ANY OLYMPIC JUMP THAT WOMEN CAN DO, MEN CAN DO NEARLY 20% BETTER

Authors

Emily McClelland, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow
Peter Weyand, Southern Methodist UniversityFollow

Category

Athletics

Document Type

Paper

Abstract

Men clearly outperform women in events that depend on moving the body’s mass through space. However, the between-sex differences may vary with event specific mechanical demands. Existing observations suggest between-sex differences are relatively greater for jumping than running events. We tested this sytematically by comparing the top 50 performances for men and women in Olympic running (n=9) and three jumping (n=3) events over a recent 15-year period. We found that mean male–female difference across the three jumping events (17.8± 2.7%) was 1.5 times greater than the respective mean for the nine running events (11.2 ± 1.4%) examined. We conclude that male–female differences are substantially greater for all-out jumping versus running events.

Recommended Citation

McClelland, Emily and Weyand, Peter (2020) "ANY OLYMPIC JUMP THAT WOMEN CAN DO, MEN CAN DO NEARLY 20% BETTER," ISBS Proceedings Archive: Vol. 38: Iss. 1, Article 32.
Available at: https://commons.nmu.edu/isbs/vol38/iss1/32