David asked the other day if I thought the top ranked male high school tennis player could beat Martina Hingis, the current #1 woman tennis player. At first I said no, but then realized that Boris Becker won Wimbledon at 17 and Michael Chang won the French Open at 18, which means that the top ranked 18-year old in the country is likely to be a pretty good tennis player.

So how far down the rankings would you have to go before you found a man who would lose to Hingis? I thought about this a little more, and it occurred to me that there's some pretty good evidence on this score. Remember Bobby Riggs? He played Billie Jean King in 1973 and lost to her, but it was a close match. What's more, a year earlier he played a similar (but less hyped) match against Margaret Court, then ranked #1, and beat her 6-2, 6-1.

Now, Bobby Riggs was a former Wimbledon champion, but in 1973 he was 55 years old. The top ranked 55-year old today would probably have an overall world ranking around 5000 or so (the official ATP rankings only go to 1000) and would almost certainly lose to any NCAA Division 1 tennis player. By extension, he would also lose to the top 50 (or so) high school players, all of whom are destined to play Division 1 tennis in their freshmen years.

Here are a few more statistics to ponder about the relative athletic ability of men and women. In order to get a (hopefully) analogous comparison from another sport, I looked up some track and field records since these are timed and therefore completely objective. Here are the current records for the 100 meter dash:

Conclusion: In the 100 meter dash, a 16-year old boy is about as good as the world's fastest woman. Although this is not conclusive, it is at least suggestive that perhaps the best 16-year old tennis player is as good as Martina Hingis. This fits fairly well with the conclusion above since the best 16-year old tennis player is probably somewhere in the top 50 of 18-year olds.

David started this whole thing by mentioning that a frequent question in the sports world is, In which sport will a woman first do as well as a man? The general consensus is that the answer is long distance running, since women supposedly have better endurance than men in the first place, and strength is of less importance in these events. This got me curious about whether women are relatively closer to men in the long distance events than in sprints, so forthwith the following table of track and field records:

This is a fascinating result. Women actually do better, relatively speaking, in the shorter events, and the marathon is one of their worst distances compared to men. Now let's see how the world record has progressed over time in two different events:

Here's a graphical look at the same data, showing the progression of men's times and women's times over the past 50 years:

100 meter dash (seconds)		Marathon (seconds)

This data is hard to draw conclusions from. It's true that women have improved far more in the marathon than in the 100 meter dash, and they've closed a bigger gap as well. Since 1960 the percentage difference between men and women has gone down by about 50% in the 100 meters (13.0% to 6.61%) while it's gone down by nearly 80% in the marathon. Women are also closer in another sense: the current marathon champion is running at the same pace as the men's champion of 1950, while in the 100 meters the current champion is running at a 1920 pace. On the other hand, most of the marathon improvement came in the first 20 years that women competed in this event, and it's been pretty stagnant for the last 20 years.

Overall, I'd say that the evidence indicates that if there's anywhere that women will eventually compete equally with men, it's more likely to be in the sprints--where women have continued to improve significantly in the last 25 years--than in the distance events. In fact, the chart suggests that women might compete evenly with men in the 100 meter dash by around 2010 or 2020, while convergence in the marathon has been so slow since 1980 that I wouldn't bet on an even race until 2050, if ever. This is fairly inexplicable, and I wonder what the explanation is?

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