If you can’t be best, be best of the worst
Usain Bolt strides over the finishing line 10 yards ahead of the other runners at the Berlin world athletics championship and he is applauded. Caster Semenya strides across the line by a similar margin in her event and officials demand a sex-test. But if he can be so far ahead of male rivals, why it is suspicious when she is so far ahead of other females?
The problem is that most sporting tournaments are not seeking to find the best – the fastest, highest jumping or greatest point scorers – but the best within a category. We have competitions to find the best juniors or best Europeans, best amateurs or best disabled. Semenya was in an event to find the quickest woman not the fastest person, and if she isn’t female she is disqualified.
Deciding the boundaries of the categories is thus as important as measuring the speed.
Geographical boundaries have a convenience because not all athletes or teams can travel the world or even the country to compete. We thus have local leagues and county championships. Yet even they present problems: while a simple rule is for someone be born in a country to represent that nation, the test has often been bent to boost national teams with foreigners who can claim a tenuous link to the adopted country. And while Everton could not play in the Scottish Premiership because it is an English football club, it could field a full team of Scottish players.
But the bigger trouble is boundaries are based on ability rather than geography. We have Under 21 matches, female events and disabled games so that people who are not the best can still win. Championship football is for the teams not good enough to be in the Premiership and the Divisions and leagues beneath are for teams that are even less good.
Disability is frequently a problem: if a slightly disadvantaged athlete is better than a severely disabled one, how do you decide where to draw the line on who should compete? Age and sex ought to be more objective tests but there have been doubts on birthdates and, as the humiliation of Semenya shows, even gender can be questioned.
What has this to do with business? Simply that the City prefers to look for the best in catagories rather than the best overall. It divides companies into FTSE 100 or 350 or small caps; it splits investments into income shares or growth stocks.
Fund managers put shares in a UK portfolio because the companies are registered or headquartered or listed in London, even though all their earnings come from abroad. They designate companies as dotcom stocks of TMTs or decide if they are ethical or not.
And investment managers then measure achievement against benchmarks to claims to be the best performing engineering stock – even though even the best engineer may have lost money when markets rose. They exclude shares because they are low yielding or highly-geared or in the wrong sector.
Just as in sport, some companies try to cross the boundary into easier categories.
Instead of looking for the best, the City looks for the best within sub-divisions or the best from the sectors that are not winning sectors - just as instead of seeking the best sports people we search for the best representing particular areas or social groups.
If the Berlin games simply wanted to find the fastest runner then Bolt gets the gold; the problem with Semenya stems from having separate awards for the fastest people who are not from the fastest sub-group (ie, male runners). What we should be looking for is outright best performance with no buts.
