A woman’s place in sport has changed unrecognisably over the last hundred years or so. At the beginning of the 20th century sport was seen as a male preserve accentuating masculine values, a woman who showed any interest in competing was thought to be ‘strange’ as it was not a very ‘lady like’ thing to do’. This kind of discrimination seems hard to comprehend for many of us, as we are so used to living in a time of such equality and equal rights. Now days in sport there is not one sport which can be categorically called ‘male’ only. Although the roots of the sport may have stemmed from male participation you can be assured that there are now provisions set up so that women can train and compete.
A great example of this would be ‘rugby union’ this may be perceived by an ignorant few to be a ‘real mans’ game as it a game that centres on aggression and injuries are common. There is now a scheme set up in our local area, in accordance with Thanet wanderers RFC, so that woman of all ages can take up the sport and develop their skills under the supervision of fully trained coaches. Unfortunately this type of encouragement has not always been available to potential athletes. Although the participation of women in sport can be traced back to the very first Olympics in 1886, they definitely did not share a level playing field with the male athletes as they were not allowed to compete officially.
At the dawn of the Olympics there were a very low percentage of female competitors compared with the male statistic. An example of this is the official numbers competing in the 1932 Olympics, 1180 men Vs only 120 women. There are many different and contrasting opinions on why this is the case. My own opinion is the lack of a real ‘role model’, until the great Dutch athlete ‘Fanny Blankers-Koen’ there was no, one, athlete that female competitors could look up to and say ‘I want to be like her’.
As I mentioned earlier this all changed in the games of 1948 where Blankers-Koen grabbed the sporting world’s attention by winning four gold medals (100 and 200m, 100m hurdles and the 4x 100m relay). Her sporting achievement was not welcomed by everybody; the New York Times claimed that there was no place for women in the Olympic Games as they did not participate in the ancient games. Her achievements also encouraged a quote which really summed up the average man’s opinion on women in sport;
‘The fastest woman in the world is also and an expert cook’ In some peoples opinions the ‘fastest woman’ in the world was actually very lucky to be classified as a woman by the Olympic committee. After reading the fascinating article entitled “Knickers off Girls, the Olympians are coming” by the author Andrew Jennings, I feel disgusted in the way which women were treated.
If a woman had performed exceptionally well them there seemed to be subject to a so called gender ‘test’. At first this test was not at all scientific. This is a quote from a woman describing her ordeal; ‘The doctors then proceeded to undertake an examination which, in modern parlance, amounted to a grope. Presumably they were searching for hidden testes. They found nothing and I left’.