[The participation of
Saudi women remains complicated, even as the Games are under way. On Friday,
Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani is scheduled to compete in judo. She is
required by Saudi officials to wear a hijab, or head scarf. But
the international judo federation said last week that Shahrkhani could not
compete with a head covering for safety reasons and to preserve the “principle
and spirit of judo.”]
By Jeré Longman
 |
Cameron Spencer/Getty
Images
Sarah Attar of Saudi
Arabia during the opening ceremony of the London
Olympics
|
LONDON — During Friday’s opening ceremony, Jacques Rogge, the president of
the International
Olympic Committee, drew loud and sustained applause when he said:
“For the first time in Olympic history, all the participating teams will have
female athletes. This is a major boost for gender equality.”
It is true that women
have come light-years from the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896, when
their presence was welcomed only as spectators. Women, too, have made
significant gains even since the Atlanta Games in 1996, when 26 nations did not
send female athletes.
Yet the fight for true
equality is far from being won. For the first time, Saudi Arabia sent two
female athletes to compete in London, along with at least one sports official.
But the three women who participated in the opening ceremony walked behind the
men, not among them.
For some Westerners,
this has been viewed a reminder of the subordinate place of women in the
conservative Islamic monarchy, where sport is forbidden for girls in schools
and women are effectively not allowed to drive cars.
The moment was
undoubtedly scripted, but it would have been unrealistic to expect anything
else in a society where men and women are generally separated, said Christoph
Wilcke, an expert on Saudi Arabia for Human Rights Watch, which has
forcefully pushed for inclusion of the country’s women in the Olympics.
“If they were walking
together and holding hands, that would not have been cool for the domestic
audience,” Wilcke said.
The participation of
Saudi women remains complicated, even as the Games are under way. On Friday,
Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani is scheduled to compete in judo. She is
required by Saudi officials to wear a hijab, or head scarf. But
the international judo federation said last week that Shahrkhani could not
compete with a head covering for safety reasons and to preserve the “principle
and spirit of judo.”
On Sunday, a Saudi
newspaper, quoting Shahrkhani’s father, said she would withdraw from Friday’s
competition if she could not wear a hijab. Olympic officials said Sunday that
they were trying to resolve the situation. Soccer once banned hijabs, too, but
approved them last month. Granted, judo is a different sport; the use of hands
is critical. Safety should be paramount. But surely a remedy can be found.
Otherwise, it will be hugely embarrassing to the I.O.C. and to the Saudis.
“The judo situation
seems to be a debacle,” Wilcke said. “Participation of Saudi women has been one
of the I.O.C.’s major issues. It seems strange the I.O.C. wouldn’t have
contemplated clothing. That would be one of the first things on the checklist.”
Perhaps Shahrkhani could
compete without a head scarf if the event were not televised, but that seems
unlikely, Wilcke said. He suggested a head covering like the one in soccer
could be used. Failure to resolve the matter, he said, would result “in hurt
feelings on both sides, for the Saudis who tried and feel betrayed, and the
I.O.C., which tried to find the right balance line.”
The other Saudi athlete
competing, beginning Aug. 8, is an 800-meter runner named Sarah Attar. She grew up and lives and trains
in Southern California, where she attends Pepperdine. Her family asked the
university to remove photographs of Attar from her online biography. And the only
photographs and video issued of Attar by the I.O.C. showed her hair, arms and
legs fully covered. She has also declined interviews, further seeming to
confirm that hers is but a token presence in London.
Yet, small steps can be
important ones. Qatar also entered its first female athletes in the Summer
Games. One of them, a shooter named Bahiya al-Hamad, carried her country’s flag
in the opening ceremony. Beforehand, she said on Twitter that she was “truly
proud and humbled.”
About 45 percent of the
10,500 athletes competing are women. Restrictions are falling away, stereotypes
are being turned on their head. NurSuryani Mohamed Taibi, a shooter from
Malaysia, became one of the few Olympic athletes to compete while pregnant when
she participated Saturday in the 10-meter air rifle event.
“I felt her kicking,”
NurSuryani, who is scheduled to give birth to a daughter next month, told
reporters. “But I said to her, ‘O.K., be calm; Mummy is going to shoot
now.’ ”
Ten or 15 years ago, it
would have been unheard-of, and possibly career threatening, for any member of
the United States women’s soccer team to publicly announce that she was a
lesbian. But midfielder Megan Rapinoe did so just before the Games, and the
response has been widely supportive.
“As athletes, we live
our lives in the public eye and have a platform to be positive role models,”
Rapinoe wrote in a blog on espnW. “I’d like to
help create more tolerance and acceptance across the board. That means more
people talking about it, more people coming out and, at the end of the day,
making less of a massive deal about being gay.”
Not that discrimination,
or slights, have exactly ended. Japan’s women’s soccer team is the World Cup
champion. But its players were forced to fly coach, while the men’s team rode
in business class, on a 13-hour flight to Paris from Tokyo before the Games.
On Wednesday in the
women’s Olympic soccer tournament in Glasgow, organizers infuriated the North
Koreans by placing South Korean flags next to their faces and names on the
scoreboard.
Yet female soccer
players have also gained praise for performing without the diving, theatrical
writhing and complaining inherent in the men’s game. A British reader named
Geoff Cooling wrote to The Daily Mail on Sunday that he had watched an entire
match devoid of excessive preening and whining.
“Was I dreaming?” he
wrote.
