I don't really follow the Olympics much anymore. I'm not sure why, I just lost interest in it at some point. Having said that, I've followed this one slightly more than usual.
Anyhow, having said that, this one has been really remarkable due to women. And I don't necessarily mean their accomplishments in sport, but in standing up for something that really needed to change or to have attention drawn to them.
It started off, at least in my somewhat inattentive to sports view, when Australian Kaylee McKeown dropped out of the Olympics. What exactly motivated it remain (as far as I know) unknown, but it was really clear that she was extremely made due to unwanted sexual attention.
This is something we've read a lot about over the last several years, and it's been particularly bad in gymnastics, or at least that's where the news has been focused. What exactly was going on is unclear, but McKeown basically called some people she had to deal with perverts and said she had enough.
That's remarkable enough in and of itself. Usually nobody gets called a pervert until they've committed a string of really notable atrocities. Even Bill Cosby, who was let out of prison recently, received a warm welcome back by his former Cosby costar, and It's pretty clear he was drugging women and then, well and then. . .
Anyhow, the next notable event was when the German gymnastics team refused to wear the usual tight-fitting female gymnastics uniform and instead opted for the very athletic looking "unitards".
Other than the weird sounding name, this is a positive development. The German female gymnastic athletes look like. . . well really serious athletes. This was way overdue.
Having said that, at least one American standout spoke on it and said she found the current US leotards to be less restrictive, and she liked them. I'm okay with that, but I think the trend away from uniforms that exploited female appearance over performance was sexist, and it needs to go.
And nowhere was that more evident than in beach volleyball.
Beach volleyball arrived on the scene over 30 years ago at which time the networks started televising it on Saturdays. It may have been a serious athletic endeavor at the time, and the women involved in it are obviously athletes, but at least from my point of view it seemed an exercise in televising women, at first wearing as little as conceivably possible. I was surprised when the sport crossed over to the Olympics, but that showed how serious of sport it had become.
It turns out that the female beach volleyball teams were still required to preform as close to nude as you could. Well, this year the Norwegian team said they had enough and chose to wear shorts rather than bikini bottoms. Heck, it isn't as if they're going swimming, and they were simply tired of being ogled rather than admired for their athletic accomplishments.
This met a threat of a fine, and they just charged on anyhow. US singer Pink, whom I don't otherwise follow, said she'd pay the fines. Good for her.
It's common to note how women's sports have come along ways in recent years, and they certainly have. Sports remain the one area of society where the differences between men and women are still acknowledged which is why in most areas men and women are segregated into men's sports and women's. Hopefully for most, this continues, in a real recognition of the physical differences, although in some areas, it really makes no sense. Why, for example, are the shooting sports segregated by sex? At any rate, however, one area where women's sports have continued to be anchored in seemingly the Hugh Hefner era has been in what they've been required to wear, which was reduced to cutesy in some circumstances, or outright 1960s/70s sexists in others.
Good riddance to that.
And the more power to the rise of the female athlete.
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