The long walk of the woman to the Olympic Game: from the exclusion to the recognition

Abstract

The founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pierre de Coubertin, clearly told in a essay: the female sport is the "ugliest thing that the human eyes can contemplate". For this reason, over that for an extremely sexist structure, the women had a lot of difficulties to participate in the first ten editions. The turn in the Olympic movement was had thanks to the fundamental figure of Alice Milliat, swimmer and French canoeist, that it organized in 1922, the Women's Olympic Games. In the second postwar period, beginning from the Olympiads in London 1948, the female competitions acquired great prestige, but it were only from Helsinki 1952, with the entry in the Olympic Committee and the debut to the Olympiads of the Soviet union, that there was a real diffucion of female sport. Lenin already underlined the importance of the sport as instrument of female emancipation and this thesis was encourage from the executives of the Pcus. The Olympiads also besides an important strument for the Islamic women to vindicate her rights. In this sense, symbolic are the cases of the moroccan Nawal El Moutawakel and the algerian Hassiba Boulmerka that they represent two different souls of the Islamic world.