Following Canadian Women Athletes to Vancouver

A Proper Spectacle
Women's struggle to enter sport's privileged circle

BY DAVID POWELL, ATHLETICS CORRESPONDENT

ONE hundred years ago this week, women's sport reached one of its most significant landmarks. The first modern Olympics in 1896 excluded women and not until the second Games in Paris, four years later, were they invited to compete. Old prejudices die hard, though, as Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder, two former PE lecturers who have made their own contribution to women's sport in Olympic year, found out first-hand.

Wh ile not denying that attitudes have changed markedly, the co-authors of a new book featuring interviews with 32 of the oldest women Olympians from around the world still struggled to find a publisher. "They were all saying 'who wants to hear a load of old women talking'? " Tedder said.

However, funded by women's groups, A Proper Spectacle has now been published. The book is so titled because Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, said in 1912: "Tomorrow, there will probably be women runners, or even women football players. If such sports are played by women, would they constitute a proper spectacle to offer the audience that an Olympiad brings together?"

De Coubertin had admitted being "personally against the participation of women in public competitions", a view echoed by Harold Abrahams, the 1924 Olympic 100 metres champion, who wrote: "One only has to see them practising to realise how awkward they are on the running track."

Tedder said: "I wondered what it was about these women that led them to do sport at a time when it was so unacceptable? Nearly all of them had fathers who did not feel that way and who supported them." One such woman was Audrey Brown, a Great Britain 4 x 100 metres silver medal-winner in 1936.

The authors challenge the weight of historical reference that states that, when women made their Olympic entry in Paris, they took part only in golf and tennis. Delving deeper, they have discovered three French women who played in the croquet and others who took part in yachting and rowing. Helen de Pourtales, a Swiss, is identified as the first woman Olympic competitor, on May 22, 1900, after sailing with her husband.

One of the oldest women interviewed is Edith Robinson, an Australian who lives near the new Olympic stadium in Sydney.
Though 93 and confined to a wheelchair, she is taking a leg of the Olympic torch relay this year. "Athletes today are treated with kid gloves compared with the way we had to struggle," she said.

Robinson's struggle included the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, famous for the controversy of the women's 800 metres, in which she took part. It was reported that several women collapsed and such was the adverse publicity that no women's race longer than 200 metres was run at the Olympics for another 32 years.

Reports were exaggerated, the authors say. One newspaper produced head-shots of five women, their faces showing the
apparent strain. Daniels and Tedder reveal: "Taking a closer look at the faces in the newspaper, we noticed that they were, in fact, photographs taken of early rounds of the 100 metres."

A Proper Spectacle by Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder,
published by ZeNaNA Press.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/