sports day: Girls not allowed to run 400m

It doesn't matter how long the sprint is .. it's the fact boys can do it and girls can't ..

If it's too difficult for girls then it's too difficult for boys yet they aren't banned

Anyway, I still don't believe it ... no school would risk that amount of bad attention being thrown at it if it got out ... and funnily enough it's not got out, the OP is outraged but won't say what school it is

It's a .4k sprint , people.

It's not an easy thing to do.

I gave great 800m & 1500m, but 400m? No thanks.

How many of you have actually run 400m as a young teen? I was a middle distance runner & I was drafted in to do the 400m, I was fit & young & NEARLY FUCKING DIED. It'sa hard race for any young person. I would pity the boys who had to do it, rather than insist the girls have to.

DD2 says she's been asked to run the 300m, she says this is just the distance her age group do,

Thinking back, I'm not sure we did 400 at school, just 1,2, 8 and 1500 (the only event I ever did and it wasn't even on sports day).

I went to an all girls school and we did 400 yards.
And cross country.

This is complete sexist bollocks with no factual evidence just that girls are precious little flowers shit.

I would be wanting to show them all the research which shows just what a lie it is that girls can't do sport as equals and threatening them with sex discrimination.

But that is really hard if you work there. If I were a parent I would do this, maybe not as an employee.

I went to all girls school and this was the rule there. That was 35 years ago

Its ridiculous and I would be up in arms, I really would, if my DC was not allowed to race without a valid reason, but as a teacher in said school it wont be easy for you.

Sport has always denigrated women - women were not allowed to compete in track and field until 1928, I think concerns about the jiggling about and issues of damaged fertility.

As an aside, women should also play 5 sets in tennis, or receive a lesser amount of prize money. There is equal prize money in Wimbledon for women.

OP, I would seriously take this to the press and LEA

Yes - its not the girls doing 300 that's the problem, its that the boys are still doing 400.

Just done a quick bit of googling and it's currently being proposed to stop boys under 15 running 400m too. Apparantly, sprinting longer sprints hinders the evelopment of speed so teenagers should focus on the shorter sprints to build up sprinting speed.

I did a lot of athletics when I was younger and it was always the case that girls, and boys, under certain ages couldn't run the 400m. It is a very difficult event because it's a sprint. It's totally different from longer distances such as 800m, 1500m etc. They're middle distance and require different skills/strength/technique. There are also lots of rules about which events children are allowed to do in combination on the same day.

Having said that I'm really not sure why boys can do it at a younger age but it is nothing new.

I don't believe this.

I don't think any school would ban girls from running a 300m race .. it wouldn't have even happened in my day years & years ago when girls were taught to sew and boys did woodwork and never the two could cross!

If this is true what school is it?

So how come women run marathons? Surely if very ordinary women can run serious long distances (which they patently do all the time) fit young girls can run 400m?

I can see it would make sense to have a qualifier for everyone, and also warn anyone who feels unwell to drop out.

I was discussing this gender split with friends re. primary sports day where dd's school has 'girls races' and 'boys races' in each category, which just seems daft given that in some years that means 2 girls or 2 boys racing each other in every event. (It also means parents sitting through twice as many races ) DD is about to leave, but I think others are planning to take it up.

Its even more mad given that loads of the older children from the school do surf lifesaving where there is no gender split for anything regardless of age group, it is all mixed up to and including the adult competitions. And even though a lot of them take it pretty seriously I don't think at any age there is any noticeable gender imbalance in who wins the races either beach or sea (ie women/girls and men/boys are equally likely to come first).

Is a woman's lung capacity significantly lower in proportion to her size (which is surely what matters)? it might be, I don't know, but the absolute size is pretty irrelevant.

Girls and boys develop at different rates;
yes... between the ages of 11-16 girls tend to develop faster than boys, don't they? At some point in that age range boys are on average going to be bigger than girls, but at about 13 that's not so much the case.

And from what the OP says the girls who are entering the >200m event will already have been training at 400m.

However ... I just asked DD what races they do at her school (all girls): 100, 200, 300, 800 and 1500m. When she asked why I wanted to know, I told her about this whereat she laughed like a drain and said 'that's how it should be... make the boys suffer'. Make of that what you will!

What I meant by the fact that women had less lung capacity than men throughout their lives is it doesn't actually stop them doing anything. Even if they are asthmatic.

Lung capacity?? Give me a break! A woman's lung capacity is, on average, going to be less than a mans all through their lives. One of the many reasons women are slower at certain sports. Are they going to stop all asthmatic boys as well? Because they would be more likely to have significant reduction in lung capacity possibly more than any of the girls?

Yes boys and girls develop at different rates (girls normally faster than boys so why are they limited to running 400m until they are 17 by the EAAS) but within the groups of girls and boys there are also vast differences, possibly more than between the sexes.

Has lung capacity in girls dramatically changed for the worse in the last 25 years?

I only ask because we did 400m for sport's days. Well, I didn't because I am a sloth, but the point stands! Were girls allowed to do shot put? We all know that girls aren't as strong as boys, and it might hurt their nails!

What an utter crock!

All girls were excluded.

So they continue to discriminate on the basis that boys who qualified were allowed to take part. Girls were not even allowed to qualify.

Shit logic, shit reasoning.

How stupid to say girls can't run 400m. Hope that all the girls don't go to the sports event in protest

With allmycats on this one. Girls and boys develop at different rates; adult men and women run over the same distances, but all juniors work up through shorter distances - the boys are usually one age group up from the girls in tems of race distance (and hurdle height).

Similarly with throwing, though men and women do end up throwing implements of different weights. Is that wrong? My DD can whang a 4k shot a fair way, but did herself quite a lot of damage with a 5k (the equivalent boys' shot) weight which a PE teacher thought she should be training with (club coach not happy).

Girls of DD's age can do a heptathlon (the full women's event); boys do an octathlon and progress up to the decathlon in the next age group.

It's nothing to do with girls not being able to manage a 400m run (or younger boys, under-15 boys also run 300 now), it's about working up to the full long sprint, a notoriously tough event.

The OP's school may be making it up as they go along, or they may be applying ESAA rules, so they may or may not be right, but it's not necessarily dumb sexism.

Perhaps the OP can actually tell us what age groups she is talking about.
There are also rules relating to the number of events done in a particular period of time pertaining to separate age groups and the amount of 'recovery' time between heats, semis and finals
Weights of throwing implements are all different male/female and age related.
Sprint distances among the younger age groups are different as are hurdle heights for boys and girls as is distance for younger girls who should be going over 600 metres not 800 and 1000m not 1500 depending on gender and age
The main problem here with athletics on school sports days is that the schools are not aware of many of the rules and this does leave them wide open to litigation if their is an incident.
I have lost track (excuse the pun) of the number of school sports days where I have been officiating at the sometimes down right dangerous
actions the schools have proposed. i.e. all hurdles at same height and spacing irrespective of what age/sex were in the race, you see hurdle spacing changes with distance changes not jut the height of the hurdles.
Everyone throwing the same weight discus, shot, javelin. lack of insight into where throwing events should take place and how they should be marked out for safety reasons
Just because we did all these things in the past does not make them right.

When I was at school I ran the 400m, 800m, 1000m and 1500m.
wasn't keen on the cross country but did it.
I had to write a letter of protest to my sons school because they were sick of football and rounders and wanted to play rugby, which considering we are in Wales was not played.
Rugby was introduced in their final year.
The kids today seem to have a limited choice when it come to sports and I was so annoyed when I had to pay £1 a week so they could use the leisure centre as part of the PE lesson, especially when they were junior members anyway.
So many sports are totally missing from their PE lessons, tennis being just one of a long list.
So much for the Olympic Legacy!!