Australians (from left) Mollie O’Callaghan, Shayna Jack, Emma McKeon and Meg Harris after winning relay gold.Credit: Getty Images
Paris is being hailed as the first gender-equal Games. What rubbish. These Olympics are all about women.
Australia’s female athletes have dominated the gold medals, headlines and glory in France. Jessica Fox, with the most individual medals won by an Australian athlete. Emma McKeon, the country’s most decorated Olympian. Ariarne “Terminator” Titmus, who mowed down a legend to defend her Tokyo crown.
They’re owning it, too. There’s none of the old enforced modesty or deferential gratitude for the scraps of attention bestowed on women’s sport once every four years. “I’ve written history today,” declared bronze-winning cyclist Natalya Diehm, quite rightly, after becoming the first Australian female to claim a medal at any international BMX event.
It’s not just Australians. Simone Biles of the United States, the unabashed greatest gymnast of all time and a woman of extraordinary strength and bravery, is the talk of Paris. The men’s 100m sprint used to be the games highlight, but the city is breathlessly awaiting the showdown between Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Texan Sha’Carri Richardson.
Natalya Diehm won bronze in the BMX.Credit: Getty Images
Women are not just winning; they’re pushing boundaries. Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez competed in the fencing while she was seven months pregnant. Australia’s boxer Tina Rahimi spoke out against France’s hijab ban. Many volleyball players have ditched skimpy briefs, once forced on them by the International Olympic Committee, for athletic leggings.
In some sports, women are defying assumptions about their biology by outperforming men. In the first medal event in Paris, the mixed team air rifle shooting, male members of only two of the top 10 qualifiers outshot the women on their team. Women have long held their own alongside men in equestrian events, and some analyses show they’re nipping at their heels in archery, too.
In the pool, Australia’s Titmus andO’Callaghan became the first women to swim 200 metres freestyle faster than American legend Mark Spitz. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Spitz won a record seven golds, he set a world record in 1:52.78s. At the Australian swimming trials to qualify for the Paris Games, Titmus (1:52.23) and O’Callaghan (1:52.48) both swam under world-record time.
Paris is a milestone in women’s sport for another reason. For the first time, the Olympic movement is boasting equal gender representation. Just 40 years ago, in Los Angeles, more than three in four athletes were men. That achievement comes with caveats; the final result is still pending (exact numbers will not be confirmed until the end of the Games), and the balance is far from evenly spread between countries (Australia’s team is female-dominated, Iran and Saudi Arabia’s are heavily male).
Australia’s O’Callaghan (right) and Titmus celebrate after they won gold and silver, respectively, in the 200m women’s freestyle.Credit: AP
Gender balance is a central goal of the International Olympic Committee, which has been pulling levers to promote women’s sports by adding new mixed-gender events, leaning on laggard nations’ Olympic committees, evening out the distribution of medal events (men still have five more medal events due to extra weight categories in sports such as wrestling), and giving female contests prime billing.
The Games used to end with the men’s marathon. This year, they will finish with the women’s, along a route inspired by the march to Versailles in 1789 when a bread shortage prompted thousands of women to walk from central Paris to the royal residence of King Louis XVI to demand reforms.
The star-studded men’s basketball final, which is expected to feature US giants LeBron James and Stephen Curry, will be held the day before the women’s gold medal match. It’s the same story in soccer.
Organisers are using every opportunity to embed the message. The Olympic logo combines the flame with the face of Marianne, the personification of the French republic. At the BMX freestyle on Wednesday, an actress was dressed as Alice Milliat, an outspoken advocate for women’s sport who helped organise the 1921 World Women’s Games. She walked around the crowd, posing for selfies.
“We know that for every female quota place in the Olympic Games, there’s actually a ripple effect of countries investing in women’s sports, and chasing qualifications and promoting those athletes in those sports more,” the IOC’s sports director, Kit McConnell, told this masthead.
A closer look at the team numbers, however, shows that the IOC has been helped to its gender parity by countries with high proportions of female athletes compensating for those with barely any. Australia has 58 more women than men competing in Paris, mostly because fewer men compete in artistic events (swimming, gymnastics), and the Olyroos failed to qualify.
Canada has 74 extra women, and the Chinese team boasts almost twice as many female athletes as men. Iran brought 29 men and 11 women to Paris, and Iraq brought 23 men and not a single woman.
US gymnast Simone Biles has become a global icon.Credit: Getty Images
There are questions about the Olympic imprimatur being given to problem nations, too. Six athletes – three men and three women – are competing under the flag of Afghanistan. All but one, a judoka, do not live or train in the country, and the women can’t go back without risking their safety.
“Its decision to allow a team from Afghanistan to compete is an act of recognition – although perhaps unintentional – of a regime that punishes women for participating in sports,” wrote Friba Rezayee, an Afghan former Olympian in exile from her country, in The New York Times.
Some argue the IOC – which is not known as a pioneer on the world stage – should have acted on gender equity earlier and more assertively.
But Sydney University sports academic Kotryna Fraser said the organisation was less powerful than many thought, and all action helped. “If they continue setting the expectations and holding other countries and sporting federations accountable, then we can move forward rather than being stuck in the past,” she says. “It takes time. Could the [IOC] do more? Sure. But we shoot too high, nothing happens either.”
Gender may be balancing out on the field of play, but it’s another story behind the scenes. Final numbers for Paris were yet to be calculated but in Rio and Tokyo, about 10 per cent of coaches were women. The IOC wants countries to set a target of 30 per cent, which is roughly the proportion of women on its executive board. Some sports, such as Taekwondo, have set their own quotas.
“When you equate 50 per cent of the athletes being coached by 10 per cent of women in significant coaching positions, there’s really a long way to go,” says McConnell.
“It’s not a place where we can impose quotas, come in and say, [for example], to the Australian swimming team, ‘you’ve had your coaching staff for three years and 11 months for the build-up, and now for Games time you have to change that to other coaches to reach quotas.’ But there are ways that we’re working with the federations, the NOCs and working with the athletes themselves to understand where those barriers are.”
Sport is still a long way from parity in the wider world, but Fraser says the achievements in Paris are “a massive milestone in the bigger picture. We need to attract young girls to sport, keep them in the pathway, and help them grow into kick-ass female athletes to push their bodies and minds. Our golden girls worked hard to create the change and turned the nation from ignoring women’s sport to absolutely loving women’s sport not only for the medals but for the skilful performance. Investment pays off.”
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