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No, spectators want to see someone being excellent, beat world records, and show the peak of human performance. Because we like to watch greatness. Yes, effort factors into it, determination etc, but nobody gives a damn if all that hard effort didn't result in actually being excellent. All that sort of stuff would just be niceties, participation trophy, consolation prize.
This would predict more spectators for e.g. male sports than female sports which as far as I know checks out.
Who's greater, heavyweight fighters or mediumweight fighters? My instinct says "heavy" because the number is bigger but I might be wrong.
The conclusion I've been under for awhile has always been that these competitions are segregated like this out of a sense of fun (to participate or to watch); it's boring to watch men beat Serena Williams or watch a heavy guy sit on a toothpick.
There's a reason "Pound for Pound" is a thing: it's a promotional tool designed to let lighter fighters have the prestige of heavyweights (the "baddest men on the planet") by claiming they were pound for pound as good or better fighters.
The very fact that it exists is telling about the hierarchy.
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Ultimately heavyweights, in my opinion. When I watch a match I'm not just watching two guys wail on each other, I want to watch the best two guys wail on each other. Young, healthy, fit, strong, etc. I don't hate the versions of sports with less competitive people, but if I'm watching something ideally I want to see peak human performance.
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Heavyweight champions are certainly seen as more important and impressive than featherweight ones. The featherweight champion could any day participate in heavyweight matches but would get his ass whooped. Meanwhile the heavyweight champion is banned from featherweight matches because everyone know he'd massacre those guys.
But yes, weight classes are a good comparison to sex segregation. Another example is age segregation, eg U19, U20, U21... tournaments in football. But also there the main one is the unlimited one and few people follow the U20 World Cup.
I always thought that was a great response to the women's soccer pay thing in the US. They're not playing the same sport, any more than the U15s are. The hard question would be "should the U15s be paid the same as the men?"
(Yes, I know that in the end they were actually getting paid more, AND they chose that model after rejecting the same contract as the men. Such a shit show of lies.)
The difference is that a 15 year old will be 25 in 10 years, but a woman doesn't become a man (in general...). And they'd say the reason that people don't watch women's football is sexism.
It's also interesting how the popularity gap is different in different sports. At least in Hungary, women's handball and water polo are not much less popular than men's. Same with swimming. But for football/soccer the gap is enormous, approx zero care about women's football and men's is hugely popular.
Regarding not the same sport: I wonder if someone would argue that all athletes should earn the same, regardless of sport. So a volleyball player should earn the same as a football player, because they both train equally hard, and the only cause of difference in earnings is some form of bias.
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I don't think that's quite the whole story because without weight classes, you wouldn't watch a big buy beat up a little guy, you just wouldn't have a little guy in boxing at all.
There might be multiple factors involved, because most sports have a women's version at the top levels, and they obviously have developmental levels like high school and college because otherwise you don't have a pipeline of new players, but not as many have "pro, but not as good" levels which would correspond to boxing weight classes. There's no "short guys" NBA.
I think this is an oversight on basketballs part. There should be height classes for basketball. It would make it much fairer for lots of skilled players.
Isiah thomas is a great player. He can score on anyone. The thing is that due to his height he is a huge liability on defense and there's no way to overcome that.
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On the other hand, minor league baseball is very much a thing and soccer(the world's most popular sport, at least officially) is theoretically composed of levels running from "literally kindergartners" to "Man U" with everything in between.
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