It’s the only time that female athletes get equal billing—but that’s only part of the explanation.
Many women love sports, but I am not one of them. I don’t want to play any sports, and I certainly don’t want to watch. And yet, I will be enthusiastically tuning in to the Paris 2024 Olympics this summer.
Once every two years, I summon an Olympic fervor that surprises the men in my life—the ones I automatically tune out when they start talking about the Yankees or Real Madrid. You can’t get me to care about the NBA, but I just might wake up early to watch the women’s three-meter springboard-diving semifinals. NBC counts the Olympics as one of only two major sporting events that reliably attract more female than male viewers. The American Olympic audience is about 55 percent female and 45 percent male, an exact flip of the Super Bowl’s gender split.
Surely one reason so many women watch the Olympics is that so many women compete in the Olympics. The Paris 2024 Summer Games advertise themselves as the first ever to achieve 50–50 gender parity. That’s a fair bit of progress, especially compared with the very first Olympics. In ancient Greece, women weren’t allowed to cross the river of Alpheios into Olympia to even watch the games, lest they catch a glimpse of male athletes competing in the nude. According to legend, a daughter of Diagoras of Rhodes—there is some confusion over whether it was Pherenike or Kallipateira—was caught dressing as a man in order to sneak in. Barred from competing herself, she had coached her son, a boxer, and when he won a match, she couldn’t contain her excitement. As she jumped over the fence separating her from the ring, she inadvertently revealed her womanhood. The authorities exempted her from the punishment of being thrown off a high cliff, because she pleaded that she was merely supporting the men in her life: her father, her brothers, and her son, all Olympic athletes.
More than two millennia later, certain attitudes lingered. In 1894, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin presented his idea for a revival of the ancient Olympic Games, he conjured a grand vision of inclusivity in terms of social class and nationality, but not gender. Zero women participated in the inaugural Athens 1896 Olympics; as of Mexico City 1968, just one in seven athletes was a woman. Even so, most of the women who made sports history in the first half of the 20th century did so in the Olympics. Alice Coachman, for example, a Black woman from Georgia, won a gold medal in the high jump in London 1948 and the congratulations of President Harry Truman at the White House. The only prominent women’s sport league to emerge in the United States before 1950 was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of 1946, and that was only because the war had kept would-be sportsmen busy.
When women did begin to compete in sports leagues, media attention didn’t follow. The Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California has been tracking gender asymmetries in sports coverage on ESPN and network news channels from 1989 to 2019. Not much has changed. Even last year, as Caitlin Clark’s ascent brought unprecedented interest to women’s basketball, another report found that women’s athletics accounted for just 15 percent of total sports coverage.
[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]
Except at the Olympics. Since the 2012 London games, women athletes have gotten more airtime than men have. In the 2020 Tokyo Games (held, for pandemic reasons, in 2021), NBC gave 58 percent of the prime-time screen to women, according to a paper published in the International Journal of Sport Communication.
Call this the representation theory of why women love the Olympics: Put women on TV, and female audiences will watch. But that explanation only goes so far. Unsporty eggheads like me don’t care about non-Olympic sports, regardless of the sex of the participants. For me, the WNBA holds no more appeal than the NBA. So what do I see in the Olympics?
First, it must be said that I see pageantry and good outfits. Recall that the Olympics are one of two major sporting events on NBC that draw more female viewers than male. The other is the Kentucky Derby, an ostentatious-hat convention that happens to take place beside a horse race. I can’t be alone in watching the Olympics partly to see what Stella McCartney designed for the British team and to gawk at the spectacle of equestrian jumps in Versailles.
Second, I see a competition that more closely resembles the worlds in which women feel comfortable and thrive. (I’ve already started generalizing wildly about half the human race, so let me keep going.) Women tend to do better in school than men, and the Olympics—with their elitism, insistence on classic Greek origins, and stuffy, corrupt bureaucracies—have a lot in common with academia. In many marquee Olympic events, such as figure skating, athletes literally get grades. Women are also shown in polls to be more supportive than men of multilateral organizations, and the International Olympic Committee is basically the United Nations of sports. Women also visit museums and art galleries more than men do, according to visitor data. The Olympics offer a synthesized, highly curated overview—one might say exhibition—of every imaginable sport.
Finally, I see an idea of athletic achievement that has more to do with excellence than with dominating an opponent.
When people say they love watching sports, they usually mean sports with balls—football, basketball. Sports with balls (or, in the case of hockey, pucks—close enough) are zero-sum. You cannot play soccer or tennis without an opponent, and you can succeed only at their expense—not merely by outperforming them, but by causing them to fail. These are not only sports; they are also games: socially constructed contests that produce winners and losers—a quality that excites crowds—and that are based on ultimately arbitrary rules.
[From the January/February 2014 issue: The accidental spectator’s guide to improving sports]
During the Olympic season, the ball sports that usually monopolize media attention lose importance. The Olympics may be called the Games, but what sets them apart is that they showcase sports that are not in fact games: artistic expressions such as gymnastics and figure skating, races such as track and field and swimming—sports that are not only sports but also survival skills or dances. You “play” soccer and volleyball, but you do not play running or swimming or skiing; you simply run, swim, or ski. These activities present not a problem to solve or an opponent to overcome so much as a test of what the human body can do. “Citius, altius, fortius” is the Olympic slogan: “Faster, higher, stronger.”
Part of what draws me, an otherwise sports-averse woman, to the Olympics is the pursuit of perfection that is not intrinsically competitive. Of course, Olympic athletes are trying to win. Not everyone gets a medal. But runners and swimmers and so on aren’t bound to their opponents in the same way that ball-sport players are. Anita DeFrantz, an American bronze medalist for rowing in the Montreal 1976 Olympics, told me that her coach always instructed the team to forget the boats they were racing against, to keep their eyes on the lane. This proved hard because she wanted to win, and indeed, she sometimes couldn’t stop herself from peeking at the other boats during the competition. But she was at her best when she followed her coach’s advice and focused her attention on the act itself. “It’s the thrill of the boat when it’s up to speed, winding up in the water, and you can hear the bubbles running down,” she said. “And when it’s going that fast, there’s just nothing like it.”
DeFrantz has dedicated her life to sports, not just as an athlete but as a member of the International Olympic Committee, which she joined in 1986, the first Black person and the first woman to do so. She wrote a memoir called My Olympic Life. But DeFrantz doesn’t seem to care for sports besides the niche Olympic ones. When I asked whether she followed any ball sports, she diplomatically said that she rooted for all the professional teams of Los Angeles, where she lives, but has no time to follow them. I found her indifference inspiring. Finally: an athlete that even I can look up to.
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