In the first week of the Tokyo Olympics we have seen the usual stories of winning moments and heart breaking losses. Dunedin teenager Erika Fairweather was epic in her swimming races, Grace Prendergast and Kerri Gowler winning Aotearoa’s first gold medal in rowing, Brooke Donoghue and Hannah Osborne also in rowing won silver, but unfortunately our Football Ferns didn’t make it through to the quarter finals.
The motto of the Tokyo Olympics is “United by Emotion” with a focus on diversity and it feels like that might be starting to happen. Numbers wise for gender, the athletes are almost 50/50 from Aotearoa, although officials and coaches is still woeful at 5% for Aotearoa and under 10% for Australia. But it’s getting attention. It feels to me the way the Olympics are being covered is changing slightly too, which may have something to do with the greater diversity of reporters covering the event.
There is still discussion happening on women being allowed to wear what they want, with support for the Norwegian beach handball team and the German gymnasts wearing their full length leotards for the Olympics for the first time. Player welfare and mental health are also being discussed with an outpouring of support for Simone Biles making brave decisions on what is best for her. And there are more than 160 out LGBTQ athletes competing at the Olympics. Fun fact: If the out LGBTQ athletes at the Tokyo Olympics were a country, they’d currently be ranked 14th.
However, while these steps are to be celebrated and no doubt there have been some gains in diversity, there is still a long way to go with inclusion. While we celebrate the first transgender athletes competing at the Olympics and the positive impact this visibility has, it has taken 16 years to reach this point. And it comes, like with allowing women to compete, reluctantly, with rules and regulations designed to exclude rather than include. The IOC has a shameful history of ‘sex testing’ women athletes, making women ‘parade’ naked to prove they are women, introducing testosterone level limits on specific track events (i.e. the ones Caster Semenya excels at), dictating medication or even surgery for women to change their bodies to be allowed to compete. The women and girls competing in skateboarding, at the Olympics for the first time, are receiving vile comments online. CNN published a great summary of these issues, as did the ODT, who also outlined proposed alternative structures for qualifying to replace the current problematic binary female/male categories. Aotearoa academics, Assoc. Professor Lynley Anderson and Professor Alison Heather from Otago University and Assoc. Professor Roslyn Kerr from Lincoln University have separately suggested similar, new structures for sports that takes into account multiple bodily attributes depending on the sport, similar to what is done for the Paralympics. It seems a positive approach, rather than a reactive, banning or invasive gender testing approach that the IOC have historically taken. I wonder if player welfare can be incorporated in the new model too.
Speaking of inclusion, Rachel Doerrie shared a moving account of what it is like for a woman being involved in her sport, ice hockey, when gendered violence is prioritised: “There is a difference between what is acceptable in society and what is acceptable in hockey.”
Away from the Olympics, NZ Rugby announced this week a women’s competition similar to that of the men’s Super Rugby competition with four teams covering all the regions will likely be starting in March next year. There’s a catch though, it’s not full time – the competition will run over a long weekend each week. I feel like this is exactly what Chelsea Alley warned about earlier this year. Those playing in the women’s Super Rugby teams will be expected to play and train in an elite competition, travelling each week for training and games, plus holding down a (hopefully flexible) job, let alone families and any other commitments they have in their lives. Why isn’t it full time like the men’s?
In herstory this week in 1893, the women’s suffrage movement presented their petition with 30,000 signatures to Parliament which led to allowing women to vote. This week a year ago, two female MPs leaving Parliament spoke of the “crazy, dehumanising, frightening” experience they endured while being in Parliament.
Check out all the media headlines in women’s sport for the 30th July right here.
Alida Shanks 