Olympic Women Are Pushing the Limits of the Human Body

And it's extremely cool to watch.

In the grand scheme of history, widely-recognized women’s competitive sports are really, really new. To be clear, female athletes are not new, and women competing or playing sports are not new. But formal competitions among women, put on national and international stages next to those of men? That’s new — so new that the 2024 Olympics are the first ever to have a (roughly) equal number of female and male competitors. And it’s pretty spectacular that it’s happening in Paris, which is where, back in 1900, women were first permitted to compete in the Olympic games (even if there were only a small handful of them).

But it’s not just the numbers that are making history. It’s what women are achieving. And it’s how female athletes are changing our understanding of how bodies work, what’s physically possible for mere mortals, and what it means to be a competitor.

Because men have dominated athletics for so long, much of what we think we know about performance and athleticism is based on male bodies (this is true beyond athletics, extending into medicine and healthcare as well). But it turns out that these lessons don’t graft neatly onto women, the same way that diseases don’t present identically and treatments don’t work identically in women versus men — and why diagnoses based on studies of men or only testing drugs on male subjects does such a disservice to more than half of the population. Assuming male bodies are default bodies, and centuries of athletic training that has built upon what’s worked for male athletes, has meant that training and best practices for female athletes are way behind the curve. Gendered expectations that make competitions different for men and women (see, e.g., the history of women’s gymnastics vs. men’s gymnastics) have sometimes stifled women’s ambitions. And around the world, female athletes still face pervasive discrimination, and so there are huge untapped pools of female talent. The Taliban, for example, bar female athletes from competing publicly, and other conservative nations and cultures tend to keep girls and women physically hemmed in. At these Olympics, the French ban on headscarves is an ugly reminder of the ways in which the politicization of female bodies and female dress can keep female competitors off the field.

But so much of this is changing — and its female athletes who are changing their games.