I find this a bit strange and maybe it's a cultural/US thing, but the races I have competed in (Germany) always had two trophies: overall male winner and overall female winner. Which would easily eliminate this issue. TIL that this is not the same everywhere.

As I said upthread, it's just a poor choice by a race director. The way you mentioned is how we do it too. They could have chosen to give trophies to the overall winners, to the last place finisher, to the 4 median finishers, or any other silly combination, but they chose what they did and Runner's World wrote an article about it.

Yes. I was initially a bit confused, actually, as in cross-country skiing they often just have a men's category and a women's category, and then it's easy to award the trophies. (As far as I know there is no non-binary modification yet.)

This comment confuses me because the implication here is that people identify as nonbinary exclusively to win trophies in non-existent sports categories? Isn't that just lying?

Can you (or anyone) objectively prove that they are or are not non-binary? It's too easy to cheat and if the rewards are big enough, too many will.

Presumably they'd have to live as a nonbinary person generally, which would come with all the social consequences of being 'out'. Also it may be possible that male-only categories are still rewarded greater than other categories (eg. womens tennis vs mens tennis and other controversies).

If someone wants to cheat, there's easier ways to cheat (doping) than taking on a whole pile of societal judgements in every facet of one's life, constantly, and trying to push against it in affirmation of one's own identity. Including accusations of lying about it for the win.

EDIT: Of course there's no way to objective prove a gender. We don't even have 'objective' ways to prove someone's gender even when they fall upon the binary. We have cis women who have been disqualified for having the wrong chromosomes even though they have qualifying secondary sex characteristics (which athletes have also been recorded needing to be subjected to invasive exposing of their bodies to verify the category).

I know it is a small thing but hopefully they change this going forward.

Having a 'special' female winner while assuming a male will be the 'real' winner is implicit/transparent sexism to me.

It's sexism by definition because it's making a choice based on gender, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Men are more physically performant than women, so if there weren't two leagues then in the overall majority of sports women would just lose.

Well, they said no woman ever won this race so I guess it's a fair assumption that the first place will be a male.

They probably added the female winner trophy to be more inclusive towards women even.

The situation is kind of stupid but does not seem malicious to me, just happened to be like this.

Of course not malicious, but not a little bit presumptuous. As you can see from other commenters here it's apparently not unexpected that a woman might win. The organizers if any, should have had a hunch this might happen, even if it didn't happen before. Well, there were good laughs to be had anyway!

Doesn't seem sexist to me, given that the reason this is a headline is because it has never happened before. Historically, the assumption that a man will win is completely grounded. I also note that the two awards are physically identical except for the text.

What system would be better, here? A single award? That's just the same system as now, minus the female award - now women almost never take home a prize. Separate but equal "mens" and "womens" awards, labeled as such? Now you aren't recognizing the "overall" winner at all. Perhaps three awards - mens, womens, and outright? Might be a good idea for cases like this where the best man gets nothing, but for the majority of cases all you've done is hand another award to the man.

Remember, this is a headline because it's an edge case. Edge cases are a poor guide for good policy.

> […] it has never happened before.

FTA:

> “Obviously there’s a lot of great women runners, but you don’t see them winning ultras outright a lot. When it happens, they get two awards.”

Sounds as though it’s infrequent, but not unprecedented.

> Edge cases are a poor guide for good policy.

Consider this situation to have been a bug in a production environment. Would you advise your junior developers not to patch it, or write unit tests for it? Edge cases are where the rubber meets the road.

I find it interesting that for some people, even when woman get favoured and men get the short end of the stick, they still find a way to paint the situation as sexism againt woman.

Thanks. What a terribly misleading headline then.