Women’s sport is entering uncharted waters – can it remain true to its roots?
On Tuesday, a new documentary about women’s sport, Game On, received its premiere, and the London screening was followed by a Q&A with some of its participants. When the former rugby union international Ugo Monye was asked what he felt on seeing it, he couldn’t speak for tears – it took a few attempts, and a hug from a fellow panel member, before he could fashion a response.
Here was a fitting reminder of how emotive the subject of women’s sport can be. The provoking of a tear or two has always been the sign of a truly memorable moment in sport’s ultramasculine history but for women, excluded so long from its halls of fame, even the smallest win resonates with emotion.
The first cinematic history of women’s sport, Game On eschews individual moments of glory (although it does contain some inspiring montages of England’s Red Roses, and their buildup campaign to the 2022 rugby union World Cup). Director Sue Anstiss knows her subject intimately – she has an MBE for her work promoting sport among women and girls – and it’s her clear-eyed perspective on the long-haul, third-class journey towards gender equality that puts a catch in your throat.
Given how recently women’s sport was being dismissed – even among the most progressive of media outlets – as dull, substandard and irrelevant, the trajectory that Anstiss’s film charts is a feelgood one. Amid the great millennial dumpster fire of doping, matchfixing and sportswashing, the advancement of women is arguably the industry’s most meaningful contemporary success.
And while the elite end of men’s sport has proudly taken up the mantle of self-interest and moral ambivalence, its female counterpart continues – for now at least – to embody a higher purpose. For Anstiss, sport is not an end in itself but a means to improve women’s lives: in the opening minutes of the documentary she calls it a “tool for driving social change”. Later in the film, Tanni Grey-Thompson observes that it also shines a magnifying glass on the equality that is still lacking between genders.
No wonder, then, that women’s sport comes across as more true to its roots, more altruistic – dare we say, more attractive? – than the ugly swamp of politics and venture capital in which men’s football, men’s golf and even men’s cricket are currently wallowing. After all, the people who have been running and backing it – through decades of public disinterest, institutional rebuffs and a crippling lack of funding – have done so for the good of others, and with no expectation of reward.
This isn’t to say that male athletes, pundits and administrators don’t make stands for social justice, particularly in recent years (although it’s worth remembering that it was a woman,
Noreena Hertz, who first recognised the potential of newly wealthy Premier League footballers to effect change, in her campaign for nurses’ pay).
But as Anstiss and others have noted, many men who are passionate about sport only begin to notice and acknowledge the discrimination and double standards embedded in it when it affects those close to them, usually their daughters. One audience member at the screening described just such a Damascene moment when his little girl