Margaret Abbott of Chicago was a 22-year-old studying art in Paris when she entered and won a nine-hole golf tournament on Oct. 3, 1900.
Abbott shot a 47 to defeat nine rivals-six French women and three women from the U.S. She had a distinct advantage over her French competitors because they came out to play in high heels and tight dresses.
When she died 55 years later, Abbott apparently was unaware that she had played in an Olympic golf tournament and had become the first U.S. woman to win an Olympic gold medal.
So loosely organized were the second modern Olympics in Paris 100 years ago that some events were thought to be part of a concurrent World’s Fair. Golf disappeared from the Olympics four years later, and its presence was hardly missed.
Women appeared in the Olympics for the first time in 1900, which makes the upcoming Sydney Olympics, Friday through Oct. 1, a centennial for women’s participation. Their presence, once challenged by Olympic renovator and misogynist Baron Pierre de Coubertin, will be of paramount importance in the first Games of the new millennium.
The high in these women’s footwear is high-tech, like the ultralight spikes Marion Jones of the U.S. will wear as she tries for an unprecedented five gold medals in track and field. The tight in their clothing is shark-skin tight, like the body suit replicating how water flows over a shark that Jenny Thompson of the U.S. will wear as she seeks four swimming golds.
Call these women the new centurions.
The Olympic gold medal is the ultimate sporting goal of women athletes (with the exception of tennis players, for whom a Grand Slam trophy is the big prize). Even basketball and soccer players, who have, respectively, a WNBA championship and World Cup title to shoot for, will be better recognized for Olympic triumph.
In 1912, de Coubertin foresaw a future in which women would run or even play soccer, and he said that would not be “a proper spectacle.” Those three words are the title of a new book, “A Proper Spectacle,” by Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder (not yet widely available), which uses history, anecdote and recollection to trace the first 36 years of women’s Olympic participation.
Women competed in golf, croquet and tennis at the 1900 Olympics, then debuted in swimming and diving in 1912. They had to wait until 1928 for a chance at the glamor sport of the Olympics: track and field. Betty Robinson of Riverdale, Ill., became the first women’s Olympic gold medalist in track and field when she won the 100 meters.
Over the ensuing 72 years, the Olympics have achieved near gender equity. Only two sports, boxing and wrestling, are either male-only or have no female counterpart, like women’s softball to men’s baseball. The number of female competitors expected in Sydney has increased to about 4,400 from 3,684 in Atlanta, or about 42 percent of 10,400 athletes. The slight gender gap owes to having twice as many men’s soccer teams in the Olympic tournament; the absence of women in boxing (312 athletes) and wrestling (320); and a preponderance of men in the open sport of sailing (400).
In addition to triathlon and tae kwon do, which are new for women and men, women will debut in weightlifting, water polo and modern pentathlon (riding-fencing-shooting-swimming-running) at Sydney. Other new competitions for women include the hammer throw and the pole vault within track and field. The women’s vault has become one of the most popular events at U.S. track meets.
“At the risk of being a little sexist,” said Dave Nielsen of Idaho State University, the coach who encouraged world record-holder Stacy Dragila of the U.S. to try vaulting, “the event is a bunch of good-looking girls with an X Games mentality and sex appeal.”
The Olympics allows women of all shapes, sizes and ages to show off the appeal of sport. At one end of the spectrum is 27-year-old Tegla Loroupe of Kenya, the 4-foot, 11-inch, 82-pound runner who will tread very lightly as she tries to win the two longest races in the sport, the marathon and 10,000 meters. At the other is 17-year-old Cheryl Haworth of the U.S., the 5-9, 300-pound weightlifter whose dimensions are ideal for her discipline.
“I am very fortunate I came along when I did,” said Jones, a sprinter, long jumper and TV commercial star whose Olympic efforts NBC intends to present like a miniseries. “I am completely aware of the sacrifices female athletes made before me. That I can just show up and reap the benefits–that makes me really lucky.
“The Olympics are the first major competition of the millennium. If I can go there and do what I want to accomplish, hopefully it would help set the tone [for women] in years to come. Actually, the U.S. women’s soccer team set the tone [at the 1999 World Cup]. I’ll just keep it going.”
The soccer team will kick it off, a day before the 2000 Olympics officially open. Following are some expected highlights of events in the next week and enduring performances from the past:
– Thursday
A day before the opening ceremony in Sydney, the U.S. women’s soccer team begins defense of its landmark Olympic gold medal with a preliminary match against Norway in Melbourne. Having won the first Olympic women’s soccer tournament in Atlanta and the 1999 World Cup in the U.S., the team is favored for a three-peat but has a tough draw: Norway, the 1995 world champion, and China, runner-up in both the 1996 Olympics and 1999 World Cup, are its first two opponents.
– Friday
For many countries, the Opening Ceremony is the highlight of the Olympics–perhaps the only chance their athletes will be noticed. The global audience for the ceremony is the largest of any televised event, which means a symbolic gesture can have great power. So it was when a woman, rifle shooter Lida Fariman, carried the flag for Iran at the 1996 opening in Atlanta. Citing Islamic principles, Iran will not let women play sports in public unless they cover their bodies, but Fariman, the first woman to compete for Iran at the Olympics since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, was the country’s flag-bearer. “I know how big a thing this was,” Fariman told the Tribune two years later, “because of all the people who wanted to talk to me about it. I think they [Iranian sports authorities] chose me to say that they give value and credit for women’s sports.”
– Saturday
Maureen O’Toole played in the first water polo world championship for women–22 years ago. She left the national team in 1994 to concentrate on raising her daughter but returned in 1997 when the sport gained Olympic status. At 39, O’Toole will be rewarded for her decades of involvement with the sport by playing for a U.S. team that meets the Netherlands in its Olympic opener Saturday.
– Sunday
Inge de Bruijn of the Netherlands was just another swimmer for most of her career and just another very good swimmer until this spring, when she crushed the world records in the 50- and 100-meter free-styles and 100 butterfly.
In a sport where such achievements raise suspicions of performance-enhancing drug use, de Bruijn’s rise bears statistical resemblance to that of tarnished 1996 gold medalist Michelle Smith of Ireland. Should she win the 100 butterfly Sunday, the 27-year-old De Bruijn would be the first Dutch swimming gold medalist since 1984. Smith, the first Irish woman to win a gold medal in any sport, was suspended in 1999 for manipulating a drug test.
– Monday
Marion Clignet, a 36-year French woman who grew up in Evanston, has been so driven by the idea of winning an Olympic gold medal in cycling that neither epilepsy nor debilitating arthritis has stopped her from trying to win the individual pursuit final that takes place Monday.
After winning a silver medal in individual pursuit in 1996, she was sidelined for nearly two seasons by a chronic rheumatoid disease of the spine. Holistic medicine, she said, helped her cure the disease and win the 1999 world title in individual pursuit. Clignet also will compete in the points race Sept. 21.
Tuesday
For years, women’s gymnastics in the Olympics had been dominated by the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1952, Soviet women won 10 of 11 team gold medals–and they likely would have won the other but for boycotting the 1984 Los Angeles Games in reprisal for the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. Even after the political breakup of the USSR into independent nations, women from the largest ex-republic, Russia, still were expected to win in 1996 at Atlanta.
But that gold medal went to a U.S. team known as the Magnificent Seven. In a sport where careers often last just one Olympic cycle, five of the seven came back to the 2000 U.S. Olympic trials, hoping for a chance to defend the title. Only two of the seven–Dominique Dawes and Amy Chow–made the U.S. team that will be in the women’s final Tuesday in Sydney.
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See next week’s WomanNews for more highlights of women’s events.
