Panoramic view of crowds ready for the Olympic torch relay throughout the Paris Metropolis Corridor celebrations on Bastille Day, the eve of the 2024 Paris Olympic Video games. Obligatory Credit score: Jon Durr-USA TODAY Sports activities PARIS – Tennis champion and pioneer Billie Jean King informed Reuters the concentrate on gender equality on the Paris Olympics is the most recent victory in a dramatic march for girls’s sports activities that organizers have touted for girls’s progress on the Olympics.
The Paris Olympics is the primary time that quotas for female and male athletes have been equally distributed, a milestone second for the Olympic motion that the Worldwide Olympic Committee has been pursuing for a few years.
For advocates like King, it marked one other excessive level for girls’s sports activities, with the WNBA’s rankings hovering and the Skilled Girls’s Hockey League (PWHL) celebrating its first 12 months of success.
“It has been an actual enchancment over the previous two, three, 4, 5 years. I am actually fortunate that I am alive to see this,” she informed Reuters. “I take into consideration the ladies and other people prior to now who cared about us, ladies’s sports activities, however they’re not round as we speak. I want they have been nonetheless alive. As a result of they did all of the work and received nothing in return.” More often than not. place.
It has been 100 years since Paris final hosted the Olympics, when 135 ladies and a couple of,954 males took half, and King mentioned the IOC was “exhibiting the world it was doing the suitable factor”.
“This 12 months’s Olympics is so targeted on equality, which is what we dream of,” mentioned King, who helped the U.S. win gold medals because the U.S. ladies’s tennis coach in 1996 and 2000.
An advocate for feminine Paralympians, the 12-time Grand Slam champion is fast to level out that Paralympians wish to see the identical equity. The Paralympic Video games, which can kick off in Paris after the Olympics, are anticipated to have a quota allocation ratio of roughly 55% to 45% for women and men respectively.
Even so, 5 years after King spearheaded the formation of the WTA, the primary really world skilled ladies’s sports activities tour, she is happy with the progress that has been made.
As America particularly embraces the star energy of feminine athletes, King sees the paradigm shifting.
“Finally, we’re seen as an funding, not a charity,” she mentioned.
The Olympic 12 months will get even sweeter as King celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of her Girls’s Sports activities Basis and followers can sit up for seeing her within the stands at Roland Garros when she competes in Paris.
“Equality on the Olympics sends a brand new message,” she mentioned. “It is a utterly totally different recreation now.”
——Reuters, particularly for reside media
