Celebrating Women at the Olympics

[JesusMaryAndJosephAndTheWeeDon]

Today Charlotte DuJardin won her sixth Olympic medal making her the most decorated female British athlete.

What is remarkable about this is that she competes in one of the few sports where men and women compete on equal terms.

Today for the individual dressage final the podium was full of women. The highest placed man was sixth. The top two horses were female too.

In the team dressage of 9 riders making up the three medal winning teams only two were men. The gold winning team was all female.

Also on the podium was the German Isabell Werth who won an incredible 11th Olympic medal from six games.

A great day for women in sport!

Feel free to add details of other female Olympians who deserve a big feminist cheer!

@nettie434

Keely Hodgkinson, Jemma Reekie and Alexandra Bell in the 800m all ran personal bests I think. Keely got a silver and Jemma was an excellent fourth.

Yes, there's a write up in the Times, with Hodgkinson pictured on the front page.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tokyo-olympics-keely-hodgkinson-takes-stunning-silver-to-repeat-heroics-of-ann-packer-and-kelly-holmes-pb9gkttwv?shareToken=1a223fcbe4c63f45684a946f6cb60163

Thanks Errol. That is a great write up. It shows the trio in an even more impressive light. I also saw a lovely interview with Dame Kelly Holmes (whom we know on this board has received a lot of abuse for talking about fairness for women in sport). She said records are made to be broken. The article mentions how supportive she has been to Keely Hodgkinson so she's another example of a woman worth celebrating.

I really hope Sky Brown, Bethany Shriever and Charlotte Worthington’s performances are going to encourage more girls to stake a claim to their local skate parks and BMX tracks. I almost grabbed a couple of BMX bikes from Facebook marketplace for my two DD yesterday as I was getting carried away

Keely’s run was amazing! Athing Mu is an incredible talent, and the race was so exciting.

The women’s 100 metre was also an amazing event: the Jamaican 1-2-3, the double-double for Thomson-Herah, the new Olympic record, and Shelly-Ann Fraser Price coming away with an Olympic medal in three different decades…!

@Charley50

Apparently 'Shriever worked part-time as a teaching assistant in a nursery at the Stephen Perse Foundation to cover some of her costs of training and travelling because UK Sport stipulated in its funding review after the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games that only male riders would be supported heading towards Tokyo 2020.' Wikipedia.

How is sport getting away with such blatant misogyny?

They do defund sports which have not been successful and hence less chance of winning a medal.

They are still more female only sports at the Olympics than men - rhythmic gymnastics, synchronized swimming. Also netball remains a female only sport in the commonwealth games despite there being an active male participation in it.

@Charley50 what do you mean 'female only' sports? As in there is no male equivalent for some sports?

Yes - there is no male synchronized swimming or rhythmic gymnastics at the Olympics. There is also no male netball event at the Commonwealth Games.

As a couple of others have said I LOVE Anna Kiesenhofer. Just did her own thing.

Simone Biles is pretty fab too.

Holly Bradshaw finally getting a medal in the pole vault - all 3 finalists were amazing, but this is her third olympics, so veyr happy for her, and she looked delighted. nice to see all of the last 3 cheering each other on, as well.

Lisa Carrington got her 3rd Gold of these Games today, becoming New Zealand's most decorated Olympic athlete. She won the canoeing in: K1-200, K1-500, and K2-500. She has won every gold there has ever been (3 Golds in 3 Games) for K1-200, and is unbeaten for 11 years.

Also: I started a similar thread the other day in the Olympics topic, but thought it would be better to bring them together in this thread.

There are more brilliant women here

I don't usually look at the sports section of The Times, when I do it's usually incredibly male-dominated , mostly football, some rugby and cricket, and indeed the football, cricket and 'other sports' subsections are massively male dominated.
But today in the olympics section there are lots of women, with the cover being captioned 'Super Woman' - Laura Kenny. As well as her partner Katie Archibald, also featured are Laura Muir, the women's sprint relay team, Kate French, Lauren Price, women's hockey focussing on Laura Unsworth , Bethany Shriver...

....and a piece about women's kit, especially beach volleyball.

I think there are more pieces about Lauras than about men today, which is a rare but nice change from the 'more Daves than women' norm.

mobile.twitter.com/TeamGB/status/1423682783818534914

TeamGB tweet about yesterday being the day which saw the most female medal winners on a single day at the Olympics - 26 on the podia