Equality in short supply for our sporting women

SKORTS may be one of the hottest fashion trends for the season ahead.

But a decision this week to continue to make them mandatory for camogie players proves the thigh’s the limit for double standards in sport.

A portmanteau of ‘skirt’ and ‘shorts’, the piece of apparel is thought to go right back to the rise of cycling among women in America in the late 19th century.

Today, ‘trousershorts’, as they were originally known, are just as likely to be found in Penneys as Sports Direct, with the A-line cut offering a fashionable but flattering alternative to this season’s micro shorts for those of us with a little more air in our tyres, so to speak.

All well and good teamed with a white stiletto when you’re trying to show off your bronzed pins this summer. Not so much when you’re tussling with a protein-ball of a left corner-back for control of the sliotar on a slippery GAA pitch during the championship season.

The trouncing of a motion to replace skorts with shorts at this year’s Camogie Congress was described as “deeply disappointing” by Britain Camogie on Friday, with a separate proposal to at least give players the choice between the two also rejected at the annual event in Kildare.

ANXIETY

Under the existing rules, the athletes must wear a “skirt/skort/divided skirt”, or face a yellow or even red card if they refuse, a status quo which will remain until at least 2027 — the next chance that delegates get to vote on the playing uniform.

After skirting the issue for so long, sporting bodies around the world have finally begun to drag women’s kit into the 21st century, with the Irish Rugby team and England and New Zealand soccer teams among those to ditch white shorts over period anxiety last year. So it’s amazing to me that 64 per cent would shut down the idea of letting female camogie stars wear shorts just like their male counterparts.

And how ironic that an item of clothing once seen as the vanguard of feminism, allowing women to throw their leg over a crossbar at a time when it was considered most unladylike, seems so utterly repressive over a century on.

Urging players to continue to lobby for change, Great Britain — backed by counties including Meath, Kerry and Galway — said: “At Congress and in the many discussions arising on this topic in our community, arguments against allowing shorts range from what girls ‘look like on the pitch’, that they ‘look better in skirts’, that ‘the problem is really the length of their skirt’, that some girls wear shorts ‘too small for them’. We don’t expect to be hearing this feedback in 2024.”

Quite right — but if the association continues to cling to the outdated tradition, then I have the perfect solution for levelling the playing field this summer, after Gucci showcased skorts for men on the catwalk.

Until then, for puck’s sake — let the ladies wear shorts if they want to.

OUTDATED DRESS CODE NEED TO BE GIVEN THE BOOT