Vol. 25 No. 265 (2020)

Sport, segregation and prejudice
Most high performance sports, even today, maintain the regulation that competition has to be segregated, women on the one side, men on the other. They explain that these rules guarantee equal opportunities and fair play. But if we limit ourselves to these labels, a high-performance athlete is denied the possibility of choosing their gender perception and expression. And particularly for any talented woman, the insurmountable obstacle of access to the sport's biggest prizes. Given this, the gap between male and female competitions produces an inescrutable segmentation.
Currently, alternative ideas lead us to much more challenging perspectives. In this sense, Judith Butler, North American philosopher claims that biology has a social history and gender has not always been considered in the same way. And she adds that categories tell us more about the need to categorize bodies than about bodies themselves.
Just as we see racial segregation in sport today as an arbitrary and unfair practice, so is gender. It is now that those who make high sports performance possible (they manage, sponsor, communicate, prepare, compete and do science) begin to imagine -and above all make possible- integrated and fair practices.
Tulio Guterman, Director - June 2020