It’s not over, but history has already been made. Following another four gold medals on Day 12 of competition in Paris, Australia is now boasting its most successful Olympic Games ever.
And it’s hard to miss the large gender divide in the medals, with women winning 13 of the 18 gold medals Australia has won so far. Meanwhile in the larger teams sports, the Australian Opals are still in medal contention in basketball as well as The Stingers in waterpolo.
We’ve been calculating a Women’s Medal Tally since the start of the Games, positioning countries according to how many medals have been won by women.
Australia has led that tally for most of the competition so far, with USA and China only taking over in recent days. Australia is currently third on the Women’s Medal Tally at the time of publishing, and still an impressive third on the general tally.
Our Women’s Medal Tally helps us identify trends and some of the interesting and intriguing stories of these games, especially where women are winning the first ever medals for their countries.
But we never expected the gender divide to be so significant for Australia.
So what does it mean for women?
The fact so many women have won big at these Olympics is great news for women and girls. It sees the country gaining a huge lineup of female role models, especially across sports where we’ve never had this level of success, including on the field in athletics, where Nina Kennedy became the first woman to win a field event by taking gold in the pole vault this morning.
It’s also great news for men, with this haul inspiring plenty of feel-good and beautiful moments during these games and research showing that sports success generates positive emotions in people, including feelings of belonging.
But it’s worth considering the potential impacts on women’s health from the success we’ve seen, and considering how investing to help achieve such positive results can generate great returns in terms of business, the community and overall public health.
Last year our women’s health survey found that 64 per cent of women receive “general positivity” when watching women achieving in sport, while one third of women reported such seeing such feats inspires them to be more physically active.
Women and girls have traditionally not had access to female role models in sports to the same extent that men and boys can see from male role models.
This is not because we haven’t had the talent. Rather it’s because women’s sport has lacked the investment to ensure female athletes become visible, get sponsorship and support to go professional, and ultimately become visible. Women’s sport has been sidelined by mainstream news coverage, with just 15 per cent of sports news stories focusing on women’s sport during the 2022-23 period, according to research of media in Victoria by Change the Game.
This could be a good reason why, in 2022, just 32 per cent of girls continued with sport participation once they reached the age of 15, compared to 50 per cent of boys, according to research by Clearinghouse for Sport.
They attributed one reason for the gender disparity as being lack of visible role models, a theory that gained more weight in 2023 as we saw the ripple impact of women’s participation in soccer (with an 18 per cent uptick in girls participating) following the success of The Matildas at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
While swimming continued to account for the vast amount of gold medals won by Australian women at the Paris Games so far, the wider range of success we’re seeing across different sports is exciting, with more girls likely to consider track and field, thanks to Kennedy’s win this morning, as well as Nicola Olyslagers and Eleanor Patterson winning silver and bronze in the high jump.
We can expect to see more girls and women taking up BMX racing following Saya Sakakibara’s win and her incredible backstory, as well as skateboarding with Arisa Trew winning the park final at the age of just 14. We can expect more participation in on-water events, like canoeing, following the success of sisters Noémie Fox and Jess Fox in canoe slalom.
But back to swimming and a special mention to Mollie O’Callaghan.
Much was made of the visible nerves O’Callaghan showed in the lead-up to her 200m final swim just prior to winning gold. Her hands were shaking as she fixed her goggles, with one commentator stating she was “shaking like an Autumn leaf”. In a world of punches being a regular part of major footy games and massive showmanship involved in many elite athletes’ pre-competition routines, O’Callaghan’s visible shaking is one of the most relatable things the rest of us amateurs may see at the elite competitive level.
Seeing great role models is not just about seeing likeness in physical traits, it’s also about seeing their intensely human characteristics that we know we too display when called up for the biggest moments of our careers. Women succeeding in sports gives us so many more options to connect, get inspired and see that even the best in their games can achieve high success despite their very public moments of vulnerability.