New Sports at Olympics Spotlight Women
N E W Y O R K, July 22, 2000 -- The first women to compete in the Olympic games played a quiet croquet match in a cauldron of trees and grass in Paris in 1900. There was only one paying spectator, an unnamed “gentle Englishman,” as the official Olympic report says.
In those games, the second Modern Olympics, women were allowed to compete in “genteel sports” such as tennis, golf and croquet. More athletes attended than spectators.
The games have changed immensely since then, but one of the biggest changes has been the support and addition of women’s sports.
“It’s been a very long 100th anniversary for women in the Olympic games,” said Marj Snyder, Associate Executive Director of New York-based Women in Sports Foundation. “It took almost a half century for women’s involvement to rise to just 10 percent of the participants at the Olympics. But it has been accelerating quickly in the last 10 years.”
The Road from Seoul
In the 1996 games in Atlanta, women represented 36 percent of the athletes on the U.S. Olympic team and 30 percent of all participating athletes. But in Sydney, 100 years after the Paris games, the U.S. Olympic team will be 44 percent women.
In what has been a concerted effort to bring equity to the games, most of the new events in Sydney feature women’s teams or individual women’s events.
The IOC (International Olympic Committee) mandated in 1992 that any new sport added to the games must be one that both men and women may compete in, that is, assuming there are athletes of both genders that compete in the sport. In Sydney, new medal sports for women include weight lifting, water polo and the modern pentathlon.
“Within the next two years, if the rate keeps climbing, women will outnumber men on the U.S. Olympic team,” said Mike Moran, spokesperson for the United States Olympic Committee.
In fact, along with tae kwon do, the triathlon and trampolining (added to the gymnastics events), 13 of the 16 new disciplines eligible for medals at Sydney include women. The three that do not are power cycling sprint track events (Keirin, Madison and Olympic Sprint).
Closing the Gap
A ground swell of both participation and public opinion helped close the Olympic gender gap.To be considered for the games, a sport must be played on five continents and in 75 countries. Sports like surfing have fervent fans and participants but only in some pockets of the world, and therefore are not added to the Olympic roster.
With sports such as water polo and weight lifting, international participation wasn’t very strong until the 1970s and ‘80s. Also, it takes time for many sports to catch on globally with both genders, said Snyder.
“Until fairly recently there weren’t any efforts made by the IOC or by the National Olympic Committee to generate interest for women’s sports,” Snyder said. “The interest in women’s soccer at the World Cup and in Atlanta helped sway that opinion.”
In fact, the story of the U.S. women’s soccer team migrated from the sports pages to the front pages, and the television ratings for the World Cup were equal to those of the NBA playoffs and World Series games. It produced the highest television ratings for a men’s or women’s soccer match.
Contact Sports
Women’s water polo, a new sport this year, had a friend in Australia. Since it is very popular in that country and the women’s team is one of the best, the home court advantage helped persuade the governing body to include the sport, according to Bruce Wigo, executive director of U.S. Water Polo’s governing body.
Wigo sees water polo as the next women’s soccer. “It will open up a lot of people’s eyes,” he said. “Water polo is the most physical and the most contact-filled sport out there. It is played under the same exact rules as men’s water polo and the millions of girls who are exposed to swimming and regularly swim will be exposed to this sport.”
Women’s weightlifting in North America dates back to 1972 when Judy Glenney, an American former track and field athlete and pioneering weight lifter, competed alongside men in local and national power and weightlifting competitions in the U.S. Glenny, along with others, lobbied the American Weightlifting Association for separate women’s competition.
The first official American national women’s meet was held in 1981 in Waterloo, Iowa with 29 competitors. Six years later, the first Woman’s International Meet was held in Florida and every year since a different country has sponsored this event. This year, it’s an Olympic sport.
A Venue for Wealthy Athletes
Despite the gains, women’s sports have a way to go.
“It’s no joke that tt took almost a half century for the percentage of women in the Olympics to rise to only 10 percent,” said Snyder, who attributed the increase in women’s sports to economics and changes in societal attitudes toward women.
“Olympic sport was initially a venue for very wealthy, privileged men. The only people who could afford to be amateur athletes were the very wealthy. As sport became a more widespread activity on every level then, you saw the involvement of more women and more people in general in sport.” Still, Snyder wonders if coverage of female athletes has as much to do with sex appeal as sport.
“You still see something like the Anna Kournikova magazine covers and you wonder how far we really have come,” she said. “When you look at the Women’s World Cup and what that turned into you see that there is either silence in coverage, a big boom or an Anna Kournikova. There’s no in between.”
The changes may not be sweeping, but they are persistent. After all, boxing, the ultimate “guy sport,” gets hours of play on sports channels and could very well leap onto the events roster for the next Olympics.