[originaltext]In sports the sexes are separate. Women and men do not run or swi

In sports the sexes are separate. Women and men do not run or swim in the same races. Women are less strong than men. That at least is what people say. Women are called "the weaker sex", or, if men want to please them, "the fair sex". But boys and girls are taught together at schools and universities. There are women who are famous Prime Ministers, scientists and writers. And women live longer than men. A European woman can expect to live until the age of seventy four, a man only until he is sixty eight. Are women’s bodies really weaker?
The fastest men can run a mile in under four minutes. The best women need four and a half minutes. Women’s times are always slower than men’s, but some facts are a surprise. Some of the fastest women swimmers today are teenage girls. One of them swam four hundred meters in 4 minutes and 21.2 seconds when she was only sixteen. The first "Tarzan" in films was an Olympic swimmer, Johnny Weissmuller. His fastest four hundred meters was 4 minutes and 59.1 seconds, which is 37.9 seconds slower than a girl fifty years later! This does not mean that women are catching men up. Conditions are very different now, and sport is much more serious. It is so serious that some women athletes are given hormone injections. At the Olympics a doctor has to check whether the women-athletes are really women or not. It seems sad that sport has such problems. Life can be very complicated when there are two separate sexes!