GENEVA — The founder of the modern Olympics and former IOC president, Pierre de Coubertin, once said that women competing in the Games would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and inappropriate.”
More than a century later, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games they are aiming for gender parity in the same city where women made their Olympic debut in 1900.
The IOC has established a aim for a 50-50 split among the more than 11 thousand men and women, including reserves, registered to compete from July 26th to August 11th. However, the IOC’s latest figures suggest organizers may fall slightly short of that target.
There is still a slight advantage over men among the 329 medal events at the Paris Olympics. The IOC said there are 157 men’s events, 152 women’s events and 20 mixed events.
Of the 32 sports, 28 are “ fully equal in terms of gender,” said the IOC, including the new Break Music event. Rhythmic gymnastics is still exclusive to women, but men can compete in artistic swimming.
Mixed team events were heavily promoted. In Tokyo three years ago, vivid images were created by the debuts in the 4×400 meter mixed relay on the track and the 4×100 mixed medley relay in swimming.
“There is nothing more equal than a man and a woman competing as a team on the same playing field in pursuit of the same sporting performance,” said IOC sporting director Kit McConnell.
A week before the opening ceremony, the official IOC database for the Paris Olympics showed 11,215 athletes, including reserves, registered to compete: 5,712 in men’s events and 5,503 in women’s events, or a 51-49% split.
In athletics, which has qualification standards that are highly achieved by athletes, there were 50 more registered in the men’s events than in the women’s: 1,091-1,041. In swimming, the difference was 464-393.
In football, with 16 teams in the men’s tournament and only 12 in the women’s tournament, the number of athletes was 351 to 264. Wrestling registration has 193 men and 96 women, with an exclusively men’s category in Greco-Roman.
In equestrianism, where men and women compete in the same events, registrations ranged from 154 to 96.
No men were registered in artistic swimming or rhythmic gymnastics, which have a total of 200 women. There is no male category in rhythmic gymnastics.
As the largest team at the Paris Olympics, the United States has the most competitors in women’s events, with 338, or 53% of its 638-person delegation, according to the IOC’s games database this week.
The reduction of 38 men is due in part to the fact that the USA qualified a 19-person team in women’s field hockey, but did not qualify in the men’s competition and registered nine women in artistic swimming.
France, with invitations to compete in all team events, had 293 female athletes registered. Australia had 276, China 259 and Germany 239.
Other teams, although with far fewer athletes, have more women on their squads.
Guam, a US island territory east of the Philippines, led with 87.5% women – seven on its team of eight athletes, according to the IOC database. Guam’s seven women play six different sports. Nicaragua is expected to arrive with 86% women – six of its seven athletes – and Sierra Leone with 80%.
Kosovo’s strength in women’s judo – four of its total team of nine athletes – brings the percentage of women to 77%. North Korea, Laos and Vietnam each have 75% female athletes on their teams.
Six of the 205 official Olympic teams did not have any elite-level female athletes registered to compete: Belize, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Liechtenstein, Nauru and Somalia.
Qatar, which wants to host the 2036 Olympics, has just one woman on its team of 14 athletes, or 7%. Half of the Qatar team represents men’s athletics, including current high jump champion Mutaz Essa Barshim.
Mali and South Sudan are at 7%. Mali will send 22 men’s football players and South Sudan 12 men’s basketball players.
El Salvador has one woman among eight athletes (12.5%).
Registered entries for women’s events in Paris include two athletes who identify as non-binary and transgender.
Nikki Hiltz won the 1,500-meter event at the US track and field trials last month and will make her Olympic debut at the Stade de France.
Quinn won Olympic gold with the Canadian national soccer team in Tokyo three years ago and returns to help defend the title.
Paris hosted the first female athletes at the 1900 Olympics – in the second Modern Games – with 22 of the 997 athletes in competition, or 2.2% of the total. The modern Olympics began in 1896 in Athens.
Women competed in tennis and golf, as well as collective sailing, croquet and equestrian events in Paris.
Charlotte Cooper of Great Britain was the first woman to win an individual gold medal in singles tennis.
Only 4.4% of athletes were women when Paris hosted the Olympics again exactly 100 years ago. In 1924, at the “Chariots of Fire” Olympics, there were 135 women competing among 3,089 athletes, according to IOC research.
The number rose to 9.5% at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, fell to 8.4% in Berlin four years later and returned to 9.5% when the Summer Olympics were held in London in 1948.
The increase included a jump to 20.7% of female athletes in Montreal in 1976 and reached close to 23% when the Games returned to Los Angeles in 1984. That’s when rhythmic gymnastics and artistic swimming, then called synchronized, made their debut. debut.
The IOC has put pressure on Olympic teams that have traditionally sent only men to complete. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei included women for the first time in the 2012 London Olympics. This is where 44.2% of athletes competed in women’s events at the Olympics. The number rose to 45% at Rio 2016 and reached 48% at the Tokyo Games, where teams were encouraged to select one man and one woman to be flag bearers at the opening ceremony.
The IOC has formally committed to “promote gender quality” as part of a comprehensive reform package pushed forward in December 2014 by newly elected President Thomas Bach.
The IOC sports department worked with sport’s governing bodies to remove some men’s medal events and add more for women. Since then, federations have achieved more equality on the playing field for female athletes than for female athletes. women in their own offices.
A 2020 analysis of the 31 sports governing bodies at the Tokyo Olympics revealed that only one achieved 40% women on its board and 18 had female representation of 25% or less.
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