First of all, a huge congratulations to all those who attended the Olympics this year from Portugal, and a special ‘parabéns’ to the medal-winners - Iúri Leitão, Rui Oliveira, Pedro Pichardo and Patrícia Sampaio, who won 5 medals between them. The Olympics are now finished for another year, and all the excitement is over and those emotional medal ceremonies are finished. Another 4 years before the next summer Olympics starts, in Los Angeles, USA.
The ancient Olympics had far fewer events than we have nowadays, and for many years only freeborn Greek men were allowed to participate. Women did not compete, and married women were not even allowed to attend as spectators, and women’s participation in sports continued to encounter daunting obstacles. But it seems all this is now changing, with numerous advancements and incremental progress now occurring, and the Olympics are at last nearer to gender parity than ever before.
On came the girls When did women start competing in sports? Although some professional competitions allowed women to compete in the late 1800s, the Olympics did not approve of the participation of women until as late as the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, and Englishwoman Charlotte Cooper was the first individual woman to win a ‘First Place Prize’ at the Olympic games in that year, playing tennis. Has fashion changed that much? Men have traditionally worn a top of some sort and shorts of varying lengths when competing, and nowadays some of them .
