SPORTS-BRAZIL: More Women on Olympic Field, But Not in Power

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 15 2000 (IPS) - Of the athletes competing in the Olympic Games, which officially opened Friday in Sydney, Australia, 35 percent are women, but only 12 percent of the posts on the International Olympic Committee, the centre of decision- making power, are held by women.

Sports are a reflection of society, where women’s participation is on the rise, though only slowly in the arena of power, observes Schuma Schumaher, leader of the Brazilian feminist Network of Human Development (REDEH).

Women were excluded from the first Olympic Games of the modern era, celebrated in 1896 in Athens. In 1900 they participated only in two events: cricket and tennis. It took women 50 years to reach the 10 percent mark of the athletes participating in these international competitions.

History began to change in 1964, in Tokyo, when women made up 13.3 percent of the competitors. Their participation has grown continuously since then. Four years ago, in Atlanta, women represented more than a third of the athletes competing for Olympic medals.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) did not include any women until 1981. Prior to the process begun just last Wednesday to replace some of the committee members, there were only 13 women among the 113 officials.

In the practice of sports, Brazil is one of the best examples of women’s ascent.

In addition to sending 94 women to Sydney in its delegation of 204 athletes, for the first time a woman carried the Brazilian flag in the opening parade of what are known as the “Millennium Games.”

Flag-bearing honours went to Sandra Pires, a gold-medal winner in sand volleyball in Atlanta who intends to repeat her triumph.

Just 15 Brazilian women competed at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, but by 1996 in Atlanta they numbered 66.

There continues to be an imbalance in Brazil as there is growing participation of women in sports but limited access to athletic decision-making bodies. In addition, several women’s teams – volleyball, for example – are coached by men.

In sports, more than in politics or in the business world, women face greater obstacles in achieving recognition and exercising their rights because it is an arena where strong “cultural resistance” continues to exist, Schumaher pointed out.

In the spheres where “ability, effort and efficiency” are decisive factors, there is greater recognition of the equality of gender rights, she said.

One example of this is the Brazilian Judiciary, which just this year named the first female justice to its superior courts, but it is “only a matter of time” before more women reach the upper echelons of the legal system because of the great influx of women studying law, where they are evaluated on merit, said Schumaher.

In contrast, political parties, labour unions and sports are areas where prejudices persist and other cultural factors make it difficult for women to achieve access to power, stressed the REDEH leader.

In Brazil, “the democratic government” does not include even one women among its ministers, chastised Schumaher, an instructor who is currently co-ordinating the project “Women: 500 Years Behind the Curtains,” a dictionary with biographies of some 900 of the country’s female historic figures.

Some women athletes are included on the list, which originally was to be limited to 500 names. One is Maria Lenk, the first South American female athlete to participate in the Olympic Games, in 1932 in the US city of Los Angeles.

Lenk won a gold medal in swimming in 1940, and by then she was joined by four other women in the Brazilian delegation. Today, in her eighties, she continues to practice her sport.

Aída dos Santos, the first Brazilian female track and field athlete to compete in the Olympics, is also to be included in Schumaher’s book. Dos Santos placed fourth in the high jump in Japan in 1964, a surprising achievement for a country that had no precedents in the field event.

At the Sydney Games, women for the first time will compete for medals in the pole-vault, hammer throw, pentathlon, weightlifting and water polo, achieving a presence in nearly all sports – save boxing and wrestling.

Two sports that won Olympic status this time around, taekwondo and the triathlon, make their debut with both men’s and women’s competitions.

The Sydney Games, which will have the world’s attention for the next two weeks, are the most “feminine” in Olympic history, and even include 11 events in which women and men compete for medals together on mixed teams.