A View of Paris 2024 from India

This is a dispatch from Ujjesha Singh,Global Ambassador for Project: Wander Bra, based in India. Our ambassadors provide global perspectives on the impact of sports, in partnership with the Women’s Sports Foundation. Follow Ujjesha’s adventures @jesha_jpg. 

Now we all know that 2023 was a landmark year for women's sports as the data proclaimed that the FIFA Women's World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand was the most successful iteration of the most coveted trophy in the world's biggest sport. It was a precursor for what 2024 would turn out to be. From Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark’s sporting rivalry that carried over from the finals game last year and filled March Madness, to Dawn Staley’s undefeated Gamecocks, and Paige and the injured Huskies. There was something in the air in March and it was women's basketball. Every year or so, dear readers, I develop a new sporting fixation and it is so deeply obsessive that I must live, breathe and play only that sport. Roughly 2 years ago, it was basketball and when I came across A’ja Wilson and Syd Colson, I just knew that my life would never be the same. 

After March, there was the ongoing football (or soccer as America knows it) season which I was dying to follow. Barcelona (my childhood club) was on a historic run. The women's team, Barca Femeni are definitely one of the greatest women's sports teams ever and they went above and beyond to prove it. They won their first continental quadruple by winning the Champions League for the third time in four years and the league title for the fifth consecutive time (undefeated!). It seemed like women's football was continuing to excel above and beyond statistical metrics after the FIFA WWC when viewership and stadium records were being broken regularly. 

Through the summer, there was the passing on of the baton when legends like Candace Parker retired and the youthful stars like Diana Taurasi prepared for the Summer Olympics in Paris, with a historic 50:50 men to women representation for the first time in the history of the coveted gathering of elite athletes. These Olympics mark 100 years since the ‘24 Games in Paris where women were only 3% of participants. 

There were storylines being written of redemption, of records, of resilience; and these would carry on over from the opening ceremony of the Olympics all the way to the closing ceremony of the Paralympics.

Now let me give everyone a bit of history, straight from the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

The modern Olympic Games debuted in 1896 in Athens, Greece—without women athletes. The Games’ founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, believed including women’s sports would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and improper." Misconceptions about women’s physical capabilities and an emphasis on their roles as wives and mothers severely limited athletic opportunities for women throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. The first white American women athletes competed at the Paris Olympics in 1900, and the first African American women—Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes—competed in track and field at the 1936 Games in Hitler’s Germany. (Pickett and Stokes made the 1932 Olympic team but were kept from competition.) 

{From 1952 to 1984, the Tennessee State University Tigerbelles—under famed track and field coach Ed Temple—produced 40 Black female Olympians and won 23 Olympic medals, including 13 gold!}. 

In 2024, out of 126 medals won by the USA, 58.73% were earned by women (including mixed and open events). That number stood at an even higher 62.64% for China’s overall tally, with Australia at 60.38%. That’s three of the top four nations, powered by women in majority. Viewership records were broken as the female contingent in Paris created and broke sporting records. So, dear Mr. de Coubertin, wherever you are, I will reiterate: Everyone Watches Women's Sports.

Speaking about the Olympics and Paralympics, I cannot help but mention some of the iconic women who came through: Simone Biles, breaking records whilst doing moves named after her; Katie Ledecky and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, both of whom would always be so far ahead of their competition that you couldn't capture everyone in one frame; Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who came out swinging against her competition as well as patriarchy, misogyny and racism to take home the gold; St Lucia’s Julien Alfred brought glory to her country by being their first ever medallist and decided to make it gold; Manu Bhaker, who became the first Indian to win two medals at the same Olympics; Rebecca Andrade, Brazil’s best, who as per Simone is the closest competition she's ever faced, Sha’Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas, Zhang Yufei, A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Lauren Scruggs, Sunisa Lee, Trinity Rodman, Tara Davis-Woodhall, Lee Kiefer, Ilona Maher, Sihyeon Lin, Sifan Hassan, Yingsha Sun… I mean, the list of women who showed up and showed out is never-ending. Every day I was glued to my screen, watching some fantastically determined and confident woman go above and beyond the constraints placed on them. It transported me to years past, when I had seen Serena and Venus Williams do the same.

As the Olympics ended, I started to gear up for Paralympics, and boy did the athletes seize the torch and light flames all across Paris with their unrelenting passion and endless ambition. My country, India, sent a record-breaking number of athletes and came home with 29 medals which consisted of 10 women medalists! The video of Sheetal Devi, a 17 year old archer with no arms (she was #1 in the world going into the games and is one of the world's only archery champions with no upper limbs) also became maddeningly viral. Preethi Pal became the first Indian athlete to win a track medal and she came home with two, whilst Avani Lekhara successfully defended her gold from Tokyo in air rifle. Cuban star Omara Durand took home three gold medals in athletics and USA star Jessica Long added two more gold medals to take her total tally to 31 medals over 6 Paralympic Games (she started in ‘04 when she was 12!) with 18 golds. Sarah Storey, the multi-sport British star, got two gold medals in Paris, which was her 9th Paralympic Games, I mean, talk about longevity, she's been competing since ‘92. Yuyan Jiang, the Chinese swimmer, grabbed 7 medals and Catherine Debrunner won 6 and led the charge of multiple medallists at the Paralympics. Other stars I had the privilege of watching were Maria Gomes Santiago, Poppy Maskill, Leanne Smith, Susannah Scaroni, Lauren Parker, Tatiana Moreno Palomeque, Qian Yang, Kiara Rodriguez, to name a few. Whilst the Olympians are pushing boundaries of physical exertion in able-bodied people, the Paralympians create standards and set benchmarks as they reach new heights of what defines sports. They are truly icons who need to be marketed more so their stories reach far and wide because to me, what they do is unfathomable and beyond comparison. 

To the female athletes, all I can say is, heads must bow, tongues must confess, you are all some of the greatest of all time. Not just in a sporting sense, but also with respect to the impact you have made on your friends, your family, your hometown, and your country by breaking through all kinds of societal ceilings imposed on you and representing your nation and your people. As a long-time fan of women in sports, I only see growth of our sports in the near future—and every shred of it can be attributed to all the women who dared to dream about sports.