Honestly, I am surprised it hasn't happen prior to this year, minus the fact that there are just so few finishers.

We observe the same in ultracycling where Lael Wilcox is among the fastest.

The thing is traditionnally sports have been invented by men with charactetistics/rules that suited men first.

You also have to take into account that in any society influcenced by patriarcal and sexism schemes, it is logical that they ate simply more men participating. The base level of a group always increase with the participation and competitivity within that group.

Take a look at the history of the concept of marathon; I think your claim is a stretch. Running fast from point A to point B isn't some kind of patriarchal conspiracy.

Also you make two contradictory claims, which one is it?

1) that the sport inherently is sexist in design, so of course women aren't winning

2) that women would be winning if the sport had more women competing

Those are opposite arguments.

which is not contradictory nor opposite to claim 2 that the level of women would increase if there were more women competing.

Look at pro cycling. 25 years ago I was riding in circle around an elite women cyclist as a junior. Now they haven't reached the same level as I had and are still far away from elite men (who are also much more to compete) but they are much closer because there is more money to the sport, more women competing. Now if races were 5to 10 times longer the difference would probably be lower as found in ultracycling events.

They aren't.

If you make something tilted against group X, group X will not look very good in the distribution of performance.

If those people in group X participate at a lower rate as a result, group X will look even worse in the distribution of performance. You'll be selecting the best from a much smaller population.

I do think there's some merit in the argument that many athletic events have been developed to showcase and compare male athletic capability. (Of course, a few are the opposite!)

Why would someone trap themselves in an ideology which depends on believing that women are physically equal to men when men are obviously bigger, stronger, more insanely competitive and dedicated to meaningless status games. That's not necessarily a plus.

Also you still haven't really explained why "run X miles from A to B" is a tilted contest. Yet "swim Y miles from France to England" (an event I believe women are somewhat better at than men?) isn't.

I think you've not understood the argument; the difference between women and men narrows as distance increases. Women might even have an advantage on the longest comps if they participated at a greater rate-- that's the topic that started the subthread we're in.

Which one is it. If society didn't hold back women, would they win or not? Arg 1 says no, arg 2 says yes.

If the event were fairly constructed, arg 1 says they'd win, arg 2 says they still wouldn't.

So you've identified two possible problems; if the first is true (events are inherently biased) that completely proves that social discrimination is irrelevant (because the event design is so sexist women can never win)

If the second is true (women only lose because society holds them back) then the claim that the events are inherently biased (enough to totally prevent female wins) has to be false because either they can or can't win ex social bias. Qed either claim being true forces the other to be false, the args are contradictory.

EDIT: yes, I may be falsely thinking point-wise rather than distributionally. Both of the factors you mention do push women out further in the distribution of placements

Even pointwise they are complementary arguments. When something is biased against you, you are less likely to participate. When less people like you are present in an activity, it's even harder. When there's fewer people like you around, the rules may tilt even farther away from being good for you. These effects all compound and reinforce each other.

Women have only recently been allowed to participate in this type of sport. See https://kathrineswitzer.com/1967-boston-marathon-the-real-st... for instance.

So it's not surprising that there's not much of a competitive tradition in marathoning that brings as many women into it as men, or that encourages them to train as hard.

It's also true that some peoples' body types seem more naturally suited to it. See Kenya's domination in distance-running events. They have a cultural tradition that celebrates endurance running going back thousands of years. Even if that timeframe is too short to exhibit genuine selection pressure, it still has an effect. Their children have been raised to run.

There is probably no inherent reason why women don't show the same speed or endurance as men, just as there was no actual science behind the widely-held notion that no one could break the four-minute mile. But it will take time to make up for past discouragement and outright discrimination.