Leap of faith
Can the Olympics overcome Covid doom? ‘A harsh reality’ Inside the athletes’ village How the Games are closing the gender gap
The Olympics are often described as the biggest gender-equal sporting event in the world. And yet the Games were a century old before women were even allowed to compete in boxing, wrestling or weightlifting.
On the eve of the 32nd Olympics, 125 years after women were banned from the first modern Games — founding member Pierre de Coubertin deeming their presence “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect” — the International Olympic Committee is billing Tokyo 2020 as the first truly gender-balanced Games, where 48.8 per cent of competitors are female and where, it claims, “women and men have equal prominence”.
With the meteoric rise in profile of women’s sports, the outside world has changed, too. The likelihood is that globally established female athletes such as Dina Asher-Smith, Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Naomi
Osaka, Simone Biles and the starstudded American women’s football team will not only dominate the Olympic narrative like never before, they will leave previously blue-riband events such as the men’s 100m in their dust.
The history of women’s involvement in sport and, by extension, the Olympics, has never been a straight path towards inclusion, rather a series of peaks and troughs.
“We have to see women’s sport within its wider context,” says Fiona Skillen, sports historian at Glasgow Caledonian University, who believes modern sport was defined by the hugely gendered values of the Victorian era. “The idea that men are strong and robust and mentally very astute. By contrast, women are seen as having quite weak bodies and weak mental states.”
Four years after the inaugural Games in 1896, women were allowed to compete in Paris, albeit in sports seen as less physically demanding — sailing, equestrianism, croquet, tennis and golf. Yet they made up just
2.2 per cent of the total of 997 athletes. It would take until Helsinki
1952 for them to rise above 10 per cent.
“Participating in competitive sports, and aggressive sports in particular, was a complete anathema to society’s ideals at the time,” says Skillen. “They saw participation as being really dangerous because it could potentially stop a woman from producing children, perhaps becoming attractive.”
That is not to say women were taking their exclusion lying down. Women did participate in physical sport, such as sailing, football and mountaineering, but they were often in the minority and faced a backlash, particularly from male-led organisations. It is a well-worn path throughout Olympics history:
In 1896, Greek athlete Stamati Revithi was refused entry to the marathon and ran by herself the following day. Women were finally allowed to run an Olympic marathon in 1984.
The 1912 Games had no female American swimmers, as they were not able to compete in events without long skirts, and British schoolgirl
Helen Preece tried to enter the modern pentathlon but was refused. It would be 88 years before women competed in this event.
In 1928, more women were allowed in the Games, but the 800m was deemed too dangerous — a ban not lifted until 1960.
Other sports had to wait over a century for women to participate. Weightlifting achieved inclusion only 108 years after its male debut; for wrestling and boxing, it was 104 years.
It was not until 1996 that the IOC amended the Olympic Charter, making one of its roles to “encourage and support the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures, with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women”.
The IOC is billing Tokyo as a “step forward” for gender equality. All countries are expected to have at least one female and one male athlete.
While the Tokyo participation data is encouraging, there are still so many areas to tackle to truly end the Olympics gender gap. Whether it is the shockingly low numbers of female coaches or the IOC policies that fail to recognise women athletes’ needs, the challenge is far from over.