The Real Losers of the Paris Olympics Are the Stereotypes That Hold Women Back

In just over a week, the Paris Olympics will be history. Over 10,000 athletes will have duked it out across 32 different sports. Careers will have been made and crushed; records broken and missed; epic comebacks—from Celine Dion to Sunisa Lee—met with unbridled tears of joy. 

The games will be remembered for many things—bad and good: A chilling arson attack on France’s high-speed train network just hours before the opening ceremony; a heat wave that threatened to imperil the health and wellbeing of both participants and spectators; and—of course—a (mostly)  successful campaign to make the 2024 Olympics the most gender equal in history. 

When future generations look back upon 2024’s summer of sport, however, they will hopefully also acknowledge something else—something less obvious. While true gender equality may yet be somewhat fanciful, something has shifted.

In Paris, the woman athlete is showing up in ways that are breaking stubborn, centuries-old stereotypes. The cracks are subtle for now, but the mold is definitely coming apart. And that means that even a defeat in competition is a win for a more gender equal society across sport and beyond. Sure, it’s a long game, but the signs are promising.

A Kick Before a Shot

On July 29, the Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez won her first match in the women’s individual saber competition. She subsequently lost in the last 16. But her Olympic appearance—her third—marked an indisputable victory, of sorts, too. The 26-year old revealed after bowing out of the games that she was seven months pregnant. A day later, an archer, Azerbaijan’s Yaylagul Ramazanova, told Xinhua News that she had competed while six-and-a-half months pregnant. She’d felt her baby kick before she took a shot, she told the news outlet. And then she swiftly shot a 10, the maximum number of points.

These two athletes certainly aren’t the first two Olympians to pursue medals while pregnant, but their forthrightness about expecting is noteworthy and formidable.

In an age in which pregnancy is still, across many cultures, considered a disability and so often the grounds for discrimination, and at a time when medical paternalism in some places still looms so large, Hafez and Yaylagul demonstrate that pregnancy and motherhood do not preclude a woman from being anything she wants to be. 

Or as Dr. Kathryn Ackerman, a sports medicine physician and co-chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s women’s health task force put it in an interview with the Associated Press: “Women are dispelling the myth that you can’t exercise at a high level when you’re pregnant.” 

(An honorable mention goes to the peerless Serena Williams who won the Australian Open in 2017 while pregnant with her first child.)

‘Leading the Way’

Others are similarly busting the myth of what a woman athlete should look like, act like, and be. 

The U.S. rugby player Ilona Maher has brilliantly taken aim at those decrying her as “too masculine” because she is muscular, or otherwise trying to body shame her. “I am considered overweight,” she wrote in response to online trolls, followed by a dazzling zing: “But alas, I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.” 

Not only is she refusing to be bruised by the abuse, but she’s leveraging it to build her own platform to advocate for women and girls in sport who don’t perfectly comply with an ideal. In doing so, she’s unapologetically proven that elite athleticism and unrestrained femininity can go hand-in-hand. There’s no need to choose between one or the other.

“She is leading the way,” Sally Horrox, World Rugby’s director of women’s rugby, said of Maher in an AP interview about Maher. “She speaks so powerfully about what rugby has done for her in terms of body self-confidence, body image, opportunity and she wants that for girls, in particular, and if it happens to be rugby, great.”

The Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, has pushed on despite being on the receiving end of a firestorm of questions (and criticism) about her gender. In an early round, the Italian boxer Angela Carini stopped fighting less than a minute into their match and refused to shake Khelif’s hand. She later apologized. Khelif has loudly called for an end to gender-based bullying of athletes while steadfastly asserting her gender as female, Axios reported.  She now advances to the gold medal match. 

Elsewhere, two women table tennis players have shown the world that age needn’t be a limit to pursuing a professional dream. At 61, Xia Lian Ni of Luxembourg this year became the oldest competitor in the history of the Olympics to win a match in the sport. Separately, Zeng Zhiying, a 58-year-old, made her Olympic debut in Paris representing Chile. Zeng, Reuters reported, was part of China's national team over four decades ago. She’d quit table tennis, but took it up again during the pandemic. 

The Power of Role Models

It would be easy to fleetingly cheer all of these women and then go back to bemoaning the lack of progress made in terms of gender equality across sport more generally. But to dismiss these women’s stories as irrelevant in the larger picture of inequality is insulting. They are standing tall and proud. They are authentic. They are refusing to yield to norms and mores, and in doing so they are part of a powerful narrative that is fueling real, long-term change. 

We know from a growing body of research that role models matter, be they  in sport, business, politics or elsewhere. “Our sense of what is possible in our careers is influenced by what has gone before, how we interpret that history,” write academics Val Singh and Ruth H. V. Sealy in a paper published in 2008, for example. 

This summer, the perceptions and preconceived notions that millions around the world hold of what it means to be a woman in sport—what it means to be feminine and athletic—are being challenged. That matters. Chipping away at a baseless belief that a pregnant woman is infirm, for example, or that a woman in her sixties is feeble, is meaningful. It creates the foundation for the tolerance, inclusivity and respect that are hallmarks of societal progress. And it’s important for individual athletes too. Research actually shows that stubborn stereotypes can inhibit individual sporting performance.

The International Olympic Committee has prided itself on making gender equality a core tenet of these games. As long as women have to contend with expectations and biases that men don’t have to contend with, equality is a sham. But the team of women fighting to change that is fierce and fearless. May Los Angeles 2028 pick up the baton in the next leg of this long journey and appreciate the weight of responsibility that comes with doing so. I, for one, can’t wait.