Women Race Into Position For Olympics

When the modern Olympics began in Athens in 1896, one dismissive tradition carried over from the ancient games. All 245 athletes from 14 nations who competed in Athens were men. Women were expected to lend their applause, not their athletic skills.

Olympic historians now believe that two women ran the marathon course near or during the Games. If so, the organizers were unimpressed. Distance running by women was thought to be unladylike, a violation of natural law.

The common wisdom held that a woman was not physiologically capable of running mile after mile; that she wouldn’t be able to bear children; that her uterus would fall out; that she might grow a mustache; that she was a man, or wanted to be one.

Not until 1984 in Los Angeles would the women’s marathon become a sanctioned Olympic event. Joan Benoit Samuelson, the winner, had attended high school in Maine, where women’s track teams were not granted varsity status during her freshman and sophomore years.

She won the 1975 state championship in the mile - the longest distance a woman was allowed to run - but because she insisted on practicing with the boys to improve her times, she was denied the school’s most valuable athlete award.

“That’s when I said to myself, ‘I’ll show that coach - I’m going to win an Olympic medal someday,”’ Samuelson says. Nine years later she did.

Twelve years after Samuelson’s victory, the participation of women in the Summer Games has been widely transformed. While only 19 women competed in the 1900 Summer Games in Paris, 3,800 women are expected among the 10,800 athletes competing in Atlanta from July 19 through Aug. 4. That’s 1,100 more than participated in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

The 1996 Games will be remembered, no doubt, for Atlanta’s heat and sclerotic traffic but also as the year women took over the Olympics - setting the stage, perhaps, for an assault on the largely male preserve of professional sports.

For it is women who are expected to provide many of the memorable accomplishments, the media focus and even the controversy of the centennial Games.

Even if, statistically, women don’t make better athletes than men, women make for better stories.

Because women have struggled so long and resolutely to overcome cultural, racial and religious obstacles, their accomplishments carry a resonance particularly associated with the Olympics: sacrifice, struggle, elusive victory gained over great odds.

Wilma Rudolph won the 100-meter sprint at the 1960 Rome Olympics having overcome a childhood bout with polio.

Gail Devers of Los Angeles won the same race at the 1992 Barcelona Games, two years after her swollen, infected feet were nearly amputated following a reaction to radiation treatment for Graves’ disease.

Gwen Torrence of suburban Atlanta, the 1996 100- and 200-meter sprint favorite, ran in low-heeled shoes during gym class in high school because she thought sneakers and gym shorts made her seem too masculine.

Whether it’s the compelling stories, or the prominence of American women in the hot new sports, or the increased general participation of women in athletics, one thing is certain: Women - who will make up half the Olympic television audience in the United States - are now squarely on the radar screen of TV sports executives, who will assiduously cater to their viewers’ interests.

There is no more reliable indicator of women’s newfound muscle than this: Their favorite events - swimming, gymnastics and, to a lesser extent, track - will dominate primetime Olympic coverage.

“I think the American public loves champions, and particularly when that champion is a woman,” says Harvey Schiller, the president of Turner Sports and the former executive director of the United States Olympic Committee.

“We have still not demonstrated equality in women’s participation in sports,” Schiller adds. “When a woman succeeds, I think the public recognizes how much harder they had to work.”

The public has no idea, however, how hard it has been for women to get just this far. As part of the Olympic Arts Festival, Avon will sponsor “The Olympic Woman,” an exhibition depicting the conflicts and triumphs of women in a century of Olympic competition.

The exhibition will feature the pioneering efforts of women such as Aileen Riggin Soule, the oldest living American female gold medalist and a competitive swimmer at age 90, and Alice Coachman, the first black woman to win Olympic gold, in the high jump at the 1948 London Games.

As a child in New York, Aileen learned of the ancient Olympic Games by listening to her mother read aloud from “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” and other Greek epics.

By 1920, women’s diving had become an Olympic sport. But Soule, 4 foot 7 and 65 pounds, was 14 years old, as was the other top American diver, Helen Wainwright.

Olympic officials had agreed to send women to the Summer Games in Antwerp, Belgium, but these were girls. No one wanted the responsibility of chaperoning a pair of 14-year-olds on a two-week boat trip to Europe.

“The selection committee didn’t want women at all,” Soule says. “They wanted to keep it pristine, as in ancient Greece, where women weren’t even allowed to be spectators.” Eventually, officials relented and both Soule and Wainwright made the trip to Antwerp.

During the crossing, they trained while harnessed in a canvas tank filled with sea water. The tank was only 7 feet deep, but Soule and other female divers, used to the lack of access to conventional pools, had grown accustomed to improvisation.

She had done much of her training, she said, in a tidal lagoon at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, where the water was only 6 feet deep and divers had to brake with their hands on the sandy bottom.

Soule had gained a certain grace and body control and toe-pointing skill at the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet school; she won the gold medal in the Olympic springboard competition, and Wainright took the silver. Those who had been skeptical about sending the girls to Antwerp now honored them with a parade down Fifth Avenue.

Four years later, Soule competed in the Paris Olympics and became the first woman to win medals in two sports - a silver in springboard diving and a bronze in the 100-meter backstroke.

In 1926, Gertrude Ederle of New York, a bronze medalist in the 100-meter freestyle in 1924, became the first woman to swim the English Channel, breaking the men’s record by almost two hours.

“It had been pretty well established that women were good in the water,” Soule says. Breaking men’s records was one thing. Surmounting racial obstacles was another.

At the 1948 London Olympics, Coachman, of Albany, Ga., met members of the royal family and was invited aboard a royal yacht. Back home in Jim Crow Georgia, she could not train on the same track as whites, and her welcome-home ceremony in the Albany Municipal Auditorium was segregated - whites on one side of the stage, blacks on the other.

Coachman received a number of gift certificates and flowers, presumably from whites, but the accompanying cards went unsigned.

“During segregated times, no one wanted to come out and let their peers know they had given me gifts,” Coachman says. “I knew I was from the South, and like any other Southern city, you had to do the best you could.

“I made a difference among the blacks, being one of the leaders. If I had gone to the Games and failed, there wouldn’t be anyone to follow in my footsteps. It encouraged the rest of the women to work harder and fight harder.”

The fight was far from over, on either racial or cultural fronts. As an adolescent in Far Rockaway, Queens, Nancy Lieberman-Cline had her basketballs punctured with a screwdriver by her disapproving mother.

In 1976, she became, at 18, the youngest-ever American Olympic basketball player, and later the first woman to play in a men’s professional league, eventually entering the basketball Hall of Fame.

Anita DeFrantz won a bronze medal in 1976 in the eight-oared shell with coxswain, having endured harassment at the Vesper rowing club in Philadelphia, where men nailed shut the door to the women’s locker room. She is now a member of the International Olympic Committee.

Dot Richardson, the 1996 softball shortstop, declined an offer as a 10-year-old to play Little League baseball in Orlando, Fla., when the coach demanded that she cut her hair and be known on the field as “Bob.”

Even with their increased numbers, women will still be outnumbered almost 2-to-1 by men at the Games in Atlanta. Only seven of the International Olympic Committee’s 104 members are women. Of the 169 countries that took part in the 1992 Olympics, 35 did not send any women to Barcelona.

“It is amazing how far women have come, but it’s a half-full, half-empty success,” says Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation.

For now, perhaps. But the factors that have come together to move women in from the fringes of sport are still at work and gaining momentum every year.

Title IX of the 1972 Amendments to the Education Act prohibited discrimination based on sex at universities that receive federal funds. According to the NCAA, 29,977 women competed in collegiate sports in 1971-72. By 1995, that number had increased to 110,524.

The visibility of star players and the availability of college scholarships encouraged more girls to play sports in high school. Whereas 62,211 highschool girls participated in track and field in 1972-73, 345,700 did so in 1994-95.

The effects were felt far beyond American shores, supporting the global explosion in women’s sports.

To maintain the number of sports scholarships for men, athletic departments had to offer more scholarships to women - there were virtually no scholarships for women before Title IX.

The competition for talented female athletes sent American universities on worldwide recruiting efforts, underwriting the careers of numerous international Olympians, who profited from the nutritional programs, training, coaching and high expectations here.

Surging interest in women’s sports comes at a time when Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the IOC, has shifted the Games from an illusory and oft-corrupted amateurism to willful professionalism.

This has provided the most significant change in women’s participation - financial security to sustain careers through multiple Olympics.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, considered by many to be the greatest female athlete of all time, will compete in her fourth Olympics in Atlanta, Janet Evans in her third. The more successful a woman is, the more familiar she becomes to television audiences and thus the more attractive to advertisers.

With the ability to sign endorsement deals and accept prize money, women can routinely continue their careers into motherhood, when they once might have stopped after high school.

Of course, the freedom to negotiate endorsement deals is not enough; there must first be products to endorse. As women have moved out of the home into the workplace, their purchasing power has grown, and with it the fortunes of female athletes.

As a result, the earnings of top track athletes such as Torrence and Joyner-Kersee are now approaching $1 million a year.

Torrence recently signed the most lucrative shoe contract ever for a female track athlete. Her four-year deal with Nike alone will reportedly guarantee her $1 million, and will include performance bonuses that could sweeten the pot to $3 million.

Richardson, the softball shortstop, markets a signature bat and glove. The gymnast Dominique Moceanu of Houston is only 14, but she has already had her autobiography published, just in case she becomes the next Mary Lou Retton.

While Olga Korbut mesmerized the American television audience at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, her story carried less resonance with some veteran reporters covering the Olympics in Germany.

The late Pete Axthelm of Newsweek, one of America’s most accomplished sportswriters, has said that his original dispatch carried no mention of the 17-year-old Soviet gymnast.

When his editors asked about this omission, he replied, “Who’s Olga Korbut?”

The story remains a forceful testament of television’s power to create Olympic heroes and establish the Olympic pecking order. Women’s gymnastics became a prominent, arguably the most prominent, sport of the Summer Olympics. And advertisers and programmers began a more urgent courtship of female viewers.

“Generally, what makes or breaks coverage is the ability to hold women,” says Peter C. Diamond, NBC’s senior vice president for Olympic programming.

With its 170 hours of coverage in Atlanta, NBC hopes to reach 200 million Americans: Considerable air time will be given to sports preferred by women; not coincidentally, these are sports that feature female athletes.

Yet, female viewers are driven less by results than by story development, Diamond says. The Summer Games allow a network to spend two weeks unfurling the compelling stories that often involve women and reflect their fight to gain equality in the Olympic arena.

Who will be the new international stars? Perhaps Uta Pippig, who left Berlin with a couple of suitcases in 1990 to train in Boulder, Colo., and has become the world’s top female marathon runner. Or Maria Mutola of Mozambique, who spoke no English when she settled in Oregon in 1991 on an IOC-sponsored scholarship and is now the Olympic favorite at 800 meters.

Perhaps it will be Tegla Loroupe of Kenya, the first black African woman to win a major marathon. Or Ghada Shouaa, the first Syrian woman to win a world title, with a victory in the heptathlon at the 1995 world track and field championships. Or the sprinter Cathy Freeman of Australia, the first Aboriginal woman to succeed at the international level, with victories at 200 and 400 meters at the 1994 British Commonwealth Games.

When she returned to Kenya after her 1994 victory in the New York City Marathon, Loroupe received gifts from villagers, a tract of land from the government and a welcome embrace from the women in her Pokot tribe, who told her: “You showed that we are like the men - we can do things. We are not useless.”

Exhorted by an older sister, Loroupe ignored social pressure to quit running and begin a life of expected domesticity.

“Running was in my blood from the beginning,” she says. “If God has given you a talent, you have to show it. People told me, ‘You won’t have children if you run long distances.’ It was lies.

“I wanted to be like the men. If no one gives you encouragement, you have to encourage yourself.”

MEMO: Jere Longman is covering the Olympics for The New York Times.