What Happened to the ‘Most Equal Olympics in History’?

Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic movement, was a fierce champion of competition as a way of building character—so long as women stayed well out of the game. In an article published in 1912, he argued against women’s participation in the Olympic Games, asserting that it would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper”. The “applause of women,” he concluded, should be reserved as a “reward” for male athletes. 

But a few women defied him. In the 1912 Olympic Games, 48 female athletes (2% of the total number taking part) competed in five events: tennis, golf, skating, archery and aquatics. At the following event, held eight years later because of World War I, 63 women took part, accounting for 2.4% of total athletes at the games. By 1924, two years after the French athlete and campaigner Alice Milliat hosted her first “female Olympic Games” in protest at the main Olympics’ exclusionary policies, 135 women (4.4% of the total) took part—and this time they were allowed to compete in fencing, too. De Coubertin died in 1937, still insisting that he was “strongly against” women’s participation in the Olympics. 

Which makes it particularly satisfying that the female athletes bobbing down the Seine during the Paris 2024 opening ceremony were making history: for the first time in an Olympic Games, close to the same number of male and female athletes will take part. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has made a Big Deal out of this, pointing out that of 32 sports, 28 are now “fully gender-equal”, and that for the first time there will be nursery and breastfeeding facilities to make it easier for athletes to bring their families. These are, clearly, important steps forward. But just a few days into the Paris games, it’s already clear that true gender equality is still a long way off.

‘It won’t be about his sport’

Let’s start with the controversies—specifically, the Dutch volleyball player Steven van de Velde, who was convicted in 2016 on three counts of raping a 12-year-old girl. His appearance at a match on Sunday morning (which he and his teammate lost) was met by booing from crowds, but he is also the only competitor in the games with special dispensation not to talk to the media—all other athletes are mandated to make themselves available for journalists. The Dutch press attaché has said: “We are very much aware that if we bring Steven out here [to face journalists] then it won’t be about his sport”.

And rightly so. “Van de Velde’s participation… sends a powerful sign to the estimated one in four women who have been raped or sexually assaulted,” wrote the journalist Josephine Bartosch. “It tells them that their abuser’s future is more important than their own.”

And even when there’s gender parity in participation, 1970s-style gender stereotyping is still at play. Over the weekend, Bob Ballard, a commentator for Eurosport, complained that a gold medal-winning Australian women’s swimming team was taking too long to finish up. “You know what women are like,” he said. “Hanging around, doing their make-up.” Fortunately, Ballard has been removed from the commentary team (that arguably makes Eurosport a more equitable broadcaster than the BBC, which this summer knowingly hired Nick Kyrgios, a man with a track record of misogyny and sexism, for its Wimbledon commentary team).

Numbers don’t add up

And even though the statistics indicate that women athletes are better-represented, behind the scenes it’s a different story. At the last Olympic Games in Tokyo (held in 2021, a year later than planned, because of Covid), just a fifth of chefs de missions, fewer than a third of technical officials, and a mere 13% of coaches were women. 

In a factsheet published in April this year (which didn’t include numbers for the 2024 games), the IOC said one of its equality and inclusion objectives is to “improve these statistics”. But even if they are improved, can the governing body really say it has achieved equality if women are still being made to compete in much more revealing outfits than their male counterparts? Athletes are growing tired of unfair clothing rules: during a competition in 2021, Norway’s women’s handball team wore longer shorts instead of the mandated bikini bottoms, and were fined almost $2,000 as a result. 

And can you really say it has achieved equality when “gender-neutral” sports are dominated by men? This year, sailing, shooting and doubles luge, where men and women had previously competed against one another, are gender segregated. Skeet shooting was another example of a sport where the sexes competed equally, but in 1992, Zhang Shan, a Chinese woman, won gold; by the following Olympic Games in 1996, the sport was segregated by gender. As the sport management professor Michele Donnelly has pointed out: “There’s nothing in the record that says, ‘And then once a woman won, we decided to have gendered categories,’ but the timing is notable.”

The IOC’s ambitions also leave out trans women: rule changes by the governing bodies for swimming and rugby league mean no transgender women are competing in this year’s games at all.

The point is that for women, merely getting included in competitive sports has always taken a huge amount of grit and determination. Take, for example, Bobbi Gibb, who hid in a bush at the beginning of the 1966 Boston Marathon after she was barred from entering because she was a woman. Or the women soccer players of early 20th-century England, who attracted crowds of up to 53,000, only to be banned by the Football Association on the grounds that the game was “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” 

For noted Olympians like Simone Biles, or Venus Williams, or Katie Ledecky, being left out of—or discriminated against when taking part in—sport is nothing new. What’s frustrating is not only that this is happening at all—but also that this time, it was supposed to be different.