Lifelong Sport

Sport is an inherently unfair activity.  

It is especially unfair at the elite level.  

Whether it is socioeconomic unfairness, or genetic, or circumstantial there are many situations where unfairness exists.   In order for a sport to be an activity that people participate in and return week after week and year after year it must be inclusive. It has to be a place where people can belong, contribute to and identify with.  

Sports will never be able to retain players and develop their intrinsic motivation if we aren’t able to minimise the unfairness to an acceptable level.

In addition to inclusion, safety is a key segment of belonging and if a sport isn’t safe there will be very few people who are prepared develop into lifelong participants.  

Inclusion is a key topic for ensuring that people are retained in sport and this opinion piece talks to fairness in sport and how sports can practically be fair to transgendered athletes. It made me stop and think and bit deeper about the ways in which sport is inherently unfair.  

I remember images of Usain Bolt at the 2008 Olympics, he was head and shoulders above most of his competitors. Should he not of been allowed to compete because his height gave him an unfair advantage?  

It’s a very tricky one for each sport to work out what is fair and what is not and what the participants within that sport will have to accept if they wish to compete within it.  

Sport governing bodies also need to determine what is fair and safe for the non-elite segments of their sport as well as elite professional players.  
For example, non-contact sports may be happy with all people playing mixed sport. It’s hard to discriminate if you only have the one category that everyone fits into.  

But when I think about a sport I engage in regularly, SUP racing, I understand the argument for separate categories for male and female. I’m a beginner but I’m faster than most other amateur females I’ve raced against. Though I’m pretty sure professional female SUP races are faster than me. So, it’s not a question of safety but should we just all race together, is that fair?  
I personally like the solution of all people racing together but having an open category and separate prize divisions (female, masters, youth, para etc).  

The science is still catching up, so it is too early to determine just how much advantage males have over female athletes. The above solutions can work well in some sports to be inclusive and while recognising that there are some physical differences, and it can be fun to recognise the different category winners.  

What about the estimated 1 to 3% of the population that don’t exactly fit into male for female categories? Sports can’t afford to be excluding a single person, and they should be making all efforts to find ways to include everyone, so sports need to determine a mechanism on how they are going to categorise each individual or create extra categories and find ways to be inclusive without being unreasonably unfair.  

But how far do we go? Should we create different categories for people of different height as well? We already have weight categories in various sports. Personally, I’m never going to be a competitive high jumper but maybe if there was an under 1.8m category…

What about different categories for socioeconomic background of the country/city/town you were raised and live in?  

Ok, so I’ll admit I’m being a bit flippant with these two examples as a way to demonstrate that that sport is inherently unfair already and hopefully, we can take some of the heat out of the global debate of how to include trans athletes and get back to focusing on creating safe, welcoming and inclusive sporting environments.  

It’s very possible that sports may need to give up a little bit of fairness in order to be completely inclusive. Sports may need to differ their approach from elite to non-elite performers as well.

The ultimate question the global sporting community is trying to answer is: What unfairness is our sport prepared to live with and how are we going to be inclusive so that there are no people left on the sideline?