Gender and performance of world-class athletes

The athletic performances of men and women are compared based on worldrecord times for various distance events in swimming, running and skating. The ratio of the times of women to those of men against years is modelled through a modified exponential distribution. The rate of improvement is found to be higher for women in the three sports. Law-like relationships are observed for world-record times against distance. Although men's absolute performance is generally superior, the disparity diminishes with increasing distance.