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Notes -
True, but they were both Kenyan, who are so far removed from the average in long-distance running it hardly seems like a fair comparison. I would love to see the average difference in finishing times between male and female competitors.
To the best of my knowledge, Billie Jean King is the only case of a female tennis player defeating a male: going through the examples in the Wikipedia article, I can't find any other examples in which a man played a match of three sets or more against a woman and lost, and these include many examples in which the man played with significant handicaps. Even in the single outlier of King v. Riggs, there's a credible theory that Riggs deliberately threw the match in order to get out of a gambling debt.
As to whether people believed that no woman could beat any man - I'm sure people in the 1970s would have conceded that a female tennis player could beat a man who was a literal invalid. Even if Riggs didn't throw the match, he was twenty-six years older than King. I ask you whether "several decades past his prime" is closer to the "able-bodied woman vs. male invalid" end of the spectrum than to the "evenly matched competitors" end.
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