Let's Row Together

Women in – and out – of the Olympic Games, from Greece's Olympia to Paris. And Willie Mays died this week just before the MLB returned to his minor league ballpark to honor Negro Leaguers.

In July, Paris hosts the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, aka the Summer Olympics.

These Olympic Games are the first to achieve full gender parity – equal representation for both women and men – on the field of play. In a break from modern tradition, the women’s marathon will be the culminating event instead of the men’s. (Women have been allowed to run the Olympic marathon only since the 1984 Los Angeles Games, when Joan Benoit won the gold medal.)

Reporting at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics – me (for Time magazine), Kathy Switzer (ABC Sports), and Lesley Visser (Boston Globe). In 1977, Switzer had created the worldwide Avon International Running Circuit, and these women’s races paved the way for the women’s marathon being an Olympic event, in 1984, and Switzer was the commentator for that event. In 1967, men at the Boston Marathon tried to forcibly pull Switzer from the race — they said only men could run it, but she completed the course.

Equality Requires Agitation

Equality for women, especially in sports, does not happen unless and until women agitate to make it happen. Through the centuries, agitation has come in many forms, starting with the women of ancient Greece establishing and competing in their own Heraean (Olympic) Games after the men competed in their Games in Olympia. They forbid women from being present, as athletes or spectators.

Then, in an echo across the ages, not long after modern Olympic games began in 1896 - again with no women competitors – French rower, Alice Milliat, called for female athletes to compete in all Olympic sports. In 1912, she founded, and then became the president of the women’s sports center, Fémina Sport as a way to gather the forces she needed to agitate for women’s equality. More on her efforts – and the results – a bit later.

For now we’ll travel back in time to both the ancient and modern Olympic Games, as we display women's gutsy fortitude and persistence in pushing past male-ordered boundaries in the face of enormous societal pressure from the men to be “good.”

Translation: “Women, please don’t agitate. We know your bodies’ limitations.”

Rebellious women refused to heed the men’s cautionary warning starting centuries ago in Greece.

A bronze statue of Cynisca, her chariot, and her horses was displayed in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, recognizing her as the first woman to win an Olympic event. Its inscription reads:

Kings of Sparta who are my father and brothers
Kyniska, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses,
have erected this statue. I declare myself the only woman
in all Hellas to have won this crown.
Apelleas son of Kallikles made it.

So, we’re in Olympia on Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula, where the first games were played in 776 BC. By 180 AD, Greek geographer Pausanias confirmed in his texts that women competed in the Heraean Games. Like the men’s games, they took place in Olympia, near the temple of Hera, who was the sister and wife of Zeus. [“Ancient Greek Women Held Their Own Olympic Games,”Feb. 2024, The Greek Reporter.]

Here is Pausanias c. 110 – c. 180, from his Description of Greece 5.16 2-4, in which he writes about the women’s games:

Every fourth year there is woven for Hera a robe by the Sixteen women, and the same also hold games called Heraea. The games consist of foot-races for maidens. These are not all of the same age. The first to run are the youngest; after them come the next in age, and the last to run are the oldest of the maidens. They run in the following way: their hair hangs down, a tunic reaches to a little above the knee, and they bare the right shoulder as far as the breast. These too have the Olympic stadium reserved for their games, but the course of the stadium is shortened for them by about one-sixth of its length. To the winning maidens they give crowns of olive and a portion of the cow sacrificed to Hera. They may also dedicate statues with their names inscribed upon them. Those who administer to the Sixteen are, like the presidents of the games, married women.

The games of the maidens too are traced back to ancient times; they say that, out of gratitude to Hera for her marriage with Pelops, Hippodameia assembled the Sixteen Women, and with them inaugurated the Heraea.

The women competed in no combat sports, as the men did. Instead, they ran.

• Stadion: a sprint competition on the stadium’s race track (177 meters)

• Diaulos: two consecutive sprint races along the stadium’s track (354 meters)

• Hippios:  four consecutive races across the length of the stadium (708 meters)

• Dolichos:  an endurance race 18-24 laps around the stadium (about 3 miles.

A wreath of olive leaves crowned each winner’s head, worn as she ate the meat of the sacrificed animal. She could dedicate her portrait and statue to Hera (none have been found), and inscribe her name on the columns of Hera’s temple.

A bronze statuette that is believed to be a Heraean winner based on the costume Pausanias described.

Now, we’re off to France at the turn of the 19th century to recall evocative Olympic moments revolving around women and involving a French baron and a French woman rower.

In 1894, French baron Pierre de Coubertin reconstituted the Olympic Games “as a hymn to virility, a union of ‘brawn and brains’ of which only men were supposed to be capable.” No need to ban women, the men concluded since de Coubertin’s description made their absence understood. Unlike at the men’s games in Olympia, women’s applause for the male heroes was appreciated at the 1896 inaugural Olympic Games held in Greece.

Yet, when the next games were held in 1900 in Paris, 22 women competed (somehow) in sports that men designated as requiring little strenuous exertion; they did this, they said, to protect the women’s fertility and femininity. Croquet, sailing, golf, tennis and equestrian were chosen, with tennis and golf the only individual sports for women. (997 men competed in these Games.]

American golfer Margaret Abbott shot 47 on nine holes ranging in distance from 68 to 230 yards to become the first American woman victor in the modern Olympic Games. (Her mother, Mary, shot a 65 and tied for seventh place, making the Abbotts the only mother and daughter to compete in an Olympics.) Margaret came home with a gilded porcelain bowl, not a gold medal, as male victors did. So underplayed was women’s competition in this Paris Olympics that Abbott died in 1955 not ever knowing of her historic Olympic role. With the Paris Exposition going on at the same time, Margaret thought she’d played regular golf tournament.

The British tennis player Charlotte Cooper won in tennis in those games. Her first of five Wimbledon title in singles had happened in 1895.

In the 1912 Olympics, in Stockholm, the men give the women a few water races to swim. Nothing too long – 100 meters and the relay, same distance for each swimmer.

By 1917, French rower Alice Milliat had seen - or rather not seen - enough (women).

You can’t know how happy it made me to learn this rebellious woman was a rower!!!

In an attempt to debunk the men’s “natural fragility” excuse, Milliat drew attention to women’s participation in World War I. Her exhortations - joined by others - were not enough. Is this a surprise? The all-male International Olympic Committee (IOC) refused to allow women to compete in the showcased track and field events at the 1920 Antwerp games.

Rebuffed by the men, in 1921 Milliat founded the International Women’s Sports Federation (FSFI) so that women could compete in athletics on a global stage, including the Olympic Games. In Paris in 1922, Milliat held her Women’s Olympic Games and 77 women competed from Great Britain, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, and France. British track and field star Mary Lines’s extraordinary performance in Paris is not part of official Olympic history, but it should be. She won three golds in the sprint races and high jump, along with two silver and one bronze.

Records from these “Women’s Olympic Games” should be part of Olympic history, just as Major League Baseball added recently the records of Negro League players to its record books.

When the International Association of Athletics Federations [IAAF] attacked Milliat for stealing “Olympics” to use in her competition’s name, she replaced it with World.

In 1924, the women still had many fewer sports in which to compete in the Olympics than the men did - 13 compared with 245. So, Milliat’s games went on. After Polish discus thrower Halina Konopacka wowed the fans with her distances, and then the French runner Marguerite Radideau won the 100-yard sprint a time of 12 seconds, it was got harder for the men to ignore the women. It helped the women’s cause when a year later de Coubertin left as the IOC president.

Even with female athletes competing for the first time in the 100, 400, 800 meters and high jump in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, the women demanded more, as well they should. The British women let their legs do the talking by boycotting the Games after the IOC president, Belgian’s Henri de Baillet-Latour, humiliated the women’s 800-meters record-holder. The sporting press also continued to play along by demeaning women’s performances. The IOC president had criticized her "for winning without grace alongside a group of ‘poor women’ who could not attain the required level due to their fragile constitution and lack of training. (Those remarks - and his views about women’s athletic abilities - had lingering consequences; the IOC did not let women compete at this distance until the 1960 Olympics in Rome.)

Women persisted, and in 1930, they remained adamant that men would not control their sports. So, they hosted another Women’s World Games in Prague. The continued success of their games AND a slight change of heart by sportswriters led the IOC to reform its practices towards women. Still, the women held firm. The “FSFI responded by demanding the expulsion of women from the Olympics so that they could dedicate themselves to the Women’s Olympiad, which included ‘all forms of women’s sporting activities.’” Then, they held their own games in 1934, which turned out to be their last ones, in part due to Milliat’s declining health.

World War II intervened in the Olympic career of another woman athlete who still went on to become an Olympic first, though I doubt any of us know her name. I didn’t. Alice Coachman, who grew up in segregated Georgia, won a gold medal in London’s 1948 games after missing her prime years due to the war. By then, she’d won U.S. titles in the 50 and 100 meters and the 400-meter relay, along with the high jump (10 national championships). In London, Coachman competed in only the high jump, leaping 5 feet 6 inches to become the first Black woman to win a gold medal.

Not until 1991 did the IOC — all male until 1981 – pass a rule that every new sport at the Olympics must include a women’s event.

In 2014, the IOC announced that gender parity was its objective.

In 2024, in Paris, that objective will be realized.¹

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From Satchel to Willie to Reggie

… and on we go, as baseball continues to lose Black U.S. players from the Major League. MLB Black players constitute an all-time low of 7 percent of all players.

Willie Mays played minor-league baseball in Rickwood Field with the Birmingham (Alabama) Black Barons.

This week, on Thursday night, fans overflowed the seats at Rickwood Field – which is America’s oldest professional baseball park - and stood to honor #24, the Giants’ centerfielder who made “the catch.” Baseball had invited him to this game which was being held to honor Negro leaguers, but on Monday word reached the organizers that his health made it impossible for him to be there.

By the next day, he had died at the age of 93.

Major League Baseball assigned its first-ever all-Black umpiring crew to this game. That’s when I learned that the MLB had had only 11 Black full-time umpires in its history. For a while, the game was shown in black and white, like I watched it be played when I was a girl falling in love with the game.

What I hadn’t heard before I saw this video this morning was Reggie Jackson’s painful testimony of what it was like for a Black man to play in Birmingham. Jackson got there years after Willie had also played minor league ball in this park.

I don’t know that I spoke with any ballplayer more than I did Reggie in the late 1970s when he was the game’s first million-dollar player. He had reaped the benefit of Curt Flood’s courageous, career-ending lawsuit against Major League Baseball, when Flood stood up for the principle that no player should be indentured to a team owner until he leaves the game. When Flood lost this “reserve clause” case, his baseball career was also over. But those who follow baseball have not forgotten for his courage.

With skillful negotiating, Marvin Miller, the players’ lawyer, pushed baseball into free agency, with players free to take their talents into the marketplace and decide which offer to accept. Jackson tested the free-agency marketplace, and came up big with the Yankees.

On several occasions I rode with Jackson to the ballpark as he drove his Rolls-Royce from the East Side of Manhattan into the players’ parking lot at Yankees Stadium. I couldn’t talk with him in the locker room, so I asked him if we could talk in his car. Immediately, he agreed.

Yet, in all of our conversations, spread over three seasons, I never once thought to ask him about what it had been like for him to play in segregated Birmingham during Bull Connor’s reign. He got there in 1967.

I feel ashamed that I didn’t do my homework so that I’d know to ask.

Today I heard him describe those horrendous times – times, he says now, he’d never want to live again.

I hope you listen, too.

1. I am indebted the Digital Encyclopedia of European History of its history of women in the Olympics.

On future Fridays, before the Paris Games begin on July 26th, I will share more about women athlete’s history in the Olympic Games.

There will be NO LET’S ROW TOGETHER next Friday.

On vacation with family and friends.