Canada: Men win flurry of women’s golf tournaments

At least four amateur Canadian women’s golfing titles have been taken by men in recent months.

Since June, two men known as Rachel Elser and Veronica Ivy have, between them, deprived women of the Fort McMurray Club Championship, the Miskanaw Ladies Open title, and the British Columbia Women’s Mid-Amateur and Mid-Masters Championships.

According to a recent comparative study on the performance of men and women in the professional game, women players underperformed men on driving distance and the percentage of rounds under sixty strokes.

Unfair

Women & Girls Alberta, which campaigns for women’s sport to be protected from male athletes, called on Fort McMurray Golf Club General Manager to explain how it is fair “to have a male enter and win the Ladies Club Championship”.

“Everyone knows that males have an undisputed physical advantage over women”, the group said.

It called on the club “to retract the first-place ranking from the man and re-award it to the woman with the best score and from now on restrict eligibility for women’s event to female only”.

Olympic ban

Men who identify as women will be banned from competing in women’s sports, including golf, from the next Olympic Games.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has introduced the new policy following advice from medical experts that allowing biological males to compete alongside women would be unfair and unsafe. Athletes will undergo an “unintrusive” and “once-in-a-lifetime” test if they want to compete in the women’s categories.

It confirmed that male athletes who are now unable to compete in the women’s category will still be able to compete in male categories or mixed-category sports for which they qualify.

However, the test results will not be applied retrospectively or to grass-roots competitions, meaning any men who have previously won medals in women’s categories will not have their medals stripped from them.