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Women athletes backsliding on Oly stage
By Bonnie Erbe
Scripps Howard News Service
The predominant lot of surprise, upset, upstage U.S. gold medals at Salt Lake this month were won by women. No, Wilbur, we have not forgotten Mr. Apolo Anton Ohno who brazenly attempted to skate past his presumed South Korean superior in the men's 1,500-meter speedskating competition, then came in second but won the Gold because his adversary illegally blocked him. He, Derek Parra and other male American athletes certainly succeeded in unexpected ways.
But the athletes we Americans will all remember five years from now (if indeed we remember any of them five years from now) will be Sarah Hughes, Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers, each of whom defied the bookmakers, came from waaaay behind and bested the presumed best.
Perhaps most astonishingly, women accomplished this in a year when the gender's stature as Olympic athletes and officials backslid. Yes, Matilda, despite all the hype about Hughes and Michelle Kwan and women being allowed to compete for the first time in two new Winter Olympic disciplines (bobsledding and curling) women are still barred from two of the 15 disciplines (ski jumping and Nordic combined). And, following several years of explosive growth among women competitors in Olympic matches, women's participation this year actually leveled off when compared with the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan. It depressingly dropped when measured against the percentage of women athletes who took part at the 2000 Olympiad in Sydney, Australia. OK — here come the boring but important International Olympic Committee statistics. Of the 2,523 athletes accredited to participate at Salt Lake, 915 were women. I will save you the trouble of resorting to your calculator— that represents 36.2 percent. At Nagano, women's participation was exactly the same. At Sydney, it ballooned to 38.2 percent.
As if 38 percent dropping to 32 percent alone did not amount to enough backsliding, of the 78 countries participating in Salt Lake City, 22 brought no women to the Games at all. This group included such supposedly forward-thinking locales as Belgium, India (which sported one of the first female prime ministers), Thailand, Mexico and South Africa. At Nagano, a smaller number, or 18 of 72 nations (four fewer), fielded all-male delegations.
On the management level, women's participation is even more paltry. Eleven of the IOC's 149 active and honorary members are women. Embarrassed by this figure, the committee announced it will seek to boost the percentage of women officials by 20 percent in the next four years. This effort will span not only the IOC but also its various arms, including Olympic committees in each country and international federations for each sport.
The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta represented a breakthrough year for women in sports. Women athletes didn't knock down doors; they kicked down doors. If '96 was a break-through year, perhaps this is the break-down year? Women's backslide is an especially significant loss when considered against all the advances for women athletes created by their surging participation at Atlanta. Within a year of the '96 Olympics, the WNBA was launched. By 1998 the Women's United Soccer Association began play.
American sports fans explain away women's non-participation in Olympic ski jumping and nordic combined, saying it's due to "lack of depth of field," meaning there aren't enough Olympic level competitors to field a team. This, they say, will come when corporate sponsorships increase and more women compete seriously.
They say this, however, with a straight face, as we watch an Olympic women's curling team compete on international television. Are we really supposed to believe there is more corporate support for women's curling than for women skiers? I don't think so! (As a test, consider how many women curlers versus women skiers you know personally.)
Nah, admit it. Despite the charm and allure of a Sarah Hughes, despite the against-the-odds win of a Vonetta Flowers, it's still a man's world when it comes to world-class sports. And it's likely to be so for sometime to come.
Bonnie Erbe writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail bonnieerbe@CompuServe.com.
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February 26, 2002
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