The Stopwatch Doesn’t Lie: Why Biology — Not Gender Identity — Defines Women’s Sports

On July 16, 1988, Florence Griffith-Joyner sprinted 100 meters in 10.49 seconds at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis. Nearly four decades later, no woman has run faster. But ...

Brian C. Joondeph | August 10, 2026

On July 16, 1988, Florence Griffith-Joyner sprinted 100 meters in 10.49 seconds at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis. Nearly four decades later, no woman has run faster, and her world record still stands.

Her 200-meter record, set at the Seoul Olympics later that year, has also stood for almost forty years.

Flo-Jo remains the fastest woman who has ever lived.

Yet her 100-meter record has repeatedly been surpassed by American high school boys.

The current U.S. high school boys’ record is 9.92 seconds, set in 2025 and more than half a second faster. Many boys have run faster than Flo-Jo’s legendary mark, and each year more join that list.

At the 2026 California state track championships, seven of the eight finalists in the boys’ varsity 100 meters ran faster than the women’s world record.

If any of those athletes had identified as female and been permitted to compete in the women’s division, Florence Griffith-Joyner’s forty-year-old world record would no longer stand.

Image created by ChatGPT

The same pattern appears across sports.

The women’s long jump world record is 7.52 meters, set by Soviet athlete Galina Chistyakova in 1988. The U.S. high school boys’ record is 8.18 meters — more than half a meter farther.

At the 2025 NCAA Outdoor Championships, the top fourteen collegiate men’s long jumpers all surpassed the women’s long jump world record.

Swimming tells a similar story. Swedish swimmer Sarah Sjöström set the women’s 100-meter freestyle world record of 51.71 seconds in 2017. This summer, a California boy in the 15–16 age group swam the same event in 50.54 seconds—more than........

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