The 2012 Olympics: A triumph for women

Move over Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, said Bill Saporito in Time. This summer, “the women of the Olympics changed everything.” Just 16 years after 26 nations still refused to send women to the Olympics, a record 44 percent of the athletes were female, and they gave us some of the Games’ most compelling moments. China’s Ye Shiwen shattered the 400-meter individual medley record and swam the last 50 meters of the freestyle leg faster than any man. Irish boxer Katie Taylor won her country’s only gold medal as women competed in the ring for the first time. Team USA’s 16-year-old gymnastics star Gabby Douglas became the first African-American to win the all-around title, and the first U.S. athlete to win gold in both that event and the team competition. In fact, by dominating in gymnastics, swimming, soccer, basketball, and beach volleyball, “ladies carried the American team’s medal tally,” said Tasneem Raja in MotherJones.com, with 56 percent of the total medals and 63 percent of the golds.

Yes, it was a good two weeks for female athletes, said Mark Purdy in the San JoseMercury News,but their visibility won’t last. At every Olympic Games, female athletes fill U.S. TV screens, and then “fall almost completely off the radar.” Most people who watch women’s Olympic sports on TV for the spectacle, story lines, and “eye candy” tune out once the Games are over. As a result, attempts to establish professional women’s leagues in soccer, volleyball, and other sports have mostly flopped. The Olympics do inspire girls to get involved in high school and college sports. But do they inspire them to buy tickets to watch other women play? Not yet.

Even so, the 2012 Games represented a huge step forward for women’s sports, said The Boston Globe in an editorial. For the first time in history, every country sent female athletes—“even the most restrictive governments,” like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. And don’t forget Tahmina Kohistani of Afghanistan, the most inspiring athlete I met at these Games, said Mike Wise in The Washington Post. A sprinter, she defied years of abuse and even death threats from men in her patriarchal country to compete in the 100-meter dash. “My country will remember me forever one day,” she told reporters, some of whom wept as she told her harrowing story. “Other girls will watch me and I will tell them, ‘Come run with me. Run with me, Tahmina.’”

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