The race to sporting equality

Rachael Blackmore rode six winners at last week’s Cheltenham Festival. Only Ruby Walsh has ridden more winners at a single Cheltenham and now Blackmore has won the cup named in his honour for the Festival’s top jockey. Few can have been much surprised. She’s an outstanding jockey and it’s been recognised for a good many years in racing, as in show-jumping and eventing, women can compete with men on equal terms.

As far back as 1983, one of the best of Dick Francis’s later novels, The Danger, had a brilliant Italian female jockey as its heroine. Even so, when Dick was a jockey himself, women were not only barred from race-riding, they weren’t even permitted to be trainers and any woman who did train racehorses would have to nominate her Head Lad as the official trainer. This is hard to believe now but is evidence of how long it took for women to achieve any degree of equality in sport. It wasn’t until 1966 that Florence Nagle, who had trained racehorses for forty years, was able to get a trainer’s licence. She had to take legal action against the Jockey Club to get it.

As it happens I was thinking of the significance of Rachel Blackmore’s success when a fascinating article by Elgan Alderman appeared in The Times this week. It centred on Alice Milliat described in the headline as “The pioneer whose rival games paved the way for equality at the Olympics.” When female athletes were excluded from the 1920 Olympics, Milliat organized the first Women’s Olympiad at the Tir aux Pigeons in Monaco. Five countries were represented; France, Britain, Italy, Norway and Switzerland. An enthusiast for all sport. Milliat had already arranged a football tour of England and what may be accounted the first Women’s International was played against a Works team at the Deepdale ground of Preston North End. Apparently, it attracted a crowd of 25,000. The FA took a dim view and issued a decree forbidding its member clubs to stage women’s football on their grounds. This ban lasted fifty years. Alderman’s article is fascinating. Among other things, it tells the story of the quite remarkable and somewhat disreputable Violette Morris, well worth exploring in depth.

Other Sports were more accommodating. There is a record of a village cricket match in Surrey being played by women in the eighteenth century, and W G Grace was coached as a boy by his mother in Bristol. Still, it wasn’t till 1926 that the Women’s Cricket Association was founded, and not till 1998 that the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) opened its membership to women. The first Tests between England and Australia were played before the Second World War and very few women cricketers became well known, notably, in England, Molly Hide. Nevertheless, it’s only in the last twenty years that the women’s game has crept out of the shadows. Last year, the Australian Ellyse Perry was named as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year.

Not surprisingly perhaps, it was in individual, rather than team sports that women first starred. I would suggest that one suitable definition of a Star in this context is someone known to a public wider than the enthusiasts for a particular sport. Suzanne Lenglen who dominated women’s tennis in the 1920s was arguably the first to fit the bill, her fame not confined to the sports pages. When she turned professional her first match against the American champion filled Madison Square Garden, a setting usually saved for boxing title fights. Since then women tennis champions have been as famous as their male counterparts. Are they as good? Well, back in 1973, Bobby Riggs, who had won Wimbledon in 1939 and was now fifty-five, set out to prove they weren’t. He played the Australian Margaret Court, (now Margaret Court Smith) then the world’s top-ranked woman, and beat her 6-1 6-2. Whereupon Billy Jean King, much craftier than Court, took up the challenge, played it as theatre, and won in straight sets. All these Battles of the Sexes proved was that King was smarter than either Court or Riggs himself. In tennis, women may have equal star billing, but it’s still the case that men are bigger, stronger, usually faster and hit the ball harder. Serena Williams is a global star, but when a few years ago some journalist suggested she might play Andy Murray, she laughed and told him not to be silly.

It’s the same in athletics. There have always been female stars, ever since the Olympic Committee gave way and treated women as equals. Way back in 1948, when the Games were held in London, the Dutch housewife Fanny Blankers-Koen won four Gold Medals and got more column inches than any other athlete -“Flying Fanny Wins Again” shrieked the headlines. Yet World or Games holders of women’s records wouldn’t qualify them for the finals of a men’s event. This has nothing to do with the quality of performance. Up to puberty and often for a year or two after, boys and girls can compete on equal terms, even in sports which till recently were usually a male preserve. Indeed long ago Mark Sugden, a schoolmaster who won several caps as scrum-half for Ireland, remarked in an instructional book, that the best scrum-half he ever lined up against was a girl who played for the Dragon Preparatory School in Oxford…

A hundred years on from when Alice Milliat brought her team of French footballers to Preston, a statue of her has been placed in the Maison de Sport Francais, and women’s football and women’s rugby have both become increasingly popular. There’s a Women’s Six Nations and there are World Cups in both sports and in cricket, while TV has woken up to the potential of women’s sport as never before. I confess to being sufficiently crusty still to dislike, even disapprove of, women’s boxing and wrestling, but if this is what equality for women demands, then one just has to nod one’s head and say “that’s the way things are”.

The march to equality will continue until someday, journalists will feel no more need to observe that a successor to Rachael Blackmore is female, than to remark on the colour of her hair. Then there will be at least equality of judgement.