Olympic ideal keeping girls’ dreams in check
In far too many places in the world, it’s still taboo for girls and women to participate in sports.
They’re hobbled by dress codes that forbid trousers and/ or require their heads and faces to be covered. They’re forbidden because of long-standing and unsubstantiated concerns that their reproductive organs might be damaged.
This archaic paternalism lingers within the International Olympic Committee, which continues to fan concerns about sports’ negative health effects on women’s and girls’ health.
The IOC’s website has a whole page drawing attention to the harms of female participation, but it’s posted under the innocuous and seemingly gender-neutral sounding heading of healthy body image.
It’s only about women. Aside from a line about sports’ positive benefits, it’s all about risk and harm.
It cites scientific evidence that Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (known as RED-S) “can have significant impact on the lives of girls and women concerned” and uses that interchangeably with Female Athlete Triad Syndrome.
Linked to the page is an article from the British Journal of Medicine on RED-S that notes what was once known as Female Athlete Triad Syndrome is only a symptom of the larger problem.
More than a decade ago, it says scientific evidence and clinical experience confirmed that an imbalance between athletes’ dietary energy intake and the energy expenditure is dangerous to all athletes — male and female.
RED-S affects athletes’ metabolic rates, bone health, protein synthesis, cardiovascular and psychological health. Among male athletes, cyclists, ski jumpers and jockeys were found to be particularly at risk.
In women, RED-S can affect menstrual function and eventually lead to decreased estrogen and other hormones, resulting in low bone mineral density.
Yet, in the IOC’s four, fictionalized, “educational videos” about RED-S, there are only two men.
One is a grieving father, whose daughter — a wrestler — apparently collapsed and died after a judge suggested she’d be “a shoo-in” for the Olympics if she dropped 15 kilos and wrestled in the 48-kilo weight class.
The other is a male skater, who sits (mostly) silently as his skating partner and wife explains how she starved herself to stay thin so they could continue to do difficult lifts. Her eating disorder ended her dream, the fictional skater says.
“The worst thing is when you are part of a pair, it isn’t just your dream. It’s his dream, too. I make him skate as a single.”
“I don’t want to,” the man says. “You have to and when he competes, I’ll be there in the front row.”
But the worst is the Hunger for Gold video about a fictionalized Kenyan runner, Akeyo Abasi.
With her head wrapped in a turban and obviously pregnant, the fictional runner tells how her father wouldn’t allow her to train with her brothers after school because her mother needed her at home helping with domestic chores and caring for her younger siblings.
But the father agreed if his daughter’s grades were better than her brothers, she would be allowed to run. When she qualified for a special training camp, she worked so long and so hard that she had a stress fracture in her shin.
She only agreed to quit running when the doctor said she must or she would die because her heart muscles had been weakened from starvation resulting from too few calories consumed and too many calories expended.
“I had to go back to my father and tell him that he was right ... I went back to my village and married the fastest boy in my class,” she says, rubbing her belly.
“And this one? Maybe she will compete and bring home the gold.”
The World Health Organization estimates that 81 per cent of adolescent girls worldwide and 27 per cent of women are insufficiently active to be at risk of early death. Among the reasons for inactivity are cultural and religious barriers.
For more than a decade, international bodies including the WHO, the United Nations, UNICEF and others have promoted the right of every child to play and compete regardless of their cultural or religious beliefs.
The Olympics are the world’s biggest sports spectacle and no better place to showcase its benefits for women.
So why is the IOC focusing on harms? Why the underlying message in the videos that it will likely be another generation before it’s safe for girls to compete?
It’s unclear how long ago the IOC posted these videos. But for as long as they have been online (and for as long as they remain), they provide specious justification to those who continue to deny women and girls the opportunity to play and compete.
So, in February when the athletes march in the opening ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, don’t be surprised to see more men than women.
Equality is the IOC’s goal, but not until 2020.