The News
The 2024 Paris Olympics is the first in the competition’s history to have about as many men as women athletes. Gender parity is a theme of the Games this year, and organizers have pushed for a similarly even split in the coverage of the events.
The Olympics’ official broadcaster has urged camera operators to film male and female athletes in the same way, and schedules have been changed to boost viewer numbers on women’s sports, Le Monde reported.
SIGNALS
Afghan women compete in special gender-equal team
Cyclists (and sisters) Fariba and Yulduz Hasmi are among a special gender-equal team organized by the International Olympic Committee to represent Afghanistan, a rebuke of the Taliban’s ban on female athletes. “Despite all the rights that were taken from us…we will be able to represent 20 million Afghan women,” Yulduz told the BBC. Some critics said including an Afghan team risks legitimizing the Taliban’s regime. All three women live in exile, so they should compete on the Refugee Olympic Team and not represent the country, a former Afghan female athlete argued in The New York Times. The IOC’s stance, however, is that the Afghan team “is not a team associated with the de facto Taliban authorities,” The New Arab reported.
Equal coverage is still lacking
Coverage of women’s sport is often focused “on how women athletes look, versus their power, grit, and performance,” the CEO of New York-based non-profit Women’s Sports Foundation told Al Jazeera. Indeed, broadcaster Eurosport dropped an Olympics commentator on Sunday after he joked about the Australian women’s swimming team “doing their makeup.” Coverage can also be shallow in other ways, limited to news of scores and results, a 2023 study found. Record viewership figures have been primarily driven by international sporting events, so “the current challenge is how to best convert those eyeballs into consistent consumers [of women’s sports],” Sports Short noted.
Transgender inclusion remains a controversial issue
Transgender athletes faced “greater hurdles” to participation ahead of the Olympics, Inside The Games noted. The IOC’s emphasis on gender parity sidesteps the issue of transgender inclusion, and it has “abdicated responsibility,” one sports and gender researcher told PBS, by instead letting countries set their own policies, with uneven results. Some sports authorities have turned to the controversial practice of selective sex hormone testing, which critics say discriminate against athletes like Caster Semenya, a South African runner who won a discrimination case against World Athletes at the European Court of Human Rights over the decision to set testosterone limits for women athletes.