Seeking sport's heroines

The awards season is upon us. The week before last a Royal Albert Hall-load of soap stars and two New York firemen gathered to celebrate the lifetime achievements of Des O'Connor.

And soon sport will have its turn, the centre-piece being the advert for Sky Sports that is the BBC Sports Personality of the Year show. This will not be won by Ellen MacArthur. Not because sailing is considered not to be a proper sport - although watching a boat leaving one harbour and waiting 267 days to see it reappear at another does offer poor value to the spectator - but because MacArthur, through no fault of her own, is a woman.

The last woman to win the award was Liz McColgan a decade ago. Since then it has been won three times by a motor-racing driver and never by a woman. Damon Hill 2, Nigel Mansell 1, Denise Lewis 0.

In part, this is explained by the fact that sports fans tend to be reactionary and those that cut coupons out of the Radio Times are more conservative still. In the main, though, it is because British sport is predominantly run by men in blazers for boys in shorts.

It is an insular, parochial, same-sex affair. Such people are unlikely to pay much heed to Heroines of Sport - The Politics of Difference and Identity by Jennifer Hargreaves. This is a shame because, despite being a work of sociology, the book is both readable and informative.

Hargreaves has focused on five specific groups of women - South Africans, Muslims from the Middle East, Aborigines from Australia and Canada, and lesbian and disabled women from countries worldwide - who, between them, receive less coverage in the sports pages than the Neville brothers. In each of these groups she identifies women who have achieved more heroic feats than anyone likely to be shaking hands with John Inverdale in a studio near Shepherds Bush. Near the head of any list would be Hassiba Boulmerka, who won the 1500 metres at the Barcelona Olympics.

By that time she had been forced, because of real death threats from Islamic fundamentalists (compare and contrast with Caddick and Croft), to live in Italy. 'I am a danger to the fundamentalists,' she said. 'I am a symbol to the young that women don't have to live behind their chadors.'

She dedicated her gold medal to Mohammed Boudiaf, the former president of Algeria who was assassinated, allegedly by fundamentalists, in June 1992. She spoke out against those she calls fascists, who 'hide behind the veil of Islam in order to impose their political will'.

She has argued that 'Islamic culture is not the hotbed of fanaticism it is often made out to be and it is not necessarily hostile either to individual effort or to the plight of women'. 'She has resisted,' writes Hargreaves, 'the popular idea that there has to be a choice between the East and the West, between Islam and rational capitalism, arguing that it is possible to take the best from Islamic and Western philosophies and still be a good Muslim.'

In short, one Algerian woman has said more on politics than a century's worth of British sportsmen. The latter's record - from footballers obeying orders and doing Nazi salutes to cricketers breaking the apartheid boycott to pay for the mortgage - is particularly lamentable. So unpoliticised are British sports stars that Footballers against the War is as likely a protest movement as Comedians for Baddiel. For most Muslim women, sport is not an option.

There are 500 million Muslim women in the world - one quarter of the world's female population - who cannot take part in Olympic competitions in existing conditions. Furthermore, their participation is even less likely now that women athletes can pole vault from the podium to the pages of Playboy , and now that you cannot open a calender without seeing a women's national team stripping for sponsorship.

As shabby men sit in their dens logging on to sexyathletes.com, the Islamic view that women's sport is decadent has some merit. 'There is no notion of connectedness between the women doing sport and women in Muslim countries who are hoping to do it,' says Hargreaves.

Prohibited from taking part in the Olympics, they have organised their own events - the first Women's World Islamic Games took place in Tehran in 1993 and are currently being staged there again - where men were excluded at all times from venues so that women could wear sports gear.

Despite the difficulties, there has been an increase in women's participation in sport in countries such as Iran. Fazeeh Hashemi, one of 14 women members of the Iranian parliament, estimates that whereas there were only 10,000 women playing sport before the 1979 revolution there are now roughly two million.

'If we push against tradition in sports, it will pave the way for reform in other areas,' she says. Similar small progress has been made in South Africa. Only two women there were sent to the 1960 Olympics; 82 went to the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Yet, writes Hargreaves, 'six years after the elections, in most spheres of life, including cultural activities in general, and sport specifically, resources between different races and sexes remain very uneven'. And black women are at the bottom of the pile.

As are Aboriginal women in Australia. Marion Still asserts: 'In the cultural pecking order of Australian sport, white males have always placed themselves at the top. They determine the order of those who follow: second are race horses, third aboriginal males, fourth white women and fifth and last black women.' To a certain extent, Cathy Freeman highlighted the problem by tying the Australian and Aboriginal flags together in a knot after she had won the 400m in Sydney. 'She has pricked the consciousness of all Australians about indigenous peoples - including those in power,' writes Hargreaves. 'By such a public act, she has symbolically thrown off the cloak of oppression and marginalization for all Australia's Aborigines and she has shown how sports superstars can use their status to highlight issues of difference and discrimination.'

Since her victory, however, Freeman has been largely silent on the subject of Aboriginal rights. 'I am disappointed that she hasn't spoken out,' says Hargreaves. 'If she were politically active her winning at the Sydney Olympics could have helped Aborigines hugely. Because she is in such a good position she could be politically very effective, but I doubt she will be.' Of course Freeman, who says she is not political, cannot be compelled to buck a system that has made her rich.

And, as an Aboriginal woman explains to Hargreaves: 'Because they're sports people they are expected to have an opinion about everything and because they're sports people they may not have sensible opinions.'

Yet by not speaking out Freeman is missing the opportunity to increase the chances of more Aborigines winning gold medals. 'One of the questions I asked myself when I did this research was why should a white, middle-class - relatively speaking - able-bodied, heterosexual woman write about women with whom I have no connection?' says Hargreaves. 'Because those of us that are privileged have the responsibility to speak out for people who are less fortunate than themselves,' she answers.

In this important book, she speaks eloquently for the many women who face discrimination in sport. It would be uplifting if just one of the privileged, pampered sports stars who will win awards in the coming months would take a leaf from her book.