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Playing addition-subtraction game
By Laura Weisskopf 9/24/2001
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
They're at it again.
Why is it a prerequisite for the people who run the Olympic games to engender controversy whenever they make any sort of decision to further the participation of women in the world's largest sporting event?
Last week, the International Olympic Committee announced it would add women's wrestling to the events for the 2004 Athens Summer Games. To make room for the mats, evidently, the IOC said it must sacrifice men's events.
Huh?
The International Olympic Committee, under the leadership of new president Jacques Rogge, insists that it wants to limit the number of athletes and sports in the Games. The goal for Athens is a limit of 10,500 competitors, men and women.
But the fact is the IOC changes its mind more than a 6-year-old at a candy store.
In 1998, then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch announced that all new sports added to the Olympics must include women's events. In addition, the IOC started playing catch-up by adding women's weightlifting and women's water polo for the 2000 Sydney Games. That raised the proportion of female athletes to a record 38.3 percent, up from 34.1 percent at the 1996 Atlanta Games and from 21.6 percent at the 1980 Moscow Games.
Now, the IOC wants to trim down the Games while making them more accommodating for female events. This is a difficult, if not impossible, proposition.
The addition-subtraction game is not a new phenomenon. The inaugural 1896 Olympics were a men's-only affair, but women have competed in every Olympics since. Before women were officially sanctioned to compete in 1910, local organizers supported their participation. Women's events slowly gained admittance in the first half of the century.
After Wednesday's announcement, boxing is now the only Olympic sport without a women's equivalent. (For baseball, women have softball.)
In an "effort" to catch up to the 20th century - oops, 21st - the IOC has added women's wrestling to be contested in four weight classes. The men's program will lose two weight classes (one in Greco-Roman and one in freestyle) after losing four classes at the 2000 Games. Final approval is contingent on an agreement with the International Wrestling Federation, which, predictably, favors the inclusion of women but not further men's deletions.
What makes this even more disturbing is the sport they target. Wrestling, particularly the Greco-Roman version, is one of the oldest sports in the world. To perpetuate its contraction - and in Greece, no less - seems contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.
Then again, the IOC certainly has no inhibition about being a target of mockery and derision. It's hard not to chuckle when one reads of an effort to restore tug-of-war - yes, that age-old beacon of international competition - to the Games. After all, it was contested early in this century. Will there be men's, women's and mixed-gender teams?
The definition and redefinition of what is sport is an Olympic committee tradition. This is also the group that sanctioned ballroom dancing as an exhibition sport.
The proposed elimination of men's weight classes obviously is troubling. Surely, the women's wrestling community does not support such cuts. In the meantime, the rejoicing remains for those women whose Olympic dream is finally, maybe, coming true.
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Women Losing Battle of Sexes, Academic Says
September 25, 2001, LEX HEMPHILL
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Each Olympics now, it seems, introduces a new medal sport for women: soccer in 1996, ice hockey in 1998, weightlifting in 2000, bobsled in 2002, and, as decided last week, wrestling in 2004.
But to some, these additions only illustrate how far women have had to come -- and still have to go -- to reach Olympic equality with men.
"Women's role in the Olympics, it's very bad; it's almost nothing," maintains Kari Fasting, a Norwegian academic and the vice president of Womensport International. Members of the International Olympic Committee "are the ones who decide everything. With so few women they have in there, it's clear that women don't have anything to say in that organization."
Fasting, a social sciences professor at the Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education, will bring that female view of the Games to the University of Utah's Olympic history lecture series this week. The only woman among the scheduled lecturers for the series, Fasting will present her talk, "The Gendering of the Winter Olympic Games," Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium in Orson Spencer Hall on the U. campus.
While Olympic history is dotted with dozens of heroic achievements by women, they certainly did not get off on an equal footing with men when the modern Olympics were launched more than 100 years ago. Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Olympics, was opposed to female participation in the Games, and women actually organized their own Olympics, in Paris in 1922 and in Goteborg, Sweden, in 1926. They finally were able to compete in track and field in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam.
"I really don't think it's him," said Fasting by telephone from Oslo, Norway, choosing not to saddle the French baron with complete culpability. "It's the whole world of sport that is so dominated by male values. Sport has been developed by men, for men, and is still run by men -- I mean, top-level sport."
One of the rare powerful female figures in the Olympic movement was Monique Berlioux, who served for about 15 years as the IOC director, essentially the chief administrator under the president. Avery Brundage hired her in the late 1960s, and she exerted much influence during the relatively weak presidency of Lord Killanin (1972-80) before Juan Antonio Samaranch fired her in 1985.
Fasting likes to cite an old Berlioux quote: "National Olympic committees, national or international federations, regional organizations, organizing committees are all, in practice, run as all-male clubs, in which women are tolerated in small doses as guests."
Fasting said, "She wrote that 20 years ago, and it's pretty much the same."
She noted that, after the IOC session in Moscow in July, "they have 14 female members and 115 men. In Moscow, they appointed six new members, and that was one woman and five men."
At that Moscow session, one woman, Anita DeFrantz of the United States, even ran for president of the IOC. She received almost no support and, for whatever other problems her candidacy may have had, Fasting thinks she knows the primary reason: "Because she's a woman, she didn't have a chance."
hemphill@sltrib.com
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Olympic Notes: Tug-of-War Fans Exerting Pull With Officials
September 23, 2001 . MIKE GORRELL
There are 138 days until the 2002 Winter Olympics begin in Salt Lake City.
Bodybuilding is out. Tug of war is in.
Not as an Olympic sport just yet, but now the backyard picnic game of strength and balance has the opportunity of some day rejoining the ranks of Olympic sports.
The IOC Executive Board gave official recognition this week to the Wisconsin-based International Tug of War Federation, adding it to a list of sports led by water skiing and bowling that hope to take part in future summer Games.
Both bodybuilding and tug of war had received "provisional recognition" from the IOC two years ago. But bodybuilding failed to advance beyond that probationary classification because of a "general overwhelming feeling" of opposition by Executive Board members.
The tug of war federation, on the other hand, enhanced its appeal during the past two years by getting more countries involved in the sport and holding a world championship.
Still, its recognition relied heavily on the IOC's love for tradition. Tug of war was an Olympic sport between 1900 and 1920. "Maybe it's not the most popular sport in the world, but . . . " was about all IOC Director General Francois Carrard could say.
British journalist Mehir Bose noted that tug of war had a controversial competition at the 1908 London Games. Fire departments from London, Liverpool and an American city (he was not sure which one) entered teams, but the Americans dropped out in protest, claiming the Liverpool chaps were wearing illegal shoes that gave them an advantage.
So it was down to London and Liverpool, with the home team claiming the gold.
WOMEN WRESTLERS
One other attribute of tug of war that appealed to the IOC: Women can compete. And this week, the Executive Board took an additional step to bring more balance to the numbers of men and women participating in the Games by adding four women's wrestling events to the competition schedule at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Two men's wrestling events must be dropped to hold the number of overall competitors static, part of the IOC's efforts to stem the growth of the Games.
Opening wrestling to women leaves boxing and baseball as the only sports limited to men, and baseball does not really stand out as a bastion of male exclusivity because it does have a female counterpart in fastpitch softball.
What's more, as IOC Sports Director Gilbert Felli noted, there are also two sports in which only women compete -- synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics.
WHAT REFORMS?
The IOC is planning to hold an extraordinary session of its full membership sometime next fall in Mexico to take a look at (perhaps undo) the four dozen "reforms" implemented following the Olympic bribery scandal.
New IOC President Jacques Rogge soon will appoint a commission to examine the reforms, approved at a special session in December 1999, and to recommend refinements.
Rogge pledged that whatever changes are adopted will continue the IOC's "move toward more transparency, more accountability, more democracy." But that is just one man's promise. Many members have spent much of the past two years grumbling about reforms, which they felt were jammed down their throats to quiet media criticism following revelations of extravagant treatment of IOC members by bid committees.
South Korean IOC member Kim Un-yong even made repeal of a ban on site visits part of his unsuccessful bid for the IOC presidency.