’t need to be segregated.

Motor racing is one, surely both sexes would be in a similar car that weighed the same, so it would be down to the skill of the driver.

A quick Google shows me examples of sports that both men and women could play against each other as it shouldn’t make any difference, golf, sailing, tennis, badminton, ice skating, darts and there were a few others.

I get that in some sports say athletics for example and contact sports as quite often there is often a sizeable weight difference.

I am not saying that women and men should be allowed to compete together equally it was just an observation as my daughter would like to try football but her school only allows boys to play in the school team although she has done rugby in PE and hated it.

At sports day last year, she said she ran faster than most of the boys in her year and because riding a horse takes a lot of strength she is much stronger than the boys in her class, so she tells me!

In the UK there has been a revival of a TV show called Gladiators.

My husband and I have been watching it for nostalgic reasons and the sport as my husband loves it.

After watching the first episode I encouraged my teenager to watch it as the female gladiators are far from the very slender girls that competed all those years ago.

These girls are incredible, so strong with attitudes to match, my teenager is not super skinny but she is strong because of all the sports she does and I wanted to show her that girls can be strong and still look stunning.

But again women and men compete separately.

The male gladiators are ridiculous and tower over the male competitors even the ones that look like they work out.

Whereas the females are more evenly matched and it is interesting to see how both the men and the women compete, some of the female gladiators can lift as much as the men which I think is brilliant!

I would rather my daughter aspired to look like one of these power-lifting, rugby-playing women, concentrating on being strong rather than looking good.

I am also proud to say that my child competes in a sport where men and women are equal and maybe in the not-to-distant future other sports will follow suit.

Thank you for reading :)