Is Australia’s 2021 Olympic Games athletics team representative of fair World Athletics gender qualification standards?

If we compare qualification standards against the 25th best world performance from 2016 to 2018, there is little difference between the men and women in 16 of the 19 individual events with less than 1% separating them. In 12 of the events there was only a maximum 0.5% difference. 

Six of the 19 events had a tougher standard for the women, and nine had a slightly tougher standard for men. 

The 5000m is the only event where there appears to be a significant difference that favours the females, yet that event did not prevent the maximum three qualifiers for both genders.

The same is true when comparing qualification standards against the 10th ranked global athlete from 2016 to 2018, although the difference between the genders is slightly above 1% in more events.

While not all selected Australians met the qualifying standard listed in the table since 2019 (five males and eight females), most of Australia’s selected athletes did indeed qualify or were very close to the listed qualifying standard.

The overall tough criteria also means that Australia has no male competitor in six of the individual events, while there are no females in five events.

In accordance to the information presented in the above table, Australia’s track and field team is indeed selected on a fair basis.

While this article cannot speak for the other OG sports, it does show that the criteria for selecting men and women for Australia’s athletics team is quite fair with similar qualifying standards for both men and women.

It simply does not matter if any Australian team has a higher proportion of females if they that are the ones that most often meet the qualifying standard.

After all, there is nothing like a bit of competition.