The number of women who currently play sport or who closely follow sporting events is steadily increasing. This increase is a result of changes that took place in schools in the 1970s.261. Does this number mean anything to you? If the answer is no, read on. In 2018 it is common to see thousands of women competing in the world’s great marathons, from New York to Berlin and Madrid. But this was not always the case. On 19 April 1967, Kathrine Switzer made history by circumventing the ban that prevented women from competing in a marathon. She also did this in the oldest marathon in the world — the Boston Marathon — and she did not just run it, she finished it with a time of 4 hours and 20 minutes despite the organisers’ boycott. Kathrine herself remembers the event in an interview with the BBC: “He grabbed me by the shoulders,” she recalls, referring to Jock Stemple (co-director of the race), “spun me back and started trying to rip off my bib numbers.” Her bib number was 261 and ever since then it has been a symbol of equality.
INCREASING NUMBERS OF SPORTSWOMEN
The presence of women taking part in sport has only grown since then and the gap between men and women in their interest in sport has narrowed considerably over the last 50 years. This is one of the conclusions that can be taken from the latest Women and Sport report from Repucom (Nielsen, 2016). Sportswomen such as Yelena Isinbayeva, Serena Williams and Laure Manadou have taken the baton from pioneers such as Kathrine Switzer, Nadia Comaneci and Larissa Latynina and, nowadays, almost 50% of women worldwide are interested in sport.
