The model predicts that women would have won a lot of men’s events. However, it also predicts that men would have won a lot of the women’s events. In Downhill it’s almost a direct switch around with most men’s races being predicted as victories for women and vice versa. In both disciplines we seem to have a spread across the entire range from near certain that a woman would win to near certain that a man would win.

So what’s the conclusion here? Well — as Patsy would say — “It’s only a model” and it’s not proof of anything, especially when projecting performances out far beyond our known course attributes for each gender, but it seems grounds to consider a few things as probably true:

There is a set of course parameters over which women and men would likely be broadly competitive with each other.

It also seems likely that there are course parameters which distinctly favour one gender group over the other.

The gender performance differences don’t appear to be aligned with how the events are segregated. Men and women don’t appear to race on courses they are necessarily better at.

So, the answer to the question “What If Men And Women Skied Against Each Other In The Olympics?” we’ve arrived at is “It depends on the course you chose for the competition”. Maybe that’s not very exciting, but I think the nature of that “depends” is quite interesting. The bullet points above could be summarised as “Men and women can be competitive but it still might be unfair to allow women to race in men’s competitions (or vice versa)”.

If the model isn’t completely wrong then I find it hard to believe that professional skiers are entirely unaware of its implications. Surely women and men have occasionally skied each other’s courses and timed themselves. When Lindsey Vonn asks to compete in the men’s races it could well be that she’s got a good idea that she would have an advantage. Maybe the FIS knows it too?

Some Caveats

I just want to note some limitations here, both to head off accusations that I’m proposing interpretations that I’m not and also in the hope of stopping people quoting this piece to support things it really doesn’t support:

There’s no forward prediction of what would really happen in this. The model, such as it is, only offers a view of how past performances relate to each other. Men and women have been racing separately on different courses and that has no doubt affected their training focus. If mixed competitions replaced segregated then the athletes — being the competitors they are — would surely train for the new courses and environment and their performance profile would change.

This doesn’t say anything about men and women skiers overall, only about the top skiers in the data we have. There’s a temptation to say things like “So, this shows that men are better at short, steep courses” or similar. It doesn’t. At most it shows that the top male and female skiers as selected by the existing standards of competition are better at some things than others. To revisit the first point if you changed the competition then the competitors would likely change too. That might not just be in terms of training but in terms of entirely different people with different physical advantages. There could be any number of men and women out there who could turn these models on their head but just aren’t able to rise to the top in the competitions that exist.

There’s no directive ‘ought’ in this. There’s nothing in the suggestion that it looks like men and women could be competitive or that there may be zones of disparity that argues that event segregation by gender should or shouldn’t exist. I certainly have no problem with the idea of mixed competitions but the arguments around sports segregation are much broader than pure performance.