Who Has the Right to Compete? — The Boundaries Drawn Around the Body

The story of sport always arrives at a single question. Who has the right to stand on this stage? From the sacred precincts of antiquity to the arenas of the present day, the answer has never been self-evident. Those allowed to take part, and those excluded. The body held up as ideal, and the body met with a suspicious eye. The final chapter of the series looks into the mirror that is sport, and at the human being reflected there.

Women Could Not Enter the Arena

The ancient Games at Olympia were not open to every human being. Only free-born Greek men could take part. Slaves, foreigners, and women were, as a rule, excluded from the contests. According to tradition, married women were not even permitted to set foot in the sacred precinct where the Games were held.

But there was an exception: the equestrian events. In the chariot races, the one declared the victor was not the charioteer who held the reins, but the patron who owned the horses and paid for their training. And an owner could be a woman. In this way the Spartan princess Cynisca, having entered horses of her own, won victory and became the first female Olympic champion. Ironically, what broke through the barrier of gender was not the female body but wealth and class.

This structure of exclusion did not vanish in the modern age. As we have seen through the previous chapters, modern sport was organised within the patriarchal culture of the British public schools. As a result, the first modern Olympics of 1896 shut women out of the official events. The ‘meeting of nations’ that Coubertin proclaimed was, at first, a meeting of men alone.

Seizing the Right by Their Own Hands

The women who had been shut out did not quietly withdraw. They built their own competitions.

As the twentieth century opened, the women’s sport movement rose across Europe and North America. Between 1921 and 1923, the Women’s Olympiad was held, and women demonstrated their strength in events such as the shot put and middle-distance running — events long deemed ‘too strenuous for women.’ The very act of proving their ability was a struggle to win their rights. In the United States, Title IX of 1972 prohibited sex discrimination in education and gave a great push to the development of female athletes.

But when women returned to the arena, a new suspicion arose. Female athletes who were simply too accomplished drew the gaze of the question, ‘Is she really a woman?’ From here begins one of the darkest chapters in the history of sport.

The Boundary of the Body, Drawn by Science

In 1968, the Olympics began to impose a test to verify the sex of every female athlete: the Barr body test, which examined the chromosomes within the cells. Only those who passed received a ‘certificate of femininity’ and could compete. Yet this test could not determine sex with accuracy. For some thirty years, experts pressed for its abolition. At last, in June 1999, the International Olympic Committee did away with the blanket testing of all athletes. A system built on the premise of a strict binary of male and female had wounded, deeply, the diverse bodies that stood upon that boundary — and it took all these years to acknowledge as much.

Around the same time, another ‘boundary’ was becoming a matter of science: doping. The more the value of victory rose and commercialisation advanced, the more athletes sought to push the limits of the flesh artificially with drugs. In the 1960s in particular, systematic doping grew severe. To counter it, a testing regime was built to monitor athletes and protect fairness. How far is the body natural, and from where does it become illegitimate? That line, too, was placed in the hands of science.

Come to think of it, the bond between sport and science runs deep. In the Renaissance, educators and physicians revived the ancient thought that ‘a sound mind dwells in a sound body,’ and recommended the training of the physique. In the nineteenth century, sport was institutionalised as an apparatus for improving the health of the populace and disciplining character. Science was always, too, a tool for defining the ideal body and for managing it.

Sport Is a Mirror That Reflects Humanity

The origins of sport, traced across six chapters. Running through them is a single backbone.

In antiquity, the leaping of the body was a life-and-death rite of communion with the gods. Nineteenth-century Britain tamed it with rules and the cultivation of character. Coubertin borrowed the authority of antiquity to revive the modern Olympics, and in the twentieth century nationalism, media, and money swallowed it whole. And even now, the line drawn around the body — ‘who has the right to compete’ — is contested in the name of science.

From sacred rite to the invention of rules. From a tool of the state to a colossal business. To the management of the body. The subject of sport has shifted from god to nation to capital to science. But one thing has not changed: the fact that human beings cannot help staking their bodies to compete for something.

Sport, then, is a mirror reflecting what each age has projected onto ‘the human body and competition.’ Into the festival we throng to every four years flow the prayer to Zeus, the sacrificial ball game, the ideal of the gentleman, the prestige of the state, the logic of capital — all layered and running together. The next time your heart quickens at the sight of someone running, behind it breathes five thousand years of the human story.