The Paris Olympic Games will be the first in history to be gender-balanced : 5250 female athletes and 5250 male athletes are expected to attend this major international sporting event. But does parity mean diversity ? Not quite. Taking an interest in the way sport deals with the issue of gender equality is particularly interesting for thinking about the subject in the workplace as well.
The " women of sport " or the exception to the rule of men's sport
Let's say it from the outset, the sport we know today was conceived as a space of separation of the sexes. Moreover, Baron de Coubertin, creator of the Olympic Games of the modern era, was very unfavourable to women's Olympiads which he considered "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and we are not afraid to add: incorrect ". So, at the (re)birth of the Games, there is no question of seeing female competitors. With five exceptions : tennis, sailing, croquet, golf and horse riding where women were allowed to compete.
But why these sports ? Because they had a tradition of " women of sport ". A tradition perpetuated in the aristocracy that trained girls in a few sports disciplines as they were trained to play music, they were encouraged to read or paint because it was in a way part of the composition of a " social dowry". But there is no question of showing yourself in sports clothes, sweating or making sounds related to effort. Feminine attire required !
Earning his place on the pitch... Competition !
From then on, the history of women's sport was one of conquest to obtain, discipline after discipline, the right to participate. At the Amsterdam Games in 1928, several sports were open to women : athletics, gymnastics, swimming... But women's events represent only 12% of the total competitions presented at the Games. The figure rose to 17% in 1952 ; then to 22% in 1972 ; 30% in 1988 ; 40% in 2000 to reach 47% at the turn of the twenty-first century. This shows how long it has been!
This path has been strewn with several pitfalls. The question of clothing to begin with, because it has long been understood in the federations' regulations that women and men should not practice the same discipline in equivalent costumes, forcing women to practice in dresses or skirts for a long time (which, common sense indicates, is not necessarily ideal for freedom of movement).
There was also the question of the aesthetics of sport : and there was endless debate about whether a woman who threw the shot put, who played football, who swam the front crawl or who boxed, was beautiful or not. What if the spectators really wanted to see the grimaces of the effort on the women's faces, the protrusion of the muscles on their arms and chests... Does this mean that we didn't want to see powerful, efficient, competitive women? Something to ponder when one would be tempted, still today, to denigrate those who embody this power, this performance, this competitiveness on the grounds that it is not " feminine " enough...
The taboo of co-education
Today, the Games are finally gender-balanced ! And all disciplines are open to women. This is also true for men, but that does not mean that events are organized to allow them to compete in sports that have long been considered " feminine ". Thus, if in 2024, men's teams will compete for the first time in artistic swimming, this will not yet be the case for rhythmic gymnastics, which will be the last unisex sport for the Paris Games. But the athlete Peterson Ceus is actively campaigning for an end to the gendered segregation of disciplines.
While there has been considerable progress in terms of the representation of women and men in all Olympic sports, one issue remains almost complete : that of gender diversity. In most events, women compete on one side and men on the other. But not together. There are a few exceptions : horse riding, the mixed 4×100 relay in swimming and athletics...
But the general principle is not to put women and men together at the same time on the same court, in the same pool, on the same tatami, on the same track. And why is that ? The argument is obvious : male and female physiologies do not produce the same sports performance!
The performance in question
Let's talk about performance ! In sport, it has so far been well understood that the goal of competition is to determine who goes the fastest, the highest, the farthest, the strongest. But now this conception is shaken up by the announced end of records. You may have already noticed that it has become much rarer today than 30 years ago to see a record broken in an official competition... And it is becoming more and more common for new records to be the subject of suspicion of doping. This is quite normal, says the report of the " Sport, Expertise and Performance " Lab of the Institute for Biomedical Research and Epidemiology of Sport (IRMES): there will no longer be any exceeding of human limits in sport by 2060 .
In other words, the question of " who is the fastest person in the world " or " who jumps the highest " or who " throws the farthest " will be definitively decided. This may make some events much less interesting, which could even disappear. With the disappearance of interest in the individual's physical capacities pushed to the extreme, the problem of differentiating between women's and men's abilities, with a few micro-markers, is also likely to become obsolete.
Faster, higher, stronger, TOGETHER !
It is a safe bet that the sporting performance of the future will be more on the side of team sports. And the International Olympic Committee is not mistaken in revising its traditional motto " citius, atius, fortius " (faster, higher, stronger) to add " communiter " (together) from 2021.
Indeed, all the new sports that are created are team sports and most of them are sports whose rules are designed so that they can be played in a mixed way : footgolf, kinball, korfball, tchoukball, goaltimate, teqball... At the same time, traditional sports are being redeployed to be played in a mixed environment, such as 3×3 basketball, touch rugby, real mixed football, etc. There are also those who take advantage of the renovation of the disciplines to see inclusion in the broader sense, such as sitting volleyball, which allows able-bodied players and players with disabilities to share the same court, the same rules of the game, the same objectives and the same emotions at the same time.
Tomorrow, sport could be even more exciting than it is today because a whole field of innovation is opening up to us to reinvent it, obviously in diversity and diversity. At the same time, this is an exciting social innovation project that is also shaping up for companies : rethinking performance based on the principle of inclusion.
