Men Are Talking About Women Fighting

Kentucky Oaks winner Rachel Alexandra almost got held out of Saturday's Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, mostly due to a cheap and perhaps sexist owner (can one be sexist against a separate species?) Dolphus Morrison and Mike Lauffer decided the filly shouldn't compete against the males, despite burning the best fillies by more than 20 lengths.

But with the second jewel of horse racing's Triple Crown come and gone, Rachel Alexandra proved that the stable that bought her, co-owners Jess Jackson and Harold McCormick, knew what they were doing entering her to race. She won. She beat the best in the field and became the first filly to win the Preakness in 85 years, all without even bringing her 110 percent best, according to her jockey Calvin Borel.

“She’s the greatest horse I’ve been on in my life,” Borel said. “She struggled and still won. It’s such a narrow track I had to give it to her. The more I did, the more she struggled.”

Rachel Alexandra is the field's best. She's not the best filly, she's the best race horse. And perhaps, she's the most important step in gender equality since...well, since ever.

There's no need to go over the myriad reasons women and men aren't able to compete side-by-side in most sports. Most arguments begin and end with the natural strength capability difference between men and women. And maybe that's why Rachel Alexandra is so special, because mares and filly's aren't so obviously different and the races don't always come down to strength.

NASCAR and golf are two sports that have also flirted with breaking the gender barrier. None of the females have ever achieved nearly as much as their hype suggests, but those sports are far closer to it than say, boxing.

But what about fighting? The idea of pitting a woman against a man immediately seems offensive and cruel. Men are never supposed to hit women, right? They're the fairer sex, delicate flowers, unable to exhibit the same brute force as the men. And for any self-respecting man, winning a test of strength and endurance is expected and if didn't happen, it was the man's shame, not the woman's triumph.

But what if there were ways to change that? Currently, the mixed martial arts world has two bankable names without contracts. They're so good that they only have each other to fight with, which can be bankable once or twice, but not every month. I bet you've already figured out the problem: they're women.

Both Cristiane "Cyborg" Santos and Gina Carano have established themselves as the Rachel Alexandra's of their sport, but whereas Rachel has the ability to test her skills against the best, the same would be unthinkable in MMA.

There's nothing that can be done about our social queeziness about watching a woman get hit by a man. Most of us are programmed to feel any such fight is unfair and barbaric. But what if we started quantifying mixed-gender fights differently than regular fights? Regualr fights categorize fighters by their weight, not their power or agility.

Clearly a 210-pound heavyweight would never fight a 135-pound woman. Even a 135-pound man carries an advantage over a 135-pound woman, because the pounds are packed differently between the two body types and because force isn't simply a matter of muscle, but of how those muscles are used.

So what if that's what the league's started looking at: how much force and power certain weight-classes exerted? Look at all the tests Drago went through. You don't think some of those could be adapted to figure out how many pounds of force Gina Carano' mui-tai kicks stacked up?



My apologies, but everything I've ever learned about competition stems from Rocky IV. We're only talking about men versus women here. THAT movie showed man's ability to defeat machine.

Isn't it possible to have genuine stars-in-waiting like Santos and Carano fight better competition without turning it into a circus? If Santos can kick with the force of 350 lbs. and punch with the force of 170 lbs., isn't it possible to match her up with a man exhibiting the same numbers? Yeah, yeah. Mixed martial arts is not just kicks and jabs, but arm-bars and ground 'n' pound and sleeper locks and so-on, but isn't that all quantifiable? And if it is, can't these organizations use those quantifications to showcase their talent?

Scrapping bottoms of various barrels ain't working so far and without the ability to parade their commodities in front of fans, they have only a faint gasp of hope for other female fighters to develop into real challengers.

Right now a filly is the fastest race horse in the world and it only happened because she was given a chance she was very close to not having. Is it unthinkable to give these same chances to human females?