Prof Ellen Staurowsky
Internationally recognized as an expert on social justice issues in sport including college athletes’ rights, gender equity and Title IX, and the misappropriation of American Indian imagery in sport. She is co-author of College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Mythand editor and author of Women and Sport: Continuing a Journey of Liberation and Celebration.
Email: staurows@ithaca.edu
The word historic is often referenced when describing the Olympic Games. Athlete performances are memorialized in record books and captured on camera as part of a larger human story, witnessed and appreciated in the moment by cheering fans in arenas and by mass audiences through digital technologies. The lingering memories of the Olympic Games serve as beacons for the next generation of athletes to meet and surpass and as inspiring symbols of what human beings are capable of.
In the case of Paris 2024, it was lauded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the “first Olympic Games in history with full gender parity on the field of play”. Of the 32 sports offered, 28 provided full gender equality for women and men participants. By the conclusion of the Games, 46% of the medals were awarded to women (n=479); 48% to men (n=499); and 6% to athletes on mixed-gender teams (n=65).
From the standpoint of media coverage during prime time, the focus on women athletes dominated for the fifth Olympiad in a row and the sixth time overall. According to media scholars James Angelini and Paul J. MacArthur, women’s sports received more coverage during the 17 nights of NBC’s primetime coverage. By the time the last of the events came to an end, women had garnered 51% of media coverage with men at 47% and athletes in mixed-gender events receiving just under two percent. An already historic moment was amplified by the gold-medal performance of Dutch marathoner, Sifan Hassan, who earlier in the Games also earned bronze medals in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter events, becoming the first woman to accomplish such a feat and only the second athlete in history to do so.
The gender parity in the 2024 Games stands in sharp contrast with the Games hosted in Paris a century earlier when women comprised 4.4% of athletes, and restricted to the sports of diving, swimming, and tennis. The French founder and president of the Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, was fixed in his objection to women athletes participating in the Games, espousing the view that the role women played at the Games was to crown the men who won. As part of the Opening Ceremony this time around, the Paris Organizing Committee honored the lives and legacies of ten of their “golden women”, fierce feminists and activists who worked for the emancipation of women, one of whom was the sportswoman and suffragist Alice Milliat.
It was Milliat who roundly rejected the notion that women were too frail to compete in sport and that sport was an activity that undermined womanly virtues. A tireless advocate, she served as president of the pioneering futbol club, Femina Sport in 1915 and shortly thereafter, created the International Women’s Sports Federation, known in France as the Federacion Sportive Feminine Internationale (FSFI). The FSFI became a platform to organize women athletes from other countries and to cultivate women’s sport governing bodies around the world. When her request for more women to be permitted to participate in the 1924 Olympic Games was rejected by de Coubertin, she created the Women’s Olympic Games, which hosted 77 athletes in 13 events in 1922 before an estimated crowd of 22,000.
The road that MIlliat traveled was a difficult one, reflected in the degree to which women were included in the Olympic Games throughout the first half of the 20th century. Continuing to run women’s events such as the Women’s World Games in 1930 and 1934, Milliat attempted to move men sport leaders to recognize the value and importance of women’s sports. Behind the scenes, international sport leaders like J Sigfrid Edstrom (International Amateur Athletics Federation) and Avery Brundage (United States Olympic Committee) who would both eventually take their turns as presidents of the IOC, communicated on strategies to limit the growth of women’s sport federations. As a consequence, by 1972, roughly 50 years after the Women’s Olympics, less than 15% of athletes competing in the Games were women.
Milliat’s work and that of many other women and their allies would be taken up in number of ways over the years. The first World Conference on Women and Sport held in Brighton, England in 1994, followed the next year by the United Nations World Conference on Women, produced the momentum for the IOC to include in its Charter a reference to promoting women in sport. That moment in the 1990s has been recognized as a turning point in fostering change for greater women’s inclusion in the Olympics at a faster pace.
There is something powerfully moving in the example of Alice Milliat, a woman who understood that having access to the right to vote worked in tandem with a woman’s right to move. She used that sensibility to navigate economic, political, and social forces to lay the groundwork for future generations of women. But her fortitude and sacrifice also begs contemplation. She was recognized as a “golden woman” by the Paris Organizing Committee and yet when the opportunity arose to name a venue in her honor, the choice was made to give preference to the global corporation, Adidas instead.
That decision serves as a reminder of the tenuous nature of gender equality in Paris 2024. As powerful as women were, as historic as their myriad accomplishments were, so too was the scrutiny on women’s athletic bodies. While gender equality is within reach in terms of women’s participation in the Games, only 25% of the coaches at the Games were women, demonstrating a long-standing gap in women’s representation in leadership positions. Gold medalist boxers, Algerian Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting from Taiwan, who had competed in women’s boxing for years, were subjected to a global conversation about their gender. Further, sport sociologist Cheryl Cooky points out that the positive narrative around gender equality in the Games may not play out in the same way in every country. As enduring as Milliat’s legacy is, and as much as progress has been made in realizing some aspects of gender equality, her work remains unfinished.
