The mission of the modern Olympic Games, according to the vacuous corporate words on its website, doubtless dreamed up by teams of overpaid consultants, is “educating youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind”. Gender equality is “a top priority”. It will achieve this by – drum roll now please for the big reveal – making the Olympic games “easier for female athletes”.
As specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely targets go, this is up there with “feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time” as a plan to end global poverty.
This summer has served up reminders that even when women are the best in the world, they're still not measured by their achievements
It might as well have pledged to project female athletes into Mars on Jeff Bezos’s phallic spaceship for all the real-world impact this promise has had. Elite sport is not all that much “easier for female athletes” now than it was in 1900 when the organisers wrote to one another and privately betrayed that they were revolted by the notion of women’s involvement, as author David Goldblatt has revealed.
This summer has served up reminders that even when women are the best in the world, they’re still not measured by their achievements. Yes, yes, is the message they get, you’ve smashed records, displayed unrivalled reserves of talent and dedication, but let’s have a look at your buttocks. Women like Simone Biles, who make the courageous decision to stand down, are written off by a certain kind of mostly male commentator as snowflakes or selfish.
At the Beach Handball Euro tournament this month – a sport beloved of Boris Johnson who famously drooled all over his keyboard about the female athletes “glistening like wet otters” – the Norwegian team was fined for, literally, not showing enough of their bottoms. Just days later, the British Paralympian Olivia Breen was told by a female official at the English championships that her sprint shorts were “too short and inappropriate”. You couldn’t make it up. Unfortunately, you don’t have to.
The German gymnastics team is so sick of it all they turned up at the Olympics in full-length unitards. It was a powerful statement against the misogyny at the core of a sport that allowed rapist and child exploiter Larry Nassar unfettered access to children for years. But it left me feeling conflicted and depressed. Women being forced to change how they dress – covering up their bodies like it’s the 1900s all over again – can’t be the answer.
Elite sport has a women problem, and it isn’t confined to the relentless sexualisation of athletes. Focusing on whether they are “mentally tough enough” is a convenient distraction from the ways in which women at the highest levels are still being failed. Biles’s decision to withdraw from the Olympics came after a vault that went wrong. As other gymnasts shared their experiences of what she called “the twisties” – a moment of terrifying uncertainty mid-air when muscle memory fails – what was most astonishing is that athletes don’t walk away more often. There aren’t many sports in which a nanosecond’s lapse in concentration can leave you paralysed for life.
But her decision also came on the back of years of failures by those within the sport who are now coming out loudest to praise her. Biles is a survivor of Nassar’s abuse, and was molested by him throughout her childhood and teenager years. Just two weeks before the Olympics, she learned new details of how corrupt officials conspired to hush up evidence of his crimes. To this day, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee and USA Gymnastic are still ducking accountability. Biles’s demons aren’t in her head. They’re all around her.
But despite the bikini bottom furore and the tiresome heroine-or-snowflake culture war that broke out over Biles, this has been a hopeful summer too
Watching the clips of that vault back, the gendered language used about women competitors to minimise their legitimate concerns was striking. The male commentator I was listening to on Eurosport described her as “stomping” over to the “ladies” in the arena, when she told her team-mates she was not going to continue. The Texas deputy attorney general Aaron Reitz called her “selfish,” “childish”, “a national embarrassment”. He later apologised for the fact that he “opined on a subject for which I am not adequately versed”, betraying a command of English that is probably on a par with his mastery of the vault. Piers Morgan wrote in the Mail that he liked “my sporting champions to be cocky little devils”, going on to whine about how she had let him personally down.
Naomi Osaka’s decision not to take part in French Open press conferences earlier this year was met with the same kind of entitled, inchoate fury, which seemed to be rooted in something much deeper than disappointment. What do these men fear when they see accomplished young women asserting their right to say no? That it might be catching? Does it put them on notice of their own impending obsolescence?
But despite the bikini bottom furore and the tiresome heroine-or-snowflake culture war that broke out over Biles, this has been a hopeful summer too. Young girls watching their athletic heroes define their own boundaries are not “learning about quitting”. They’re learning the power in saying no. In a society where girls are still taught to pipe down, to suck it up, to not make a fuss, to please, to preen and compromise, that’s the most powerful lesson for any young woman. Biles’s no was not an opting out; she was opting in to her own autonomy.
In doing so, she reminded people what sport is supposed to be about – fun and team effort. “We should be out here having fun and sometimes that’s not the case,” she said. “I didn’t want to risk the girls a medal because of my screw-ups. They’ve worked far too hard for that.” Afterwards, she was the loudest voice in the arena cheering them on. If that isn’t the meaning of sporting, then what is?