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Can the answer be drug testing?
Seiler and Sailer then focus on the factor which they believe is most responsible for the 'decline of female athletes' - drug testing! As they point out, random, surprise drug checks were introduced into the world of track and field in 1989, 'at least partly in response to the embarrassment of the Ben Johnson case in the 1988 Olympics'. Drug use, say Seiler and Sailer, benefits females more than males; therefore its supposed abolition as a result or random testing has hurt elite female performances far more than those of their male counterparts.

Critics of their contention can point out that drug testing actually took place as far back as the 1964 Olympic games. That being true, why should the current drug-testing strategies have such a powerful, recent effect on the gender gap? Seiler and Sailer reply that the early tests lacked enough sensitivity to truly detect 'dopers', and also point out that tests were usually only associated with major events, allowing athletes to train throughout most of the year under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs and then 'get clean' in time for a big competition.

To summarize, they believe that the initial narrowing - and the current widening - of the gender gap 'is largely a consequence of the rise and fall in the illegal use of performance-enhancing drugs from the 60s to the 90s'. To put it in a nutshell, as female athletes began using steroids, they became more like men and performed accordingly. As soon as drug testing stopped such doping, the women became less like men and their performances slumped. Cocaine and brandy cocktails
Are Seiler and Sailer right? Well, it's important to bear in mind that the use of drugs to enhance physical performance is not such a new thing. The ancient Greeks used stimulants before and during athletic competitions, and it's believed that the Aztecs used a cactus-based stimulant to improve distance-running capacity. Competitive swimmers in the Netherlands in the 1800s used caffeine to perk up their performances, and during the same time period many Europeans believed that the ingestion of sugar cubes dipped in ether could promote athletic prowess. Cocktails of cocaine and brandy were popular among competitive athletes about 100 years ago.

Steroid-like compounds similar to those which have speeded up Olympic athletes were first synthesized in the 1930s, and their initial systematic use to boost performance may have been by German troops at the 'Battle of The Bulge' in 1944. It's generally believed that Olympic athletes first began using steroids in the late 1940s to early1950s, and that the intake amounts of these ergogenic drugs have steadily increased over time.

If S & S's contention is true, then either male athletes have abstained totally from using drugs while their female counterparts have doped wildly (this would explain how females, especially from the so-called Communist bloc, could suddenly approach male performances in the 1970s when drugs became very popular - and then fall back when the drugs were taken away), or else males and females have both been taking performance-enhancing drugs, but males have gained little benefit while the females were 'going through the roof'.

It's very unlikely that either of these hypotheses is accurate. Drug use by males in sports other than running has been documented to be widespread; it's unlikely that male runners would remain snow-white. Furthermore, the changes associated with steroid use - greater muscle mass, heightened anaerobic power, increased fatigue resistance, and improved recovery from workouts - are extremely attractive to male runners, making the drugs very hard to resist. Indeed, close observers of the international running scene contend that drug use by male athletes is rampant.

With regard to the second point (that males benefit little from drugs, while females gain a lot), if the drugs indeed had little impact on male performances, it's difficult to understand why their use would have become so widespread. In power events, increased muscle mass can benefit even already highly muscular men; in endurance efforts, greater fatigue resistance and superior recovery are extremely beneficial, even to the male athlete who is already extremely strong in those areas. Even a second or two of improvement can mean the difference between a world championship and an 'out-of-the-money' finishing position.
In short, steroids can transform the elite male athlete into a sort of 'superman' and the elite female into a kind of 'superman-woman'. It's illogical to suggest that a curtailment of doping had little effect on males, allowing them to continue to blaze their way to new records, while that same curtailment caused women's performances to stagnate.

Drug testing doesn't work
It may also take a leap of faith to believe that the new drug testing has actually had much impact on drug use. Instead, it's more likely that athletes have become much more sophisticated about concealing their doping. Insiders reveal that this is the case, and even the athletes themselves sometimes refer to it, although their tattling often occurs after retirement (note Carl Lewis's recent announcement that U. S. athletes have turned the United States into 'the East Germany of the 1990s'). Political and financial considerations suggest that the drug testing may in reality have little bite. Would the organizers and promoters of the multi-million pound Olympic Games really reveal that many of their high-profile gold medallists were in reality nothing more than druggies?
The notion that drug testing is behind the increased gap also seems ridiculous when one takes a look at the Kenyan men and women. Both are superlative, but the gap between the Kenyan males and females has grown even wider than the gender disparity in other parts of the world as Kenyan males have smashed one world record after another. Yet it is an absolute certainty that both Kenyan males and females have been 'clean' since Kip Keino got the Kenyan ball rolling back in the 1960s.

Note, too, that Whipp and Ward's data demonstrated that the remarkable increase in female running speeds started far before the heavily drugged 1970s, suggesting that drugs weren't required for women to excel. Further-more, the rate of increase in the 70s and 80s was the same as it had been in prior years, despite all of the new performance-enhancing drugs.

Consider the Kenyans
However, if the widening gap IS a reality, then what other factors could account for it? Bear in mind that the newest world records have all been set by African men. And most of these African men have been Kenyan men. Out of the nine new men's senior and junior world records we mentioned earlier, six were set by Kenyan men and two were established by a man of Kenyan origin who is now a citizen of Denmark; only one of the nine was attained by a non-Kenyan - the 5-K mark reached by Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia (which, incidentally, was shattered nine days later by Daniel Komen of - you guessed it - Kenya).
On the distance side of things, it is primarily the Kenyan men who have widened the gap between male and female performances. As we mentioned earlier, looking at the Kenyan situation is an instructive way to examine whether the widening of the gap is really the result of drug prohibitions, as Seiler and Sailer suggest.
It is an absolute certainty that the Kenyan men and women have not been using drugs - either recently or in the past. For one thing, 'sports medicine' - and its associated pharmacopoeia - does not exist in Kenya: Most of the Kenyans would simply not have access to performance-enhancing drugs. In addition, the Kenyan runners have an abhorrence for putting anything strange and unusual, including drugs, into their bodies. It is hard to even get them to eat dessert! That's why the Kenyans have always tested 'clean' when they have been examined (Editor's note: Kenyan five-time world champion and Olympic gold medallist John Ngugi was temporarily banned from the sport because he refused to urinate into a bottle for a drug tester, not because he was a user; double-world-record-holder Komen tested positive for caffeine, but it was determined that the excess caffeine in his urine came from that highly ergogenic and unusual substance, Coca Cola).
The Kenyan men are opening up a chasm between their performances and those of their own countrywomen, and their sizzling new world standards are making overall men's performances look better and better, compared to those of women. Yet drugs - or lack of same - have absolutely nothing to do with these phenomena.

So what's really going on?
For one thing, the Kenyan men are training harder than the Kenyan women do. That doesn't necessarily mean running at relatively faster speeds, compared to the women; of course the men are absolutely faster, but both groups may train at a similar percentage of VO2max (remember that males' VO2max values are elevated compared to females). However, the Kenyan men tend to run more repetitions of difficult intervals or hill climbs - sometimes 50-per cent more. And their weekly mileage levels can be 25-per cent greater, too.
In addition to the heavier work load, one of the key factors to take into account is the fact that many of these barrier-breaking African men are 'training in packs': they are working together to push men's running standards to what seemed to be unreachable levels. Komen, the fellow with the unbelievable new two-mile and 5-K marks, trains incredibly hard under the protective wing of another Kenyan male, Moses Kiptanui, who is himself a former world record holder in two different events.
'He listens because he wants to know more - because he wants to be the best. He can break a record almost any time he really wants to,' says Kiptanui of Komen. 'I follow in his footsteps; that's why I have succeeded,' says Komen about Kiptanui.
It's no coincidence that two of the other new Kenyan record-breakers, Wilson Boit Kipketer and Bernard Barmasai, have also trained with Kiptanui, or that other Kenyan men who have recently made breakthroughs, like Lameck Aguta (winner of the 1997 Boston Marathon after several previous, unsuccessful attempts) have been training with Kiptanui. Similarly, Dieter Baumann set a new European record over 5,000 metres after training with Kenyan men.
The success of the runners who work with Kiptanui doesn't mean that Kiptanui is the 'god of training,' an all-knowing figure who can put almost anyone on the path to a world record with the right workouts. What it means is that these men have been using principles which have actually been popular in the women's rights movement, challenging each other to become better and 'mentoring' each other - teaching each other what it really takes, physically, mentally, and emotionally, to make it to the top.
There is a synergy in such personal and training relationships which can have a huge impact on performances. Workout quality rises to a new level because an individual is training with other incredibly fit runners, yet recoveries are also better because at least one person in the group (in this case Kiptanui) is wise enough to know that proper training combines both punishing work and gentle rest and realizes that a macho approach to training - trying to kick someone's butt every day during workouts - is a recipe for BO (burn-out), not PB. Actual racing strategies are also superior because they are plotted with someone who has won crucial competitions and/or shattered world records.

The Moroccans, too
This group approach is no doubt one reason why Moroccan men have also enjoyed immense recent success. The Moroccan government has opened two new training centres within Morocco at which their top athletes train together under the tutelage of sports scientists. Moroccan officials claim that women will benefit from these facilities as much as men, but so far social strictures have limited the development of Moroccan female athletes, and it is the men who have been burning their way to fast times and occasional world records.
These kinds of beneficial relationships have worked on a more limited scale among some female runners. For example, Joyce Chepchumba, a very fine yet not previously overpowering runner, won this year's London Marathon by beating the very tough Liz McColgan on her home turf. Joyce had been mentored for at least two years prior to London by her more successful and probably physiologically superior partner, Tegla Loroupe, and that alliance is undoubtedly a key reason for Joyce's success. Tegla herself has the best chance of any female runner of shattering Ingrid Kristiansen's 16-year-old world marathon record, but she has no Kiptanuis or Komens to train with.
'Very few of the Europeans are training in groups,' says Kiptanui. 'Those who are, such as the Spanish and Germans, have benefited recently. The Spanish took gold and silver in the World Championships Marathon in Athens, and the Spaniard, Fermin Cacho, was second in the 1500-metre final. The German, Dieter Baumann, who visited Kenya last winter, recently broke the European 5,000-metre record. There are many advantages to training in groups.'
Indeed there are. It was immediately after the Kenyan AAA began putting their best athletes together in training groups prior to the World Cross- Country Championships (back in the 1980s) that the Kenyans began dominating world cross-country (that domination now includes 12 consecutive men's team championships). If groups of female athletes began working together, offering each other total support as well as exciting challenges, we might see the gender gap beginning to close back up again - along with a spate of new women's world records.
It's also fair to say that only a very small minority of the world's female population has been given a true opportunity to compete athletically, and that overall the athletic potential of females has been fostered and supported much less, compared with males. And within countries in which males and females are running impressively, there is usually much more pressure on females to forgo running and follow other, more traditional pursuits. When these situations are corrected, it's highly unlikely that the gender gap will widen; in fact, it's much more likely that we will see women shrinking it.

Owen Anderson

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