While Dr Belle Tindall says she is not sporty at all, she is fascinated by and super grateful for, those women who push their bodies to achieve massive results
OK. I hold my hands up. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone less sporty than me. I’d rather do – literally – anything else.
Have you ever seen the show Gilmore Girls? If so, you can consider me a Welsh Rory Gilmore. Or how about Friends? Perhaps I’m a less glamorous Rachel Green. Any Pride and Prejudice fans out there? I’ve got a touch of the Elizabeth Bennett about me.
What I’m trying to tell you is this: yes, I’ll be watching the Olympics along with you all, but that will look like me peering up at the TV every now and again from behind the latest Beth O’Leary novel. I have been known to be quite intensely not bothered.
However – I do have a caveat to offer, if you’re interested?
This year, oblivious to the sporting world as I am, I have become a little obsessed with particular women in (recent) sporting history; women who have used their bodies to do something magnificent – both to achieve big things and to say big things. I’d like to share just two stories with you, if you fancy it? For no reason other than pure celebration and true gratefulness.
Transcending oppression
Here goes. Coming in first is Kiran Gandhi.
In 2015, after a whole year of training, Kiran was all set to run her first ever marathon. Marathons are funny things, aren’t they? They’re quite marmite-esque – you either love them or you consider them to be 26.2 miles of pure torture. Anyway, Kiran sits in the love them camp and so she was less than delighted when, the morning of the big race, she got her period. Can you imagine? Staring down the barrel of running 26.2 miles with a tampon in? Ugh. The sheer discomfort of it.
Kiran made the subsequent decision to go tampon-less and let her body bleed freely as she ran. As a result, photographs of her blood-stained leggings were plastered all over the internet.
I remember so distinctly the first time that my period brought me shame. I was twelve, so pretty new to the menstruating game, and a boy in my art class went into my backpack, found my stash of period pads (which was hidden in a bag inside a bag inside a bag), and waved them around for the whole class to see. Mortified doesn’t cut it. I truly believed that this bodily function was something to be ashamed of. And so, I think about that when I read what Kiran wrote about her decision:
“If there’s one way to transcend oppression, it’s to run a marathon in whatever way you want…I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who don’t have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesn’t exist.”
Gosh, I wish twelve-year-old Belle could have known about Kiran Ghandi.
Fighting for equality
Next up has to be Billie Jean King. How did I go 27 years without being utterly obsessed with the great Miss King?
There’s a list of the world’s 50 highest-paid athletes and not one single woman is on it. How crazy is that? The highest-paid female athlete (Iga Świątek) needs to earn a whopping $20 million more to even hit number 50. So, there we have a frustrating inequality hidden in plain sight. Despite this colossal imbalance, the women who are coming the closest to touching this list are almost all tennis players.
And that is largely thanks to one Billie Jean King.
Sick and tired of being paid less, Billie relentlessly fought for major tennis tournaments to offer the same amount of prize money to both sexes. This infamously led her to play a game against the former number one ranked player, Bobbie Riggs, as a means of proving that women players were not inferior to their male counterparts. As Billie herself said: “Unless I was number one, I wouldn’t be listened to.”
Billie won and history was made. The list mentioned above shows us that we still have a heck of a long way to go, but Billie Jean King made a difference, a big one.
What a hero.
Celebrating women’s achievement in sport
The stories of these two women make me feel teary and proud and invested; three things I never thought I’d feel in any kind of sport-related context. And here’s what I’m not saying: that women in sport need to have an overt feminist agenda to be celebrated. That, ironically, would be sexist of me.
A woman’s sporting achievement is not a lesser achievement if it doesn’t result in an advancement of gender equality. I’ve just really relished thanking God for Kiran Ghandi, Billie Jean King and all the other women whose names I may never know, and I just thought you might too.
So, happy Olympic summer one and all! Maybe I’ll even try putting the book down this time around…
…But don’t hold me to that.
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