LAST WEEK experts revealed women would have to wait another 150 years before overtaking men in the 100 metres sprint.

But hot on their heals comes some contradictory research from a little closer to home.

Professor Peter Atkinson, a statistician based at Southampton University's School of Geography, has come up with the mathematical formula to predict winning times said women could be beating men long before the 2156 Olympics.

"There is uncertainty about the prediction and our analysis has taken that into account.

"Interestingly there is a small chance that women might run faster than men within 60 years." He has studied the winning times of Olympic 100-metre finals over the last 100 years and predicts records will continue to be broken and women will eventually close the ever-decreasing gap on men.

"The data shows that women's times for the 100m sprint are falling at a more rapid rate than men's times," he said.

"By fitting curves to the data we have been able to show that, if current trends continue, female athletes will run faster than male athletes in the 2156 Olympics."

Professor Atkinson, a keen jogger who has yet to come up with a mathematical formula to predict his own future running achievements, became involved with the research project because of his interest in spatial statistics matching trends to data.

He been working on the ground-breaking study with colleagues from the University of Oxford and the KEMRI/ Wellcome Trust research unit in Kenya.

The team of researchers have based their future predictions on the assumption that athletes were drug free and conditions were as suitable as possible.

However, Prof Atkinson admits there is uncertainty about predicting future times.

And no one knows whether men's greater body size, testosterone production and muscle mass will ultimately prevent women catching up with them.