WOMEN RULE THE GAMES

Our medals are all from women. Why don't we have more opportunities for them?

Rarely does a day go by at Tokyo 2020 without a Canadian woman winning a medal.

Team Canada bagged nine medals by Wednesday morning, every one of them by a female athlete, or a group of them.

It was a thing at Rio 2016, where Canadian women dominated the opening week relative to their male teammates. It's a thing again.

There are reasons for this.

The biggest one is simply that the athletes are delivering great performances at the right time. Whatever happens in the years before an Olympics, even after a postponement of a year, the biggest challenge is peaking when the gun goes off or the buzzer sounds. Whether it's Canada's close-knit army of female swimmers, weightlifter Maude Charron, the pair of judoka or the country's softball team, all of them have risen to the Olympic moment when the moment was before them.

There is context, too. Canada is among the countries that has for years sought to fund amateur sports equitably, regardless of gender. Those investments pay off over the long term.

There is also success breeding success.

“I think you can see it, that there's a movement happening with young, female athletes, and I think to be a part of that, we are gaining a lot of momentum, especially in Canada and really across the world,” said Kaleigh Rafter, catcher on the Canadian softball team that won a bronze medal on Tuesday. “Young women are aspiring to be athletes, aspiring to be in the spotlight. To know we had a small part of that, especially in Canada, a place we consider our forever home and a place we love so much, it's just amazing.”

And yet, with Canadian women performing so well at another Summer Games and the evident excitement for — and pride in — their performances back home so obvious even from 10,000 kilometres away, a thought keeps returning: Why don't we have more opportunities for women's sports?

The Canadian Women's Hockey League folded in 2019 because it was flat broke, and most of the best women's hockey players in the world have been holding out for a real professional league in the years since. The U.s.-based NWSL will expand from 10 to 12 teams next year, but there remains no professional club in Canada, even as the CPL, a developmental league for men's soccer, was founded in 2019. Even the WNBA, the gold-standard pro league for women, has seen some stars leave their U.S. teams for Europe because the money is better over there.

Whenever these issues are raised, there will be those quick to argue that people wouldn't watch professional women's sports. The game isn't fast enough, or it's not physical and other such reasons.

But is anyone saying that about the Olympics right now? Maude Charron doesn't lift anywhere near the weight of her male counterparts, but it doesn't matter. She put down a gold-medal performance on Tuesday night — raised it up, to be precise — that was compelling athletic theatre. The closing 50 metres of Maggie Mac Neil's gold-medal swim on Monday morning here were thrilling, and it didn't matter a whit that there weren't any dudes in the pool. Women competing on their own athletic stage can have every bit as much drama and intrigue as the men. It seems like a painfully obvious point to be making, and yet here we are.

Even the Olympics aren't free of such double standards. The marathon wasn't added to the program for women until 1984. The race-walk includes 20-kilometre and 50-kilometre events for the men this year, but just the 20-km for women. American swimmer Katie Ledecky won gold on Wednesday in the 1,500-metre freestyle, an event in which she has broken her own world record 11 times, but this was the first time she did it at an Olympics because it was just added for Tokyo 2020. Men have been doing it at the Olympics since 1908. Canoe slalom was added for women at these Games after a 12-year fight. Haley Daniels competed in the heats at Kasai Canoe Slalom Centre on Wednesday, and while she wasn't able to advance to the medal rounds, she was beaming after her runs anyway.

“Being part of the first wave of women canoeists to be at an Olympics, I am just so proud and so excited and we're just going to get better,” the 30-year-old from Calgary said.

There's a reason that women keep arguing for equal treatment in the athletic sphere — they aren't getting it.

All they can do is keep fighting, and keep leading by example.

EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES Haley Daniels of Team Canada competes during a heat of the Olympics' first-ever women's canoe slalom event. “There were times when I had to dig deep and find some courage to train because I never knew if I was going to be at the Olympics,” she said.