"We live in a society that has long glorified and celebrated unchecked male mediocrity in countless arenas–politics, business, academia and the arts to name a few–why not sports?" ​​
​​

“It will be the end of women’s sports. No one wants to watch mediocre men.”

Really? I beg to differ.

Setting aside the obvious, the fact that athletes of any gender who qualify to compete at the Olympic games are far beyond the horizon of mediocre, and the misidentification at the Paris Olympics of the athlete in question, female boxer Imane Khelif, it’s fair to say we’ve been watching mediocre men sail to the top for years. Dare I say centuries? There may indeed be both an appetite and a lucrative market for mediocre men’s sports in the future.

It was in the wake of a fabricated panic over the gender of Khalif at the 2024 Summer Olympics that I stumbled across the above quote on my social feed–a bold assertion made by a random and likely mediocre, dude on the internet.
It tweaked my interest. The statement is a concise if mild version of a debate currently raging about gender in sport, playing on fears among some that men are clamouring to either transition or falsely claim to be women, in order to dominate in women’s sports. There it was: smack in the middle of a stream of poorly spelled and unpunctuated ugliness, underneath a story that was later removed from the platform.

But I digress. Among other things, I take issue with random dude’s assertion that “no one wants to watch mediocre men”. We live in a society that has long glorified and celebrated unchecked male mediocrity in countless arenas–politics, business, academia and the arts to name a few–why not sports? I for one believe there could be a massive audience for Mediocre Men’s Golf on a Saturday afternoon. Or maybe something more in the spirit of Monty Python’s ‘Upper-Class Twit of the Year Race’.

To be fair, defining mediocrity in concrete terms might prove to be difficult, and it is a quality not confined to any single gender or ethnicity. Undoubtedly, athletes would object to being subjected to any invasive and potentially humiliating testing necessary to categorize their mediocrity. Policing the bodies and scrutinizing the gender of those who self-identify as male would likely never fly, and so I doubt we’ll get the chance to watch the unchecked privilege of mediocre men in sports on a Saturday afternoon anytime soon.

Meanwhile, sports fans everywhere can be content to watch the unparalleled talent and excellence of elite athletes. They continue to inspire – whatever their gender.