Mick Hartley

Ah Canada – the home of lost trans causes. The Secretary of State for Sport – a 2004 Olympic gold-medal sprint kayaker by the name of Adam van Koeverden – has expressed his outrage at the International Olympic Committee’s recent decision to keep sport single-sex: that is no men in women’s sport (it was never a problem the other way round).

Jonathan Kay at Quillette:

On Facebook, the Secretary of State for Sport went on something of a rant, accusing the IOC’s defenders of succumbing to the “notion that scary drag queens are winning women’s volleyball games”—an idea that he called “a stupid conservative pseudo fantasy.”

Van Koeverden also claimed that efforts to protect female sports categories are actually misogynistic, because they are about “policing women’s bodies.”

So what of van Koeverden’s own sport, kayaking, which got him into the public eye, and his political career, in the first place?

His specialty event was the 500m sprint kayak, in which athletes use double-bladed paddles to propel narrow-beamed racing canoes. In the final round of the 2004 Olympic individual (K1) male competition, van Koeverden won with a time of 1:37.9, a half second faster than second-place Nathan Baggaley of Australia. The bronze medalist, Ian Wynne of the UK, was just a tenth of a second slower. Three other racers also broke the 1:40 mark.

The Olympics also feature a women’s 500m sprint kayak event. And if the male athletic difference were indeed a “myth”—as many purported experts pretend to believe—one would expect the winning times in the two categories to be similar. But of course, they’re not. The 2004 gold medal winner in the women’s 500m sprint kayak was Natasa Janic of Hungary, with a time of 1:47.1—more than nine seconds (or almost ten percent) slower than van Koeverden.

Hmm. Do as I say, not as I do.

Those silly women just need to train harder.