Australian Open semi-final winner Andy Murray has hit back against widespread criticism of his decision to appoint a female coach.
Immediately after his impressive win against Tomas Berdych last night, Murray announced that his success proves his coach Amelie Mauresmo is the best person for the job.
He said his win proves that women can make excellent coaches and that the criticism of her based on her gender is unfair.
Murray appointed Mauresmo as his main coach last year, a decision met with controversy simply because of the idea of a male tennis star being lead by a woman. He has rebuffed these suggestions several times since he hired Mauresmo, but did so more defiantly than ever in an off-court interview last night.
“A lot of people criticized me working with her and I think so far this week we’ve showed, you know, women can be very good coaches as well,” he said.
He went on to point out that other successful tennis players had achieved great success with female coaches. He described the criticism of Mauresmo as “unfair” and said “I think she’s fantastic”.
The criticism of Mauresmo’s ability to coach Murray certainly has no basis in experience or qualification: she is a former world number one herself, winning the Australian Open as well as Wimbledon.
Problems for women in sports coaching are not specific to Mauresmo, either. She is only the second woman to ever coach a top ten men’s tennis player in the history of the sport.
Australia-wide, only 20% of coaching positions are held by women. Women are underrepresented across all leadership roles in sport, making up only 20% of presidents of sporting organisations and only 33% of board positions.
At the Sydney Olympics, only 16 out of 86 coaches were women. These figures were even worse at the Beijing and AthensOlympics, where 11 out of 95 and 8 out of 82 coaches were women respectively.
So where are the female coaches in high-level sport? And how is it possible that so many of us would still question the ability of a Wimbledon-winning tennis star to coach another ambitious player just because of her gender?