TRAINING
Gender differences in Orienteering; Introduction
T
HERE are many examples of discrepancies in the physical demands of sporting events undertaken by men and women, even within sports. For example, in major tennis championships men play the best of 5 sets and women the best of 3, in golf women are able to use a tee that is slightly closer to the hole, and it was only in 1984 that the Olympic Games first included a women’s Marathon. In our own sport of Orienteering, a quick glance at the course details for an event will show that for all the age groups, barring perhaps the very youngest and oldest, women orienteers have shorter courses than their male counterparts. By way of example, in the 2007 Australian Championships, the women’s long courses were on average 23% shorter than the men’s. This article will attempt to evaluate whether the observed differences in course length can be justified on physiological basis. This can be a very emotive subject so I would like to establish a couple of points before becoming the target of irate letters. Firstly, in no way does the physiological evidence, or for that matter orienteering results suggest that men and women of the same age couldn’t do the same courses. But what the evidence does suggest is that there should be separate male and female categories, as is the case, and that perhaps by having different length courses for men and women of the same age, the planner is providing an event in which the relative physical demands are the same. To discuss this I’ll present an overview of some of the pertinent physiological differences between sportsmen and sportswomen. In doing so it is clearly evident that there is considerable variation within each gender, and considerable overlap. So, when making these physiological comparisons I’ll be comparing like with like, that is to say top W21E females with top M21E males, or top W40 females with top M40 males, and not elite W21E females with less fit M21 males, the former of whom are likely to have a superior level of fitness and performance than the later. Additionally, it is appreciated that orienteering isn’t just about physical fitness. Navigational skills and the mental sporting attributes of the individual are also of vital importance. But since I am not sufficiently familiar with any research that compares these factors in male and female orienteers, I will leave it to others who are better informed to comment on them. Additionally, I’m also cognisant of the strong influence of historical factors and society’s beliefs of what men and women are physically capable, but will again leave that to others for comment. 16 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER JUNE 2008
A comparison of the orienteering performance of Men and Women In endurance running events of between 15 and 150 minutes, the times recorded by the men are generally around 10% faster than those of the women, with a similar difference being evident from club to world standards. Therefore, given the endurance running nature of orienteering, we may expect to see a similar difference in orienteering performance. Indeed research seems to suggest that this is the case3, and to provide a recent example I conducted a very basic comparison using the results of the Australian 2007 Long Distance Championships. For this I took the top course for each age group, which provided 14 pairs of long courses from 12A to 75A, and the time taken by the first 3 men and first 3 women on each of these courses. I then calculated the average time taken for the top 3 men and top 3 women to complete their courses, and finally converted this into orienteering speed (m/sec) by dividing course distance (m) by time taken (sec). The results are illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Such a rough comparison is obviously prone to a few anomalies, but nevertheless seems to support the general assertions made above, with the women’s orienteering speed being approximately 80% of the men’s across all age groups. Incidentally, the failure to get a smooth decline in speed with age is probably due to the better older orienteers continuing to run in the younger and elite classes. There may also be a few course discrepancies in terms of climb and relative time spent in fast or slow terrain. But
