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In ancient Greece, women were not allowed to play sports or attend championships. As such, they were excluded from the first Olympic Games which took place in Athens in 1896.
It was a great shock when, that year, Stamata Revithi decided to participate in the Games all the same—and she did participate, though on the sidelines of the official competition, and in doing so became the first female marathon runner in history. It was partly thanks to her that women were finally authorized to participate in the Paris Olympic Games in 1900. At the time, women only constituted 1.5% of the total number of athletes and were only admitted into certain disciplines deemed suitable by the organizers: namely, tennis, sailing, croquet, golf, and horseback riding.
In 1922, also in Paris, the International Women's Sports Federation, founded by swimmer and women’s sports leader Alice Milliat, organized the first women’s Olympic Games. This was such a success that the percentage of female competitors at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam reached 10%. And women were also able to compete in athletics disciplines, which had until then been prohibited to them. In Montreal in 1976, female athletes made up 21% of the total number of athletes, and in London in 2012–where for the first time, women were allowed in all disciplines–they constituted 44% of the participating athletes.
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games, scheduled to run from July 26 to August 11, will be the first to have achieved gender parity, with 5,250 male competitors and 5,250 female competitors. But despite this very important step, serious discrimination persists in both amateur and professional sports.
Sexism and racism
In Italy, although one in three women are passionate about football and even with the number of female footballers that is constantly on the rise, almost 40% of the population(1) consider this to be a purely masculine sport. Also, in the world of this sport as in others, racist verbal attacks against female champions of African origin representing the country in national and international competitions are increasingly frequent. Insults in the street or during press conferences, offensive chants and banners in the stands, the rise of hate speech on social media—this all prompted the National Office against Racial Discrimination (UNAR) to create the National Observatory against Discrimination in Sport. Its first report, published in 2022, lists more than 200 cases of discrimination having taken place over the course of 12 months. These include sexism, ableism(2), antigypsyism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.
The case of Paola Ogechi Egonu is particularly significant. Born in Italy in 1998 to Nigerian parents, the rise of her career has been as rapid as it has been brilliant: Olympic Flag bearer at the Tokyo 2020 Games, star player of the Turkish VakıfBank team, champion of the Italian national team, she is considered one of the best athletes in the world.
“They went so far as to ask me if I was Italian!” she declared in tears after her defeat in the semi-final against Brazil at the 2022 World Cup. This umpteenth attack hurt her so deeply that she even considered leaving the team. But the discrimination she has suffered is not only caused by violent, hateful, and disruptive supporters. Recently, the champion sued Italian army general Roberto Vannacci for defamation; in his book that attacks homosexuals, migrants, foreigners, and feminists, Vannacci wrote the following about her: “She is Italian in citizenship, but it is clear that her somatic traits do not represent Italianness.”
The case of Zaynab Dosso
The female sprinter of Ivorian origin Zaynab Dosso is also frequently the victim of racist insults. In October 2022, she was verbally attacked by a woman beggar in a Roman club. “I’m not surprised that she called me a wh*re… nor that she told me to go back to my country,” Dosso elaborated in an Instagram post. “What shocked me is that the people around us stayed silent. Some of them even laughed.”
After winning the Bronze Medal in the 4x100 relay race at the European Championships Munich 2022, Dosso set a new record for Italy in the 100-meter race on May 15, with 11’02—confirming her exceptional talent. But an overview of social media at the time is chilling: “She is as Italian as I am Aztec,” one reader of Gazzetta dello Sport commented on Facebook shortly after she set the record. “At this point, I think athletes should compete for themselves and not for their country! What sense does it make if there are only athletes of African origin in international competitions?” another user added, receiving many likes.
A very heavy legacy
This phenomenon of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity is extremely widespread in Italy, across all sports. Mauro Valeri, a university professor, psychotherapist, and sociologist who died in 2019, wrote several books on this topic, including Black Italians. Black Athletes in Blue Jerseys.
“In itself, modern sport has never been a natural space for integration. On the contrary, in Italian history, we have examples of sport serving to fuel racism,” he claimed during a conference. “When the CONI(3) was created in 1942 at the height of the fascist period, Article 2 of the statutes stipulated that the objective of the Committee was to improve athletics, taking particularly into account the physical and moral improvement of the race. Curiously, the term ‘race’ was not removed after the war, but only in 1999. […] One might think that this was an oversight. A serious oversight, but an oversight nonetheless. Even if this were the case, it is difficult to accept that over all these years, no one in the sporting world requested an anti-racist modification (of this statute, editor’s note).”
