Women in sport

First of all, a huge congratulations to all those who attended the Olympics this year from Portugal, and a special ‘parabéns’ to the medal-winners - Iúri Leitão, Rui Oliveira, Pedro Pichardo and Patrícia Sampaio, who won 5 medals between them. The Olympics are now finished for another year, and all the excitement is over and those emotional medal ceremonies are finished. Another 4 years before the next summer Olympics starts, in Los Angeles, USA.

The ancient Olympics had far fewer events than we have nowadays, and for many years only freeborn Greek men were allowed to participate. Women did not compete, and married women were not even allowed to attend as spectators, and women’s participation in sports continued to encounter daunting obstacles. But it seems all this is now changing, with numerous advancements and incremental progress now occurring, and the Olympics are at last nearer to gender parity than ever before.

On came the girls

When did women start competing in sports? Although some professional competitions allowed women to compete in the late 1800s, the Olympics did not approve of the participation of women until as late as the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, and Englishwoman Charlotte Cooper was the first individual woman to win a ‘First Place Prize’ at the Olympic games in that year, playing tennis.

Has fashion changed that much?

Men have traditionally worn a top of some sort and shorts of varying lengths when competing, and nowadays some of them look more like swimming outfits, with lycra or an equivalent stretchy fabric dominating clothing. But if you go back far enough, fashions have certainly changed! If the modern Olympic Games ran true to the strict customs of ancient Greece they might well today have been called the ‘Naked Games’, as the original sporting events in the early Olympic Games were played in the nude (the mind boggles).

The evolution of stretch fabrics facilitated the creation of new athletic clothing, and manufacturers began to create colour-coordinated cotton and nylon clothing in the 60’s, and have progressed to a veritable array of different colours, with styles specifically targeted for certain sports.

Even athletic footwear has come a long way. Their origins date back to the 19th century, when the first shoes were designed to improve athletes' performance, and those early sneakers, with their rubber soles and rudimentary designs, were far from being the scientifically engineered style items we know today, that went on to becoming must-have pieces for fashionistas.

The whites have it

Standard cricket attire evolved into shirts with fully or partially starched fronts and collars, and were white - because it reflected the sun, absorbed the heat, and the red ball was easier to be seen against the white, and tennis players followed suit. Tennis had always been a sport associated with the elite, and wearing all white was certainly not something that, say, coal miners or industrial workers would ever be able to do, and in many cases, it signified the luxury of not having to work at all.

At first, it was the men’s clothing that caused controversy. When the All England Club (Wimbledon) first opened, the only dress code was: ‘Gentlemen are requested not to play in their shirtsleeves when ladies are present’, and somehow women managed to play tennis in high-collared dresses with floor-length skirts, long-sleeved tops, corsets and stockings, all of which prevented the range of mobility. But it all changed when Charlotte Dod, a 15-year-old tennis sensation, wore an outfit resembling a school uniform when winning Wimbledon in 1887. Her older opponents debated the fairness of her clothing, claiming she had an advantage in moving around the court, and for the first time, there was thought given to designing a different style of tennis clothing for women moving forward.

it wasn’t until 1920 that tennis player Suzanne Lenglen caused outrage by wearing a calf-length skirt, a low neck, bare arms and a floppy hat all constructed by French designer, Jean Patou. with white silk stockings held in place with small French coins. The press called her outfit ‘indecent’. Goodness knows what they would have said about today’s outfits!

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan