I was initially judging it on the angle they hit the water. 3 of them weren't great, 1 was great and 1 was yet to hit the water so i couldn't judge on skill.
I understand that, and I'm saying that the angle is the result of physics. Judging it by the angle in that snapshot, and simply saying "three of them aren't very good" is erroneous. The angle at which a swimmer hits the water has a high degree of variance, based on their height and their strength. I used to swim competitively, and I'm very short. While the ideal is to enter the water close to flat, that's not always possible for a short person - distance covered in air ends up having a greater effect on time than angle does. If I launch to enter close to flat, I end up in the water much sooner than taller competitors. My best times occurred when I launched at a higher angle, which puts my entry to water further away from the wall - that maximized my distance out of water. It also resulted in me entering the water at a steeper angle rather than flatter, but... I'm female and bendier than males in general, so flexing on entry to avoid a dive was pretty easy to accomplish.
At the end of the day, Thomas is male, and is also quite tall at 6'1". Thomas has the strength to launch at a low angle and still massively exceed the distance obtainable by their female opponents. That observation has nothing to do with skill, it's merely physics
As you mentioned the physics aspect and if it's that what concerns you, how would you feel if a female in the race was taller and stronger than all the rest with a wider parabolic arc? or if it was a male that was shorter with a shorter parabolic arc?
There's always going to be some variation, and some competitors are always going to have a natural advantage. But there's also pretty consistent means and variances for those distributions. Males are consistently enough taller and stronger for that to skew the competition in a material fashion. And even a male with an average female height of around 5'5" will be *stronger* and thus able to launch further.
The physical differences between males and females are consistent enough, and well established enough, that dividing sports on the basis of sex is a reasonable and appropriate thing to do. Just as it's reasonable and appropriate to divide competitions by age because there's a consistent difference between adults and children.
My opinion is that males shouldn't be in female sports as on average there's an unfair advantage in most of them.
I wish all womans and mans public spaces would be changed to male and female instead as that solves a lot of the legal conundrums.. they should change every instance of 'woman' and 'man' to male and female, would solve so much.
Meh. I get where you're going, and from a hypothetical position you're not wrong. But from experience over the last decade, it won't fix as much as you think it will, and I'm not particularly pleased about having to relinquish the word that represents a female of the human species just to appease some males who want to redefine everything so they can semantically justify boundary violations. A female horse is a mare, a female bovine is a cow, a female deer is a doe, a female chicken is a hen, a female human is...
a woman. I feel like humans should be allowed to retain such nomenclature.
Plus, there are so many people out there who simply won't let "female" stop them. There are a lot of people heavily invested in asserting that sex is a spectrum, or that sex is a social convention, or that you can't ever actually tell someone's sex, or that biological sex is super complex and brain feelings are part of sex so a male with "girly feels" is actually a female. Changing the name won't actually solve the problem, unfortunately.
I will however treat everyone as the gender they want to be, as I think gender is a social construct and as long you don't start arguing against reality I'm happy for you. Though I don't know why people let society dictate who they want to be in first place.
100% with you on this.