The 2024 Paris Olympics have finally achieved this incredibly basic but ambitious goal

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games will be the first to achieve full gender parity. From July 26 to August 11, 5,250 male and 5,250 female athletes will take part in the 33rd edition of the modern Games.

In reaching this figure, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has fulfilled the 11th recommendation of Olympic Agenda 2020, which aimed for a 50:50 balance between male and female athletes and an increase in the number of mixed team events, which will number around 20 out of the 329 total events at the Games.

Women’s participation in the Olympic Games began unofficially at the second edition of the modern Games, also held in Paris in 1900. Of the 997 athletes, 22 were women, who competed in five disciplines: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf.

It is often believed that women did not play much sport in the past, but this has nothing to do with a lack of interest in physical activity, but rather with gender policies that imposed a rigid segregation between young men and young women. Sport has played a central role in the separation of the sexes.

‘Muscular Christianity’: The Ideology Behind the Modern Olympics

The educational ambitions of Pierre de Coubertain, the father of the modern Olympic Games, were heavily influenced by what was called “muscular Christianity,” a movement that saw sport as essential to the formation of faith and masculinity in young men.

In 1883, at the age of 20, Coubertain attended the physical education program at Rugby, the British private school that gave its name to the ball game and is the setting for Thomas Hughes’ novel Tom Brown’s School Days.

Marked by France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Coubertin saw in the English sporting mentality a solution to the French’s lack of preparation for war. Over time, he also praised the diplomatic potential of sport to maintain peace between empires. This association of sport with national struggles, imperialism, and war swept aside more playful and pluralistic visions of sport, leading Coubertin to conceive of the Olympic Games as an exclusively male celebration of presumed white superiority.

The modern Olympics have not welcomed women gracefully. In fact, they have played a vital role in keeping modern sport within the male domain, and it is only through perseverance and struggle that women’s presence at the Games has become more accepted and formalized.

Alice Milliat, who founded the International Women’s Sports Federation in 1921 after the IOC rejected calls to include women in more events, was a key figure in this fight. That same year, she organized the first Women’s Olympiad, which was repeated the next two years, in addition to the World Women’s Games, which were held four times between 1922 and 1934.

The second Women’s Olympiad, held in Paris in 1922, attracted 20,000 spectators. In 1960, one of its members revealed that in 1923, the IOC had debated how to deal with the effects of feminism on sport and reluctantly agreed to expand women’s events in order to control their increasing presence and participation in these events.

Lack of parity on the IOC board

Although it is a historically feminist demand, gender parity can hide the ulterior motive of maintaining control.

The 1996 Olympic Charter sets out the IOC’s commitment to promoting the presence of women “at all levels and in all structures, particularly in the executive bodies of national and international sports organisations, with a view to the strict application of the principle of equality between men and women”.

However, parity on the Executive Board was not included in Olympic Agenda 2020. If it had been, the 11th recommendation would remain ineffective since the IOC Board is currently composed of 11 men and five women.

Denigrating female athletes

Beyond the numbers, sport is governed by principles that make any effective equality impossible, including the dogma of sexual segregation that underpins the very idea of ​​parity.

Supposed to protect the female category, the separation of the sexes has influenced the decisions of sports federations each time an athlete has challenged male superiority.

That’s what happened to Chinese shooter Zhang Shan after she won gold and broke the Olympic record in mixed clay pigeon shooting at the 1992 Barcelona Games. After her victory, the International Shooting Union banned women from competing, so Zhang was unable to defend her gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Games, even though the Games were supposed to promote women’s participation.

In Paris 2024, there will be a mixed shooting event, but with teams composed of one man and one woman. This form of “mixed” model will avoid direct competition between men and women.

Ski jumper Lindsay Van was also unable to defend her record at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics because women were not allowed to compete in the event, despite holding the overall record. The International Ski Federation cited possible reproductive problems among female ski jumpers as the reason for the ban. The same arguments had been used to ban women from the sport in the early 20th century, more than a century earlier.

Anecdotal as they may seem, these episodes show that any move toward gender equality always ends up imposing competitive constraints on women. For years, these took the form of sex verification tests, and today, testosterone levels are scrutinized, excluding many African women from the competition.

From a more cultural perspective, France has banned athletes wearing headscarves from its Olympic team, while female athletes in several disciplines have opposed clothing that sexualizes them.

The bodies of female athletes remain one of the main objects of regulation by sports committees. As long as sport is segregated by sex, the difference between men and women must always be marked, preserved and controlled.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Olatz González Abrisketa has University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. Read it original article here.