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It’s a tricky business, declaring something to be “gender-equal.” Such bold statements tend to be swiftly followed by a giant “but”—and it looks like the Paris Olympics are no different.
For the first time at the Games, we’ve been told, there’s parity when it comes to the number of male and female athletes taking part. Well, there are actually 5,630 men and 5,416 women, but don’t tell that to the International Olympic Committee, which is making a song and dance about this being an “historic” moment of 50/50 representation, and using the hashtag #GenderEqualOlympics at every opportunity.
I don’t mean to sound horribly cynical… this is great stuff on the surface. There are genuinely positive moves, such as breastfeeding athletes being given private rooms and an on-site nursery. But only a few days into the Games, it’s undeniable that the “gender equal” tag is starting to look as shaky as that rendition of the can-can during the opening ceremony.
Where to begin? Perhaps with the Olympics camera operators, who have been warned by its official broadcaster to avoid “sexist” portrayals of sportswomen. The Olympics Broadcasting Services has updated its guidelines to ask its mostly male camera team (I can see the first problem there, can’t you?) to avoid shooting close-ups of female competitors, which are more common than those of men.
“Women athletes are not there because they are more attractive or sexy or whatever. They are there because they are elite athletes,” mansplained CEO Yiannis Exarchos. To give it some credit, the broadcaster has juggled the schedule so that previously overlooked women’s events get primetime slots. But I can’t quite work up the enthusiasm they probably imagined this radical move would prompt, given that it’s the lowest of all the low-hanging fruit.
Then there’s Bob Ballard, who was dropped from Eurosport’s commentating roster over the weekend for making sexist remarks about the Australian women’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay swimming team. As they celebrated with their gold medals by the poolside, Ballard said, “Well, the women [are] just finishing off. You know what women are like… hanging around, doing their make-up.” Well done on reaching the pinnacle of your sport gals! Now, stop making the men wait, like you do when you’re slapping on all those silly cosmetics, and let them get on with the real competition, okay?
Just the sort of casual sexism women need when we should be applauding their achievements. Ballard is an experienced presenter; that he saw women as fair game for a “joke” that should have died out with the dinosaurs (and that he hasn’t learned from the previous misogynistic missteps of other commentators) speaks volumes about how sportswomen are still viewed. (Ballard has apologized for his comments.)
Is now a good time to mention the fact a convicted child rapist is being allowed to compete? In 2016, Dutch international volleyball player Steven van de Velde was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of rape involving a 12-year-old British schoolgirl he contacted on Facebook, when he was 19. He was released after serving just 12 months, and is now, unbelievably, representing his country in Paris, after the IOC conveniently left it up to the Netherlands to decide.
He’s been given special treatment galore, excused from staying in the main Athletes’ Village and from having to give media interviews. “We are protecting a convicted child rapist to do his sport as best as possible and for a tournament which he qualified for,” said a spokesman for the team. Sure, because why worry about what it says to victims of sexual assault and other young athletes when there’s volleyball to play? What a thing to be proud of! What a role model! What a message for the Games to send, that a child rapist is perfectly fine to compete, but—just to pluck a random example out of thin air—French women who wear the hijab or religious headscarves are not.
Honestly, I could go on. I haven’t even mentioned Nike’s flagship uniforms for its male and female track athletes—shorts for the men and, as one option for the women, the sort of high-cut underwear that make a Brazilian wax absolutely essential, and which US competitor Lauren Fleshman described as “a costume born of patriarchal forces.” As Fleshman added: “Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display. If this outfit was truly beneficial to physical performance, men would wear it.”
Given all of the above, it’s not all that surprising how, after the 2016 Games in Rio, researchers from Cambridge University Press found that much of the reporting language used around the competitors was sexist, with a disproportionate focus on women’s appearance (hello Bob Ballard), clothing, and personal lives, and commonly used words including “aged,” “pregnant,” and “married.” That’s compared to “fast” and “strong” for men. Not to mention the nasty habit of sportswomen being referred to as “girls.”
And, frankly, we’re not much better in the UK. I’m talking about those cavemen on social media who have been complaining that some of the beach volleyball players are—shock, horror—wearing leggings for the first time instead of bikini bottoms. Never mind that many women in the sport have called their previously skimpy outfits impractical, or that, you know, they just might not fancy having millions of viewers looking at their vulvas.
It all adds up to a picture in which women still aren’t as equal as Olympics organizers might like to imagine, and where some female athletes must feel as though they’re in a giant game of misogynistic Whac-A-Mole, where an unexpected sexist could pop up at any moment and belittle their life’s work.
Of course, part of their dedication to sport is learning to focus and shut out the external noise—something these elite competitors are the best in the world at doing. But if they came into the Paris Games feeling proud to be part of the first #GenderEqualOlympics, they might already be thinking it’s not quite the level playing field they were promised.