There’s an old saying referring to the battle of the sexes: “Men play the game but women know the score.”The score is rapidly mounting in favour of New Zealand’s female Olympians.
Let’s, for a moment, leave aside all the challenging stuff – like how much money is fed to which athletes in whatever sport; how much more some male athletes can earn than their female counterparts – and focus on the upward curve of New Zealand’s Olympic graph.
In the two previous Olympics – Tokyo three years ago and Rio 2016 – women brought home most of the medals: 11 of the 20 in Tokyo (55%) and 11 of the 18 in Rio (61%). In Paris, 13 of New Zealand’s 20 medals were claimed solely by women (65%); that rises to 14 and 70% if you include the 50-50 male-female combination of Micah Wilkinson and Erica Dawson, who took bronze in sailing’s mixed multihull class.
It’s an even clearer picture when measured in gold medals over the last 20 years:
That’s a total gold medal tally of women 22, men 11. If you count all medals (gold, silver, bronze) over those same 20 years, it looks like this: women 44, men 40 (not counting Wilkinson and Dawson again).
It’s a far cry from New Zealand’s previous best haul at an Olympics – in 1984 at Los Angeles when New Zealand won a then-record eight golds (as well as claiming one silver and two bronze medals) and finished eighth on the medal table, the only time this country has featured in the top 10. All those medals were won by blokes, many with famous names in our sporting context: sailing’s Sir Russell Coutts, canoeists Ian Ferguson and Paul MacDonald, equestrian Sir Mark Todd and more; not a woman in sight.
The New Zealand team in Paris exceeded the official estimate of 14 medals. The cynic in me says that is usually the case – those who do these things take care to under- rather than over-estimate; it’s better for the national psyche.
New Zealand’s high-performance sporting dons are fond of talking about how success at the elite level stimulates grassroots participation and thus further elite success – but that hasn’t always been so lately. That theory will be put to the test after two stellar Olympics for little old New Zealand, just outside the top 10 in Paris and ahead of Canada, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Ireland in the final medal count.
Certainly, the overwhelming feeling from this Olympics is that our medal winners – male and female – have grown into the rigours and intensity of international sport, to the extent that many medals that would previously have been silver, bronze or fourth are now gold.
It will also be dead interesting to see if our high-performance boffins – who will be relaxing after a job well done in terms of identifying and fostering New Zealand’s medal sports – continue the trend and whether they chuck some money at other, less prominent sports.
Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors celebrate their gold medal success in Paris. Photo / Photosport
There will clearly be some big shoes to fill when it comes to female Olympians in Los Angeles 2028, with the retirement or likely retirement of heroines like Carrington, Emma Twigg and Lydia Ko, who has long predicted 30 as a finishing age. Gold-medal rowers Lucy Spoors and Brooke Francis are 33 and 29 respectively and, more to the point, have young families around which they fit this golden journey.
However, the amazing Ellesse Andrews has some chapters of her book to write yet, as do others within the cycling set-up like Shaane Fulton; the New Zealand women’s sevens team seem highly likely to continue their success even without Portia Woodman. Maddi Wesche is only 25, a teenager in terms of the shot put.
Cycling and canoeing have come through some iffy cultural and humanistic allegations and/or issues and can point to their respective medal hauls as proof they’re on the right track. It’s probably expecting too much for our women sports stars to keep up this level of success but, for the time being, New Zealand’s Olympic future still seems heavily female.
