REPOST: The “Women Are Better at Long-Distance Swimming” Talking Point Is Basically Bullshit

More credibility gets chucked into the ideology furnace

***Hi there! I took yesterday off to try to figure out if I was taking off for Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I don’t think I reached a conclusion. Anyway, I’m un-paywalling this piece from a year ago — enjoy!

Gender denialism is currently the fuzzy testicle drooping out of the intellectual left’s gym shorts: it’s obvious, embarrassing, and people are wondering “are you gonna do something about that?” The debate over trans women in sports has made it clear that some on the left not only deny that male physiology confers advantages that perhaps can’t be reversed with hormones: They deny that male physiology confers any advantage in sports whatsoever. They seem to think it’s mean to admit that the average man is bigger, stronger, and faster than the average woman, even though everyone knows that, and it feels like we’ve suddenly decided to debate whether five is bigger than three.

The latest clown to step into the biology denialist dunk tank is — oh, God, this one hurts — Neil deGrasse Tyson. That really sucks — I like Neil deGrasse Tyson! He produces the Carl Sagan-type wonderment that I often enjoy after a long day in the comedy mines. And that’s why watching this viral clip from last week felt like rectally inserting a pine cone:

First of all: The editor of Scientific American didn’t step down because she “expressed some opinions” — she stepped down because she turned one of the world’s foremost scientific publications into an anti-science laughingstock. Her social media rant was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. But the part of the clip I want to address is Tyson’s point that women may have the advantage in long-distance swimming. This is the throw-sand-in-people’s-eyes talking point du jour — it’s like an e-mail went out in late 2023 that said “when this comes up, talk about long-distance swimming.” And in fact, that talking point was amplified by the very article Maher quoted, which — of course — made the point about endurance swimming, because that’s the line we’re going with, everybody get on message!

Tyson instructs us to “look into that”. Well, bad news, Neil: I did look into it. And here’s what I found.

The first important point is that the claim isn’t really about “long-distance swimming” — it’s about insanely fucking long distance swimming. Because results from regular old “shit yourself and pass out” long-distance swimming paint a clear picture: Men have an advantage. The longest swimming event at the Olympics is the 10K, and here are this year’s results,¹ with shockingly retrograde blue and pink dots representing the men and women.

If not for Norway’s Henrik Christiansen, who finished four seconds slower than women’s gold medal winner Sharon van Rouwendaal, every man who finished would have posted a faster time than every woman. The results of 10K swimming at the Olympic level point to two inescapable conclusions: 1) There is an observable difference in performance between men and women, and 2) Henrik Christiansen is absolute shit. If I may compress the results of these data into a popular meme:

But there’s a difference between distance swimming and ultra-distance swimming. Swimming World Magazine — ranked the #1 wank fodder magazine by people in the ‘80s who were too chicken to buy real porn — defined ultra-distance swimming as any swim longer than 10K. There are other requirements — you can’t wear a wetsuit, can’t stop at any point, and have to be 100 percent out of your fucking skull. These people swim distances that would exhaust me if I drove them in a midsize sedan; ultra-distance swimming is the extreme of the extreme.

Much of the evidence for the belief that women excel in ultra-distance swimming comes not from sports, but from sport-like publicity stunts. Swimming the English Channel, in particular, has received attention — Channel swims are mentioned in this article from The Cut, this article from Swimming World, and basically every article I found on the issue. Of course, swimming the English Channel isn’t really a sport; it’s a David Blaine-type exploit by people who have found a way to monetize their masochism. And at any rate, the ten fastest Channel swims all belong to men, with the fastest men’s time (6 hours and 45 minutes) being 19 percent faster than the fastest women’s time (7 hours and 25 minutes).

But an academic paper published in 2012 serves as the source for every claim I linked to above — it seems to be the singular source for claims about Channel swims. And, remarkably, the paper everyone is citing to make the “women are better at long distance swimming” claim says that men swim faster — here is the paper’s finding on gender:²

(iii) in general, greater swimming speed for men than for women [my emphasis] but no such sex-based difference in the best annual ‘English Channel Swim’ performances.

Here’s what’s going on: The researchers looked at the data three ways. Two ways found that men swim faster, and the third found a gap that favored men but was not statistically significant. And, it must be emphasized, the Channel swim is not an Olympic sport, but rather a privately organized event in which modern day Ron Obvious-types swim from England to France despite the presence of a perfectly good Chunnel.

One of the authors of that paper is a Swiss physician and endurance athlete named Beat Knechtle. Knechtle seems to be the source for claims about gender performance distance swimming; in addition to the paper about English Channel swims, he co-authored two similar papers, both of which are highly cited and highly flawed. His work appears to be genesis of the “women are better at endurance swimming” talking point: Swimming World’s article cites four works under a section labeled “The Evidence”, and all four are Beat Knechtle joints.

Kneckle Joint #2 is about the swim between mainland California and Catalina Island; Knechtle and his co-authors found that when you compare the fastest men’s time each year to the fastest women’s time, the women’s average is 53 minutes faster (in a swim that top swimmers complete in around eight hours). The problem is that swimming to Catalina Island isn’t really a sport; it’s just a thing people do sometimes, presumably while on cocaine. For some years in Knechtle’s data set, nobody made the swim; in other years, one or two people did. The men’s data set is also skewed by slowpoke performances from the wool bathing suit era; some guy in 1936 made the journey in almost 34 hours, which isn’t “swimming” so much as “failing to drown”. Knecktle also makes much of the fact that the all-time women’s record is 22 minutes faster than the men’s record, but that stat mostly just highlights what an oddball “sport” we’re talking about: That record is from 1976 — the oldest record in all the rest of swimming is from 2008. Knecktle is measuring a “sport” that is really 1/3 sport, 1/3 fraternity prank, and 1/3 cry for help.

Knecktle Joint #3: Rise of Knectopolis is about the 28.5 mile swim around Manhattan. In this paper, Knecktle and his co-authors make an elemental mistake: They simply overlook a record-setting swim by a man. The 2014 paper asserts that the women’s record time — 345 minutes by Shelley Taylor Smith in 1995 — is 14.1% faster than the men’s record, 402 minutes by Drury Gallagher in 1985. But, say it with me now: “What about Oliver Wilkinson’s 344 minute swim in 2011?” Knecktle et. al. appear to have simply missed that. Knecktle also crunches data from the annual “Manhattan Island Marathon Swim” two ways, and one method found that women perform better, but one didn’t (though of course the one that did got repeated by The Cut). And, aside from the egregious Oliver Wilkinson erasure, the main problem with the study is that the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim is just weird: A 15 year-old won it in 1990, and a 48 year-old got sixth in 1986. Conditions make a huge difference: All 26 swimmers who finished in 1999 beat the 2007 champ by at least 25 minutes. And Shelley Taylor Smith was a one-woman confounding variable — she won five times, making her the anti-Henrik Christiansen of ultra-distance swimming.

I’ve spent some time with Knecktle’s work, and I don’t think he’s a grifter or a crank; I think he’s an endurance swimmer who noticed that women often win those events and thought “What’s that about?” He proceeded to write some papers that neither prove nor disprove any hypothesis about gender differences in ultra-endurance swimming because good data are hard to come by and because social science is hard. I also don’t think that he’s angling to be a left-wing hero because his operating theory is that women do well largely because their higher body fat percentage makes them more buoyant and more able to endure cold water, which is the kind of theory you keep under your hat if you’re trying to be Doctor Girlboss.³

I don’t think that Knecktle is the problem; I think the problem is people who amplify shoddy social science because it suits their agenda. It breaks my heart to see Neil deGrasse Tyson — a man of science — upvote trashy pseudo-science that isn’t fit to be published in Barely Legal; I feel like I just watched footage of David Attenborough smothering a cockatiel with a pillow. And deGrasse Tyson did it in service of biological denialism that won’t age badly only because it looks ridiculous now. The idea that we don’t know if men have an advantage in sports simply cannot be the liberal talking point if liberals ever want to win another election; it may be the single dumbest talking point even in a world in which “Bill Gates put a microchip in the vaccine” is out there. And all the “long-distance swimming” talking point will ultimately do is to sink the credibility of anyone who tries to use it as a lifeboat.

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1. The men’s and women’s events were held on the same course, but on different days. I looked up reports of the events to see if there were adverse conditions on one of the days, but none were mentioned in the reports I read (except for pollution in the Seine, which appears to have been the same for both groups). There does seem to have been a small difference in the temperature: It was sunny with a high of 87 on the day of the women’s swim and sunny with a high of 82 on the day of the men’s swim. Though, FWIW, I looked up results in the 2020 and 2016 Olympics, and the distribution is the same: The top woman finished ahead of the last-place man, but the top man finished well ahead of the top woman and the last-place man finished well ahead of the last-place woman.

2. The paper also looked at results related to age and changes in performance over time — that’s why this finding about gender is labeled “iii”.

3. I reached out to Knecktle to see if he wanted to comment or clarify his work off the record. I also asked him if there was some reason why he failed to note Oliver Wilkinson swim or if he pre-registered his hypotheses, which would have inoculated him against charges of p-hacking. He didn’t reply, but in fairness, I gave him less than a day to answer and I think he’s retired.