An Olympic First for Female Athletes
Day 5: Gender Parity (Finally) Comes to the Olympics
For the first time in the modern Olympic Games 128 year history, there will be an equal number of male and female athletes.
Women first competed in the Olympics at the first Paris Games in 1900, after being excluded from the 1896 Athens Games. Twenty-two women (2.2% of all athletes) competed in Paris back then in five sports - tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian and perhaps most notably, golf.
The first woman to win an Olympic Gold Medal was American golfer Margaret Abbott. Her mother Mary also played in the tournament, making them the first and only mother-daughter pair to compete against each other at the Olympics. But the craziest part of Margaret Abbott’s story is that she died 55 years later having never known she won Olympic Gold!
It took another 40 years, until 1996, for women to make up even one-third of the athletes, and until 2012 before every country had a woman on the team. Now in 2024 we have finally reached full parity, with 5,250 women representing all 206 teams. But parity is not equality, and there is still far to go in achieving a truly equal Olympics for women. Mixed Gender and Open events still favor men, and when women perform well in those Open events, the boys take their ball and go home. It will take much more work and investment to achieve true equality in the Olympic Games.
What To Watch Today
(All times Eastern. Full event relays available on-demand on Peacock)
2:00 am - Triathlon: Men's Individual 🇺🇸
3:30 am - Shooting: 10m Air Pistol Mixed Team
6:00 am - Tennis: Women's Singles Third Round, Coco Gauff vs Donna Vekic 🇺🇸
7:30 am - Table Tennis: Mixed Doubles Medal Matches
9:30 am - Rugby 7’s: Women's Semi-Final, USA vs New Zealand 🇺🇸
9:30 am - Shooting: Trap Men's Final
10:00 am – Judo: Women’s <63kg and Men’s <81kg 🥇 🥇
10:35 am - Water Polo: Men’s Preliminary Round, USA vs Romania 🇺🇸
11:30 am - 3v3 Basketball: Women’s Pool Round, USA vs Germany 🇺🇸
12:15 pm - Gymnastics: Women’s Team Final 🇺🇸 🥇
1:00 pm - Rugby 7’s: Women's Medal Matches 🇺🇸 🥇
1:00 pm - Soccer: Men’s Group Play, USA vs Guinea 🇺🇸
1:30 pm - Fencing: Women's Épée Team Finals
2:56 pm - Swimming: Women's 100m Backstroke, Men's 800m Freestyle, Men's 4 x 200m Freestyle Relay Finals 🇺🇸 🥇 🥇 🥇
4:35 pm - 3v3 Basketball: Men’s Pool Round, USA vs Serbia 🇺🇸
8:12 pm -Surfing: Men’s and Women’s Finals 🥇 🥇
In Other Olympic News…
Today’s Triathlon may become a Duathlon if the Seine is not clean enough for the swimming leg of the race.
France was hit with a second disruptive infrastructure attack this week - this time several fiber optic communications lines were cut.
France and Argentina have become bitter rivals, especially in Soccer and Rugby, but no one is really sure how it started.
Having you been watching the Fencing? Maybe it’s time to start.
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