There were several events this week across football, rugby, boxing and the Olympic Games that reminded us of one thing: how women have been treated with indifference and spite in sports over the years.
At Dublin’s High Performance Centre on Wednesday, Stacey Flood was asked about her experience of rugby as Ireland prepared to face world number-one side England on Saturday.
Flood, who played Gaelic football for Dublin minors, spoke of never having had a rugby role model as a child because there weren’t any. Turning the conversation to a more upbeat tone, she said that, luckily, there are girls coming into the system now who can identify with older players in their sport.
Joey Carbery, Munster and Ireland - where did it all go wrong?
“The first person I looked up to was my older sister. I’m so lucky for that,” she said. “Those [younger] girls now have multiple people to look up to. I think that’s such a special thing. We’ve girls coming into the team who started playing rugby when they were five, six years old. I started playing rugby when I was 16, 17 years old. Like, they are already 10 years ahead of me when they are first coming into a programme like this.”
Michael Walker: Carlo Ancelotti’s time at Real Madrid looks up unless he can add to trophy hangar
Mountains being moved to find success in Wicklow football
Do you believe that Tadej Pogačar is the greatest cyclist of all time?
FAI and League of Ireland clubs agree on the need for Government funding – but not much else
It is less than four years since Connacht players were forced to change in disgraceful conditions beside bins at Energia Park in Donnybrook, an incident that rightly focused attention on an IRFU organisation that then had not learned to read the room.
On Tuesday, the Republic of Ireland beat Greece 2-1 at Tallaght Stadium in their Nations League game. As sports go, football has been the ultimate story of exclusion.
Had it been 1970, one of the goalscorers for Ireland, Anna Patten, would not be playing for Aston Villa as women were still banned by the English FA. Katie McCabe, who was suspended for the game against Greece, would not have been a professional as her club, Arsenal, founded in 1987, would not have had a women’s team.
In a particularly malicious act, the FA officially banned women’s football from its official grounds and pitches in 1921, citing concerns over the “unladylike” nature of the game. The FA and political establishment, not blind to women’s football’s growing popularity and success and where huge sums of money were being raised, were troubled as it was outside their jurisdiction and control.
At the time, there were about 150 women’s football clubs, with many attracting huge attendances. One match at Goodison Park in 1921 drew a crowd of 53,000.
A 2022 Guardian piece highlighted the fact that the game set an attendance record that remained unsurpassed for 92 years when the women’s Great Britain team competing at the London Olympics in 2012 beat Brazil at Wembley Stadium in front of 70,584 fans.
It wasn’t until 1971 that the FA finally lifted their ban, acknowledging that there was a growing demand and that the perception of women in sport was changing. Still, 50 years of damage was done.
Also, this week in New York, Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano held a press conference to promote a historic all-women’s professional boxing card in July. It will take place in Madison Square Garden, where Taylor and Serrano headlined the first women’s boxing event at the venue in 2022.
It was Taylor who was invited to take part in an exhibition match with Canadian Katie Dunn at the men’s World Championships in Chicago in 2007 to promote the inclusion of women’s boxing in Beijing 2008.
That wasn’t to happen, a decision that crushed Taylor, with women’s boxing not making its first appearance at the Olympic Games at London 2012, where she won the first lightweight gold medal. Men had been competing in boxing since the USA Olympics of 1904, where a women’s bout was held as a demonstration sport.
Wednesday was also the day that the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the same body that had kept women’s boxing out of the Olympics for 108 years, announced that the athlete quotas for Los Angeles 2028 would change.
The biggest takeaway was that LA will have the same overall athlete quota as Paris 2024 of up to 10,500 athletes but significantly, with a quota of 5,333 for female athletes and 5,167 for male athletes. So, LA will be the first Olympic Games in history to have more women than men competing.
“All of the events and the finalisation of the athlete quotas were done with a clear consideration about adding value to the games,” said IOC sports director Kit McConnell, expressing how attitudes have changed.
The IOC decision is something of a milestone and was highlighted by its executive board’s decision to reverse the quota for men’s and women’s football teams. Traditionally, there were 16 men’s teams and 12 women’s teams. For LA, this will be flipped with 16 women’s teams and 12 men’s teams.
With the Masters golf and Champions Cup rugby among the mainstream sports dominating a busy sporting week, the small wins might have gone unnoticed. But they are a reminder of where women’s sport has come from, where it is headed, and that it’s not yet there.
