Dr. Amy Bass
Professor of Sport Studies, Chair, Division of Social Science and Communication, Manhattanville University.
Email: Amy.Bass@mville.edu
Twitter: @bassab1
Threads: @bassab1
Website: www.amybass.net
The promise of the Paris Olympics to be the first with an equal number of men and women competing begs for interrogation beyond whether or not an equal number of men and women competed across sixteen days of competition. Paris’s Olympic slate featured 329 events — 151 for women, 157 for men, and 21 mixed events in relays, or open events such as equestrian.
Beyond the numbers, every day saw a new headline about swimmers Katie Ledecky and Summer MacIntosh, gymnast Simone Biles, or the entirety of women’s rugby, from American Ilona Maher’s Tik Tok account to New Zealand’s gold medal Haka. The scheduling of women’s finals after men’s in marquee events like track, soccer, and basketball felt significant. Women’s basketball concluded the final day of competition with an intense face-off between the host country and the U.S. in a dramatic ending. More notably was the women’s marathon medal ceremony concluding during the Closing Ceremony, an honor usually reserved for the men’s race, ensuring that France’s determination for an “Equality Games” remained center stage until the very end.
But parity does not necessarily mean equity. Dutch distance runner Sifan Hassan, for example, took bronze medals in both the 5,000m and 10,000m and then went on to win the marathon, something that hadn’t been done in 72 years. Her final mark on her unprecedented performance was accepting her gold in hijab, a notable slap in the face to France’s hijab ban for its own Muslim athletes — a mandate that asked them to obscure their identity while still professing liberté, egalité, fraternité for the home team.
The transvestigation of boxer (and now gold medallist) Imane Khelif, too, showed cracks in equity’s armor, with everyone from author JK Rowling to American Republican VP Candidate JD Vance accusing her of being a “man” after Italy’s Angela Carini stopped their bout just 46 seconds in. The IOC adamantly affirmed Khelif as a cisgender woman, but that did nothing to deter the Boston Globe from incorrectly referring to her as a “transgender boxer,” demonstrating how quickly transvestigation weaponizes the look of female athletes, deeming everything from short hair to pronounced biceps as proof of competing as a man.
To be clear: no transgender female athletes competed in Paris. And Khelif, born female, raised female, has now announced plans to take legal action for the online harassment she experienced.
Rugby’s Maher, too, faced online vitriol that questioned both her gender and her level of physical fitness. “I get the comments of being called a man, being called too masculine, because I have muscles,” Maher told Time. “I know that it’s from very sad, insecure people…But I know they’re saying it to other girls as well. And that’s what I don’t like.”
But promoting body positivity is difficult when the head of Olympic Broadcasting Services had to issue a missive asking camera operators to eliminate “stereotypes and sexism,” or when Eurosport’s Bob Ballardexplained the delay after the 4x100m freestyle relay, won by Australia, with: “Well, the women just finishing up. You know what women are like — hanging around, doing their makeup.”
His apology did nothing to save his job.
Equity is, without question, a work in progress. It’s judoka Clarisse Agbégnénou advocating for space to breastfeed during the Games. It is track legend Allyson Felix launching a nursery in the Olympic Village. It is Ledecky sharing the medals podium with teammate Paige Madden, an icon acknowledging the next generation.
Yet someone like Ledecky embodies how parity is also at odds with a central goal in sport: winning. Parity ends once the race starts, something particularly apparent not only in Ledecky’s dominant 1500m swim, but also in Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s run, Biles’ vault, Quan Hongchan’s dives and Hassan’s runs — performances far and away better than anyone else in their respective sports.
Arguably, McLaughlin-Levrone and Ledecky foiled broadcast production teams attempts to create inclusive shots of those battling for silver. McLaughlin-Levrone’s time of 50.37 over hurdles led to comparisons of how she would’ve done against athletes in events she didn’t even enter: her gold in the hurdles was just 0.2 seconds off qualifying for the flat 400m final.
The Games are not just about winning, but rather a sentiment exemplified when Biles and teammate Jordan Chiles, silver and bronze medalists in the floor exercise, bowed to gold medalist Rebeca Andrade of Brazil on the medals podium. Setting aside the horrific controversy that surrounded Chiles’ bronze in the days that followed, the image of three black women understanding the moment better than anyone tells us exactly why it matters that women are in the game.
