Allowing mixed (male and female) age groups in certain mandatory age groups
This discussion has an associated proposal but it has not been approved yet.Comments about this discussion:
Started
There is one more thing that came to my mind when creating the official proposal today that I would like to address within this committee:
The current rules are very strict about combining male and female age groups: "Male age groups and female age groups are never combined."
In general, I can understand the idea behind it and would basically leave the rule as it is, but at competitions (e.g. track races) it can be seen from time to time that with very young riders (U9) and riders of an older age, the differences between male and female participants are often smaller than the differences between participants of different ages. I therefore wonder whether it might not make more sense to allow organizers to merge the U9 male and U9 female age groups into a mixed age group before merging the U9 male or female with the corresponding U11?
Or in other words: Does it really make sense to insist on a strict separation of male and female age groups for the age groups at the edge of our septum if this means that the individual age groups cover a significantly larger age range or is it perhaps more sensible to form mixed age groups here and possibly keep the age range somewhat smaller?
Comment
I think this is an interesting point, Jan. However, I hesitate to make a change this significant for anything but younger children. I know that in the US at least it is very common to have co-ed competitive sports up until puberty.
Comment
I would only make such an exception for children in the U11 age groups - I think the differences between boys and girls quickly become significant after that.
At the upper end of our age group spectrum, for me it would be worth considering again from 50+.
In between, I think male and female athletes should be ranked separately and there should be no mixed age groups.