Olympic Dreams Gone With the Bigots

At the Tokyo Olympics, according to a CBC radio documentary, women athletes were discriminated against. Must history repeat? Can we learn?

My younger self wrote about “equal rights” in my old blog, so here are patches of old essays.

I can never forget her. She was a pretty biathlete who wanted to be an Olympian. I remember her bright white T-shirt, nice blue jeans and bright blond athletically short hair. When I came upon her she was standing on a low stool and painting on the boards on a construction site. Here our city’s Olympic plaza was being built, inspired by the plaza in Sarajevo. People at the winter games in Sarajevo, a few months ago, had gathered every night celebrate the day’s events. For our own Olympics we would soon have a plaza too.

For this dear lady, though, future Olympic celebrations would be bittersweet. The looming Olympics excited the rest of us; schoolchildren had painted happy athlete stick figures on the boards. And there the blond stood, on her stool, like Moses on a hill, sketching a holy land she could never tread. My friend would never ski at the Games. She would only watch.

The world body for the biathlon for the winter Olympics is mainly European. They had just met and “decided” that female biathletes would not participate. There would only be a men’s event. I could understand that Europeans lag behind the rest of us in feminism, but understanding does not mean forgiveness. Not from me. By waiting four years for the coming Olympics, and then a further four years down the road… my friend, despite her buff determined body, would be too old to compete. How very sad. I felt like an eight year old trying to silently comfort an adult as I reached up to pat her arm twice.

By the way, ten years later an eager young biathlete told me that my old friend was still hitting the snow trails skiing and shooting.

Eventually Women were allowed to compete.

Down the years I’ve never quite wanted something badly enough to become devoted to excellence and focus, not like an athlete, but I sympathize deeply with those who do. Myself, I prefer to read more than I exercise, reading things like George Santayana’s “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.”

This winter, buried in the middle of the newspaper, buried six pages into the sports section, is news that the Europeans have done it again: 

According to the Calgary Herald, Nov 29, 2006 page E6, the International Olympic Committee has ruled that the coming Games of Ice and Snow will include an exciting new event, ski cross, but will not include ski jumping for women. I guess the old unexciting concept of equality is still too new for the IOC.

The article contained quotes of Canadian athletes mourning the loss, and hoping against hope that the aging leading lights in their field would not retire before the next Olympics. Ironically, on the same page was a story of Canadian ski racers getting inspired by, and empathizing with, the Canadian male ski racers. Excitement? Empathy? If only Europeans could learn, as Canadian women have, to stand in someone else’s ski boots. How many times can we turn our heads while the light of half the human race is dimmed?

The British Columbia Supreme Court (provincial) has finished hearing the case of the Canadian women ski jumpers. “There will little solace to the plaintiffs in my finding that they have been discriminated against; there is no remedy available to them in this court.” This was in the Calgary Sun, Saturday July 11, 2009. The Sun, reminiscent of my other essay, has buried the story 15 pages into the sports section.

(…2021 Note: As I recall, an old white male Olympic official, in denying the women’s event, expressed fears about the damage to a uterus by ski jumping. A journalist (Valerie Fortney?) later expressed glee because that same official, at a later olympics, would see all those uteruses in the air…)

Eventually women were allowed to compete.

Finally the issue came to a sad conclusion. This time the story was not buried in the sports section: The front of section C, “People,” for the Calgary Herald, Sunday April 10, read “Behind the scenes of this week’s announcement allowing women’s ski jumping into the Olympics was a group of Calgary mothers who worked tirelessly on  behalf of their daughters to buck the international sporting establishment.”

I am angered at the word “allowing” for I think rights are not “allowed,” nor “given”; 

I am soured at how the “work” came from women old enough to have known feminism, not from any of the male “good German” sports figures; 

I am saddened at the recital of the names and occupations of young daughters who, while they may have gone on to “get a life,” gone on to “the real world,” have also left behind their dreams of skiing down Mount Olympus. 

A bit of my dream life is gone too.

… 2021 conclusion: Yes, we can learn from history, and advance. Then again, as those mothers found, just as Reverend Martin Luther King wrote to us all from Birmingham Jail, progress does not roll in on wheels of inevitability.

…

…

Sean Crawford

Calgary

August

2021

~One Tokyo example: Athletes were not expected/allowed to have children being breastfed.