Women of the sports world are no longer hiding behind their skirts. They themselves are the latest fashion trend and have no reason to be modest.
That was the week of women in sport. The Wimbledon women, the women’s football World Cup and the England versus India women’s cricket test series are moving to centre stage. At Wembley next Saturday there is even an under-16 girls’ football international between England and Scotland.
“The good news is finally journalists have realised that we’re here to stay. There are wonderful stories to be told,” said Anita DeFrantz, the first – and so far, only – female member of the International Olympic Committee’s ruling executive board.
The bad news is that all too often the women who earn the most column inches are still those who are deemed most attractive by male sports editors. So for every picture of Lindsay Davenport there have been 20 of Anna Kournikova in the papers during the past Wimbledon fortnight. Probably the most photographed female athlete in the United States at the moment is not Marion Jones, who stands on the edge of immortality should she win five Olympic gold medals in Sydney next year, but Amy Acuff, a high-jumper who may not even make the team.
Why? Because the 1,85m blonde, part-time model has taken to competing in a series of eye-catching outrageous outfits, which include a grey fur tube top and black briefs. Her ambition is not to win an Olympic gold medal but to work on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition,”because people get a lot of attention for that”.
It is a situation that depresses author and former US athlete Mariah Burton Nelson, who has written a book bemoaning what she claims to be the media’s systematic neglect of female sport. She says that girls reading the sports pages find so little with which to identify that they think that women do not compete. Her book The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football says that at best the media minimises female sport and, at worst, ignores it. It argues that the coverage of sport is one of the last areas of male dominance. “Nowhere are women as under-represented as they are in the sports pages, and nowhere are women so systematically thrust into feminine, sexual roles.”
Professor Margaret Talbot, head of sport at Leeds Metropolitan University, claims the portrayal of women’s sport has long been conditional on them looking like girls. “There seems to be an unease about seeing women achieving and striving,” she says. “Women are expected to conform to a strong feminine stereotype. Swimmers fall within acceptable female behaviour, whereas female soccer is always seen as an inferior version to male football.
“None of which corresponds with reality,” Talbot continues. “There is plenty of evidence to show many people prefer female tennis.” Although the All-England club still refuses to pay women equal prize money, statistics show television viewers around the world have been watching them more than the men in eight of the last nine tennis majors. The American cable channel HBO has devoted an unpre-cedented 70% of its coverage to women this year.
Chris Evert, three-time Wimbledon champion and now a commentator with NBC, believes the projection of engaging role models such as Kournikova as female icons is actually good for the sport. “Girls now want to grow up and be athletes,” she says. “There are attractive, appealing girls out there and now they realise that it’s okay to run around and sweat and be tough. Twenty years ago it was frowned upon and wasn’t feminine.”
For years women’s football has suffered from the old (male) joke about the players swopping shirts at the end of the match. But in America the women’s World Cup is enjoying television ratings better than for major ice hockey games. Crowd figures already have passed 500 000. Every game has been televised on ABC. Corporate sponsorship is unparalleled.
The 1999 women’s World Cup undoubtedly will set records for popularity and – at least on the surface – give some credibility to Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s comment that the future of soccer is “feminine”. While saying women’s football is “gathering pace”, Fifa also admits football is overwhelmingly seen as a man’s sport, and has some huge hurdles to clear to gain acceptance as a legitimate sport for women in many parts of the world.
“In the case of, say, some Arab countries, the culture may indeed be not accepting,” Fifa representative Keith Cooper said. “And it’s not Fifa’s place to say otherwise to them. Elsewhere, cultures or religions may pose barriers. In macho societies, women are just not expected to play football. Grudgingly that’s being overcome.”
It’s usually the most socially liberal societies where women’s football is strongest, although China is an exception to that rule. Scandinavia provided half of Europe’s qualifiers and the Americas, with the United States, Canada and Mexico, provided three more of the 16-team field.
The best place to measure how far women’s sport has come will be at the Sydney Olympics next year, where more than a third of the competitors are set to be female. Women first clawed their way into the Games in 1900, then hung on by their fingernails as attempts were made to dislodge them. Now those fingernails – polished, painted and rhinestoned – are featured on television and in photo spreads.
Countries now rely on women to boost the medal count, a significant role reversal from the past. A 1928 New York Times article said it was “important that our girl athletes give us some help in the Olympics, instead of proving the handicap they appear to be at this moment”.
But women still have a long way to go, a point illustrated after Joan Benoit’s victory in the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon in 1984. The first question afterwards was not how she felt when she entered the Olympic stadium, but whether she was aware her bra strap was showing during the race.
Like the marathon, the race for women to gain acceptance for what they do rather than for who they are looks like being a long one.