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Jamaican sprinter Veronica Campbell-Brown has come out to defend the performance of female athletes in recent Olympics claiming that they suffer from the world record breaking successes of their male counterparts.
Brown was speaking to BBC Sport and claimed that while men take the limelight for their world record breaking achievements women are left in the shadows, regardless of any successes they achieve.
The Jamaican sprinter won gold in the 200m at the Beijing Olympics with a time of 21.74 but was still 0.4 seconds slower than the record set by Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988. Several of the women’s track and field world records were set in the eighties and have not been broken since, leading many to suspect that they may have been illegally achieved through the use of performance enhancing drugs.
There is no evidence to prove that drugs were used to set any of these records but while the male athletes, such as Usain Bolt, continue to set the athletics world alight it does beg the question why women have struggled to break world records set over twenty years ago?
In favour of the drugs theory there have been significant advancements in areas such as training facilities, training programmes and sport science as well as the treatment and prevention of injuries so it is plausible to suggest that if the male athlete's have progressed so regularly then it should have been the same for female athletes. There is also no denying the fact that there has been no better time to take up a career in athletics, particularly with the increased funding compared to twenty years ago.
However it is unfair to assume or even speculate that just because the modern crop of female athletes have not been breaking records those who set them must have been taking performance enhancing drugs. It is just as plausible to suggest that the current crop of female athletes are simply not as good as their predecessors and lack the mental strength to break world records.
Regardless of the reasons behind this and barring a few exceptional female athletes, such as Pamela Jelimo and Yelena Isinbayeva, women’s athletics does seem to be experiencing a stagnant period and there is certainly room for three or four female athletes to take track and field by storm.
 | Author: | The Sports Nut (The Sports Nut's profile, The Sports Nut's blog) |
 | Posted On: | Fri, 2008-09-26 17:33 |
 | Tags: | sprinting, running, field events, distance running, women, exercise and fitness |
 | Comments: | 0 comments, go to comments |
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