Chris Game looks at the controversial restoration of women’s boxing to the Olympics
Remember last month’s announcement by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about which new sports it would and wouldn’t back for inclusion in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics? If so, I bet at least something in that announcement really irritated you.
For me it was the proposed addition of golf and rugby sevens in 2016. I assumed, when baseball and softball were sensibly axed at the 2005 Singapore summit, that the seemingly limitless expansion of the already obese jamboree had finally ended.
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Next to go, surely, would be tennis and football – sports in which an Olympic gold medal is not the pinnacle achievement. Followed by shooting, which is unwatchable, and synchronised swimming, which, as its original name – water ballet – suggests, is not a sport at all, but an art form. Sadly, though, enlargement has restarted, and with two more ‘non-pinnacle’ predominantly boys’ games, rather than, say, the more youth-appealing roller sports or karate.
The IOC decision that evidently annoyed even more, though, was the inclusion of women’s boxing in London 2012. Three women’s weight classes will be introduced, with one of the men’s 11 classes dropped to leave the total number of boxers unchanged. So, after a mere 116 years we will finally have a summer Games, all of whose now 26 sports are open to women.
It’s not remotely gender equality. As at Beijing, for every three events – and gold medals – open to women, there will be four for men. Again, therefore, there will be hundreds more male competitors. And the whole show will be bossed by Lord Coe’s 18-member London Organising Committee, to be a female member of which it’s apparently necessary, like the Princess Royal, to be in direct line of succession to the throne.
Women’s boxing, though, is a significant step, whatever your viewpoint. Certainly, it was sufficient to provoke the predictable outrage, and not just from those, like the British Medical Association or the brain injury charity, Headway, who oppose all forms of boxing and brush aside the huge differences in scoring systems and protection requirements between professional and Olympic codes.
I’m not sure if it’s surprising or not, but some the choicest quotes came from male boxers. Bernard Hopkins (US world champion): “I don’t think women should box, period, for health reasons, due to the way the body is made”.
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Amir Khan (British world champion), while admitting that he’d never seen women box: “Deep down I think women shouldn’t fight. When you get hit, it’s very painful. Women can get knocked out”.
It’s hard to know where to begin when confronted with these kinds of views. Pregnancy and childbirth are painless? Men don’t get knocked out? No, let’s start with the other, and perhaps more remarkable, part of the IOC’s announcement: that London 2012 will see not the introduction of women’s Olympic boxing, but its reintroduction, after no less than 108 years.
Yes, surprising as it may seem, women’s boxing featured, albeit as a demonstration sport, at the 1904 St Louis Olympics – only the second Games to which women had been officially admitted in any sport at all. What’s more, there’s a wonderful internet photograph of what it looked like ( ).
The reason for its reintroduction is obviously the sport’s massive growth over the past two decades, here and internationally: nearly 700 registered women boxers in Great Britain, and national federations with women boxers in 120 countries.
We have heard several bids recently for the fastest-growing women’s sport in the 海角视频 – cricket, football, cycling, even ice hockey, but boxing’s claim is probably as legitimate as any.
One stimulus, undoubtedly, was Clint Eastwood’s superb Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby in 2004, in which Hilary Swank plays an ageing amateur boxer who, reluctantly taken on by veteran trainer Eastwood, achieves her dream of fighting professionally. Eastwood doesn’t do triumphalist, Rocky-style films, though, and Swank suffers a spinal-cord injury, becomes a quadriplegic, and is unable even to end her own life without Eastwood’s assistance.
Hardly an ideal recruiting vehicle, then, and the sport’s currently burgeoning popularity owes far more to its intrinsic appeal to today’s young women than to any film-promoted fad.
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At the same time, as the 1904 reference reminds us, women’s boxing has a much longer history than is often realised. There are records of women as well as men participating in London prizefights as long ago as the 1720s, and several of the travelling fairs in the 19th and early 20th Centuries had boxing booths featuring women, partly to attract the crowds but also as genuine contestants. Which is perhaps why the 1904 demonstration bouts didn’t strike people at the time as particularly odd.
Of course, here in the West Midlands we know that the true crucible of the modern Olympics was not Pierre de Coubertin’s Athenian Games in 1896, but Dr. William Penny Brookes’ creation – the first Wenlock Olympian Games in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, in 1850.
Brookes’ Games comprised a mix of athletics, football, cricket, quoits, plus some literary and artistic competitions, with laurel wreaths and cash prizes for the victors. And, with occasional interruptions and variations, they have continued ever since, this July’s 123rd Games commemorating also the bicentenary of Brookes’ birth.
Brookes was a doctor and social reformer, with generally progressive ideas on the virtues of physical exercise and competitive sport. De Coubertin’s aristocratically disdainful view was that women’s Olympic participation would be “impractical, uninteresting, ungainly and improper”. Women should produce, not be, athletes.
It would be pleasing, therefore, to report that the Wenlock Games, unlike de Coubertin’s, included women as full competitors from the outset. Pleasing, but unfortunately not possible. Both sets of Games established an early pattern of systemic discrimination against women that still, in the official Olympics, persists today.
With few exceptions every sport, discipline and event now open to women has had to be fought over, before being reluctantly introduced years, and frequently decades, after its male equivalent. Boxing – 1904 for men, 2012 for women – may constitute the longest gap, but only just.
Gymnastics – men 1896, women 1928, and then only synchronized calisthenics (sit-ups and jumping jacks to you and me). Swimming – men 1896, women 1912. Cycling – men 1896, women 1984. Weightlifting – men 1896, women 2000.
In athletics, women had to stage their own separate Olympics before being grudgingly admitted in 1928. Until 1960 the longest distance they could run was 200 metres, and they were barred from both the 400 metres hurdles and the marathon – the Games’ great popularizing event since 1896 – until 1984.
Reference to the marathon returns us to boxing, for the supposedly medical-based opposition that women have had to overcome in the two sports is not dissimilar. With the marathon it was the fear that their wombs might fall out due to the repeated jarring.
With boxing it was that women were too frail, bruise easily, and are made ‘unstable’ by pre-menstrual tension. It may be this that Bernard Hopkins had in mind in his rather odd remarks quoted earlier, and it was definitely the basis of the sex discrimination case that Jane Couch, the first women licensed to box in Britain, brought and won against the British boxing authorities as recently as 1998.
Couch, a five-times world champion, retired last year to become a boxing promoter, having, as it happens, fought (and won) one of her last contests in Birmingham’s ICC.
It is the Olympics’ loss, as well as hers, that the 108-year gap between the Games of 1904 and 2012 proved just four years too long.
Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at University of Birmingham