Award winning journalist Tracey Holmes writes on the women who will make the 2024 Paris Games the most gender equitable yet, and one special woman in particular.
Tracey Holmes interviews Kimia Yousofi. Image: supplied.
The International Olympic Committee can’t stop celebrating this fact and who can blame them: for the first time in the Olympic games’ 128-year history there will be an equal gender split amongst the 10,500 athletes competing.
The first time Paris hosted the games, in 1900, was also the first-time women competed at all. The founder of the games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin – a Frenchman himself, was not a fan of women exerting themselves and strongly advocated against their inclusion.
“An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper,” de Coubertin said. Despite his resistance, the organisers of Paris 1900 went ahead with the plan. Alongside 1225 men, just nineteen pioneering women took part.
What a difference a century makes. LOL. How appropriate that this milestone will be reached in the city where it all began. And it wouldn’t be Paris without an Olympic fashion show, would it? The Musée des Arts décoratifs has held a seventh-month exhibition titled, ‘Fashion and Sports: From one Podium to Another,’ just to get the locals into the mood for the games.
Australia had no women representatives in Paris’s first games, but this time around they make up a little over fifty-five percent of the team in green and gold. There is an expectation the women will also bring home the lion’s share of Australia’s medals too.
Although the Australian Olympic Committee no longer issues medal forecasts, it doesn’t stop the experts from doing so. Gracenote, a company specialising in sports data, has predicted Australia will finish in the top five medal winning nations – with a forecast of fifteen gold medals and fifty-four medals in all. That would make it the best result since the Sydney 2000 games – an excellent result for a country of only 25 million in a field of 206 nations.
The Matildas hope to break through for their first Olympic medal and end the heartbreak of finishing fourth at the Tokyo Olympics and the FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup.
Beach volleyballers, Mariafe Artacho del Solar and Taliqua Clancy, one of Australia’s ten First Nations Olympians, will be counting on the experience of Tokyo’s silver medal to go one better on what will be the most spectacular venues in history – a sandy court constructed under the shadow of the city’s iconic Eiffel Tower.
It’s not possible to think about Australia’s women athletes without mentioning the female members of the Dolphins swim team – particularly the expected dual in the pool between teammates Ariarne Titmus and Mollie O’Callaghan – the two fastest 200m freestylers in the world.
Let’s not forget the Opals, who will need a big performance if they are to deny the USA women’s basketball team their eighth consecutive gold medal. But hey, the USA doesn’t have the formidable and evergreen Lauren Jackson; Australia does.
Jess Fox, barring a major incident, will surely build on her reputation as the world’s top slalom canoeist. Competing at her fourth Olympics, this one will be special for another reason, her sister Noemie qualified too.
In athletics – where anything can happen on the night – we have some star performers. World champion pole vaulter, Nina Kennedy, comes into Paris having also won the Diamond League meet in London this past week; at the same meet Mackenzie Little showed she’s in form winning gold with a PB; while 1500m runner Jessica Hull has shown she has what it takes to be in the medal mix.
We also have sailors, surfers, divers, rowers, rugby players, hockey players, breakers and skateboarders amongst a long list of others.
Australia is considered a heavyweight in the Olympic games, thanks to the enormous, ongoing government funding of sport through the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Institute of Sport.
We don’t often stop to appreciate how lucky we are when it comes to funding, facilities, and some of the world’s best coaches. There will be some women in Paris who are lucky to be alive, let alone reaching the heights of Olympic representation.
Kimia Yousofi is a 100m runner and two-time Olympian from Afghanistan. Two years ago, along with dozens of other elite women athletes, she was forced to flee her country after the Taliban took over, banning girls and women from playing sport and getting an education. The country is governed by a regime practicing gender apartheid.
The Australian Olympic Committee and security expert Neil Fergus worked tirelessly, for months, dealing with successive Australian governments, to evacuate Kimia along with her mum and younger brother for a new life in western Sydney.
Being uprooted from everything you know would be a daunting prospect for anyone. Yet, despite the obvious challenges, Kimia continued to train and believe in the impossible: that she would get to compete at a third Olympics in Paris.
As June ticked over into July, only weeks out from the start of the games, her single-minded focus and determination paid off. The Afghanistan Olympic Committee, now in exile in France, told Kimia she had been selected alongside two women cyclists to make up exactly half of the small, six-person Afghanistan Olympic team.
Speaking at a press conference at the Australian Olympic Committee headquarters just days before flying out to Paris, Kimia said she was honoured to represent the girls of her homeland who had been deprived of their basic rights.
“I represent the stolen dreams and aspirations of these women,” she said. “I’m thankful to my family, who have been with me every step of the way, supporting me unconditionally.”
Kimia will take her place in the heats of the 100m sprints in Paris running for the women of Afghanistan, aware that her history-making performance will be banned on television inside her country. She will run with confidence though, knowing there is a long list of supporters from Australia including the AOC, Athletics Australia, and Neil Fergus’s team who have all helped Kimia on her extraordinary journey.
Her Australian coach, John Quinn, will travel to Paris with Kimia having been named Team Afghanistan’s head coach, recognition for the work he has done in preparing her over the past two years despite not knowing whether Kimia’s dream would be realised.
“When you consider everything else she’s had to juggle – training, a new language, getting her family here, all those things, she has been amazing,” Quinn said.
Kimia is amazing. Not even a brutal regime could kill her Olympic aspirations.
When you celebrate the women athletes during the Paris 2024 Olympic games, make sure you send some of the cheer in Kimia’s direction. In many ways, no matter who wins the medals, it is people like Kimia that are the real Olympic champions.
Tracey Holmes is a Professorial Fellow in Sport at the University of Canberra and host of The Sports Ambassador Podcast.