By: Gunilla Lindberg – IOC Member, ANOC Council Member, Secretary General of the Swedish NOC
Recently during the ANOC General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro, I made my intervention on the topic of the Promotion of Women in Sport. Looking back further again to the ANOC General Assembly in 1998 even there too my theme was based on the subject of the Promotion of Women in Sport.
In 1998 the ANOC General Assembly counted 386 delegates in attendance from 189 countries, however only a scarce eight of them were women. Again in 2000 at Rio history repeated itself – of the 400 delegates in attendance – again astonishingly only 8 were women. Looks like we didn’t make too much progress in the meantime.
Since the NOCs began organizing meetings back in 1952 they have been represented by only a marginal 52 women as opposed to an overwhelming number of 2126 men. 52 women and 2126 men. What do you think about those figures?
Two years ago we had a dream that the participation of women athletes in Sydney would be the highest ever, and the percentage is up to 38% from 34.2% at Atlanta in 1996. That is promising.
Today we know that on the program for Sydney women will compete in 25 sports out of 28 on the roster and in 132 events of the entire 300 (44%).That means that 24 new events for women have been included in the Olympic Program for Sydney.
This is thanks to the work being carried out by the IF’s, the Sydney Organizing Committee, of course the IOC and especially it´s vice president Anita DeFrantz for these fantastic results. This is valid proof that we can bring more women into the world of sports – and more sports into the world of women.
Two years ago a resolution was taken towards the objective that each of our 199 NOCs should include women participants in their Olympic Teams competing at Sydney in 2000. In Atlanta there were 26, will this become a reality? We will have the answer in a couple of months.
We talked about participation at the Games, but there is another side of the coin. Dick Ebersol, the Chairman of NBC Sports and Olympics, recently declared that a good 48% of the viewing audience for the Olympic Games is women and to add to that another 16% are children – this was one of the key reasons for taped viewing of the Olympic Games, women and youngsters do watch the Games but don’t tend to sit up till all hours to catch their favourite athletes.
According to the IOC statistics – 83 NOCs today, that is 41.7%, have women in key leadership positions such as presidents, vice presidents, board members and secretary generals.
In spite of this, again the question arises, why are there no women candidates up for nomination for positions as IOC members for the upcoming elections?
Of the 45 athletes up for election to the IOC Athletes Commission at Sydney at least here we can count 16, a good third.
Actually it is ironic to think that we have made more progress in the sporting arenas than in the business arenas. Another direction where we would only have to gain would be by educating more women coaches, more women sports journalists, more women administrators, and more women technical delegates.
The Olympic Movement needs to develop an equilibrium of both capable men and women in leading positions, taking part in discussions and making good decisions together. And there would be rewards for the sports world in taking advantage of that lost percentage of capable women that are out there that are not being involved in high level sports.
Women can benefit from the Olympic Movement, but yet the Movement could benefit much more from them.
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