Among all the great stories that came out of this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic games, one is worth dwelling on. 50% of all this summer’s Olympic, and 45% of all Paralympic, athletes were women.
Simon Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Trischa Zon-Hudson deservedly stole headlines for their longstanding medal dominations. But the sheer number of female athletes competing from all over the world stood out to me.
The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin had said that women competing in the Games would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.” Thus, women didn’t appear in the Olympics until the 1900 Games, then only accounting for 2% of all athletes. By the 2012 London Games, every participating nation was represented by a female athlete, even nations where women are not normally seen in public.
Such milestones haven’t come by accident. It has taken concerted effort to make space for women at all levels of the Olympic movement. And it has taken the pioneering effort of countries such as the United States to lead the way.
For someone who wasn’t involved in athletics in high school, it came as quite a surprise to my hometown friends when I became captain of our college’s water ski team. I admit I was the worst skier on the team. I just had to do well enough to compete in one event – happened to be tricks – to remain on the team. It certainly helped that my roommate, John Gillette, was a championship barefoot skier.
But this story isn’t about me – or John for that matter. It is about what it has taken to include women in competitive sports. When John and I were in college, we gathered in a dorm lounge to watch the tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King. Never mind that Riggs was already a bit over the hill; his bravado was over the top. In 1973, he bragged that the female game was inferior and that even at the age of 55 he could still beat any of the top female players.1
Riggs may have been just hyping the publicity, though I doubt it. I do know most of the guys in that college lounge were hoping Riggs would hold up his end of the bargain. King took Riggs on, hype and all, and beat him soundly. Riggs may have been aging, but it was a signal that women athletes were here to play.
That match came only a year after Title IX passed. The new law wouldn’t affect my high school classmates, but it did impact my sister’s class five years later.
Title IX was a gender equality law passed in 1972, banning sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. It opened doors – albeit slowly – for girls and women in academic settings nationwide.
When I see news reports these days of educational bans on women and girls in countries like Afghanistan, I am grateful my wife, siblings, daughters, nieces, and cousins have had opportunities to pursue sports, degrees, and careers to the level they have. What a poorer world we would have without the talents of women that have been unleashed in my lifetime!
Title IX was rooted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declared that discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin was illegal. However, the Act did not include discrimination based on gender, except for a section on employment opportunity. The problem is employment advancements require an equivalence in educational advancements.
I’ve watched over the past five decades as female colleagues and friends have struggled to open doors, often in vain. Passed over for less competent men, treated as oddities in board rooms and management offices, denied tenure, refused employment, and even deprived of access to the pulpit, they’ve soldiered on.
But when President Richard Nixon signed into law the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the doors that had been shut for far too long began to open. By the time Title IX became mandatory in 1978, the law was already having an impact. Time magazine noted that the change had already begun. In that decade alone, girls competing in high school sports had increased their numbers 6-fold.2
Not surprisingly, much controversy surrounded the law – controversy that continues to this day. Be that as it may, doors for girls and women continue to open.
In 1978, my sister, Esther, graduated from high school, proud of her manager role with the girls field hockey and basketball teams at Millville High School. My wife, who I would not meet for another 8 years, graduated that same year on the other side of the continent having competed in volleyball, basketball, and track & field.
Where I saw the impact most personally was with my daughters. Hope had always been competitive in sports at our international school in China, so when we moved back to the U.S. in 2007, she was ready to go out for sports. Outside of school, she and her sister, Hannah, competed in club volleyball. At school, they chose track and field.
What I like about track and field is that everyone, for the most part, is competing against themselves, trying every day for a new PR (personal record). Sure, star athletes grab the attention, but everyone out there doing their best is helping the team.
And that is what my girls did. Hannah followed her sister into the throwing events – shotput, javelin, and discus. Every practice, every meet they’d be out there trying to outdo themselves. Whatever everyone else was doing around them, they knew the job they had to do – best themselves.
That was the attitude Coach Short fostered. “Shorty”, a former NFL defensive tackle, had played for the Denver Broncos and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, as well as teams in the USFL. Now he was throwing coach for the Lincoln High School Cardinals. What I liked most about Coach Short was his patience with the student athletes and how he gave each of them his best coaching, whether they were a star or a kid turning out just for PRs.
With the Olympics, we see mostly the stars. Sometimes a story about a lesser light slips in, but the coverage is about the winners – or at least the USA team. The undersold story is that people – men and women alike – are competing from over 200 countries and, in the case of refugees, those without a country.
Now the Paralympics is expanding the richness of participation even further, not with also-rans, but with true athletes who are doing amazing things. Again, the diversity is impressive. I love that the Chinese para-athletes have done so well. What an example in a region where people with disabilities have for too long been shunted into the shadows!
I am well aware of the controversies surrounding gender in women’s sports. The controversies in this summer’s Games concerning Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan and Imane Khelif of Algeria were unfair to the athletes and their competitors. The rules need to be thoroughly vetted and standardized as we shine an ethical light on this most vexing question.
While we like our world to fit into neat categories, God has apparently made some humans biologically unique. In certain cases, chromosomes, testosterone levels, and physiological markers do not line up as we have come to expect. This is not about human manipulation or self-deception. This is about inadequate definitions to cover the exceptional cases.
But these cases remain extraordinary. And it would be a shame to lose ground on what has so recently been gained on behalf of women who have for far too long been denied expression of their God-given talents. Wherever the female body is at a disadvantage against the male body, there needs to be a place reserved for women to compete with the bodies they were born with. I understand the need for everyone to have a place to shine, but it has taken too long for women to be allowed to shine to push them aside now.
The Olympic movement is finding ways to engage men and women together in certain sporting events, while keeping distinctions where biological differences put female participation at disadvantage. Meanwhile the movement has taken concrete steps to ensure equality of representation across the board.
At the same time, the Olympic movement is making room for a level of gender diversity that some will applaud, and others will denounce, especially when it comes to divergent genders. We live in a world where uniformity of opinion is not to be had – and the movement is both global and secular.
Whatever else, I affirm the serious and systematic steps the movement has taken to include and embrace the role of women at every level. And I give thanks for the actions our nation has taken over the past half century to pave the way for the women in my family to live out what God has instilled in them.
When Senator Bayh introduced the bill that was to become Title IX, he called it “an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs – an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work.”3
For me, that resonates with what I understand about gender equality as conveyed in scripture. I would express it less as a “right” than as a “responsibility,” that all of us are called by God to live to the fullest and give to the fullest what God has placed in us. That “fullest” includes all of our God-given abilities.
The greatest commandment is that we are to love God with our entire being. As Mark 12:30 puts it, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.4
Connect that with other biblical statements. God has poured out His Spirit on all peoples, specifically both men and women.5 The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians adds that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”6
Now you might say, what on earth do these passages have to do with the Olympics or girls in sports and schools? Surely this is stretching these texts beyond what was intended, is it not? I think not.
When the texts say we worship God with our whole being – and it says this in several places both in the Old and New Testaments – I believe that means with everything God has endowed us. When Eric Liddell ran like the wind in the 1924 Paris Olympics, he said God had made him fast. In other words, God had designed him to run – and to run with all his might.
Of course, just because God has made you fast does not mean that human societies will allow you to run. But when they do allow you to run, you can trust that God has opened that door. To reference my friend, John A. Koeshall, “the long outworking of God’s intention,” while not always actualized in the text, is certainly pointed to in the text.
Through the voice of the Prophet Joel and Apostles Peter and Paul, the outworking of God’s intention is that God wills to use men and women alike – to the fullest He has created them. For us to deny anyone their God-given responsibility to exercise the attributes God has endowed them with, purely on the basis of gender, seems woefully wrong.
In case you missed my other Olympics posts: Remembering the ’72 Munich Olympics; Liddell’s 100-year-old Paris Gold legacy; The 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony…; Where does the power come from? Check out this page for additional resources.
Photo: Coach Short, Hope, me, Kim, & Hannah
- https://web.archive.org/web/20071025021004/http:/www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907843,00.html ↩︎
- https://time.com/4822600/title-ix-womens-sports/ ↩︎
- 118 Cong. Record 5808 (1972). ↩︎
- NIV ↩︎
- Acts 2:17, quoting Joel 2:28 ↩︎
- Galatians 3:28 ↩︎
Thanks, Howard! Great blog.
Thanks, Jenny!