FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association): The Men, the Myths and the Money

Annette Hofmann all concentrate on historical analyses of the fate of specific competitive female sports: modern pentathlon in West Germany, fencing and ski jumping. Terret and Ottogalli-Mazzacavallo examine the different stages in the recognition of female fencers by sporting institutions through the archives of the International Fencing Federation with a focus on the sustained resistance and laborious arguments of the male fencing community to any challenge of the gender order. ‘From duels to battles’, they point out, ‘ the world of weapons has always been male dominated and the world of sport is no exception’ (84). Institutional discrimination has followed female fencers, most especially in their efforts to be accepted to team events. Heck follows women’s struggles towards equal opportunities for participation in modern pentathlon, with Germany among the most active countries in pursuing this goal. Only in 1981 was the first World championships held for female pentathlon athletes and only in the year 2000 were they allowed to compete in their sport in the Olympic Games at Sydney, Australia. In her analysis of the slow progress of women’s ski jumping to be accommodated at international competitions, Annette Hofmann makes an interesting comparison of two early female ski jumpers who long ago put the lie to the notion that ski jumping was not for women and that, put to the test, women could jump just as far as men. She concludes that both jumpers, in different ways, embodied traits of the ‘new woman’ entering a male domain and breaking gender barriers, but their success and talent were still insufficient to open the sport to women and girls more generally. Women still have a rocky road to pursue to be fully acknowledged as internationally competitive ski jumpers. To round out the collection, Maria Claudia Pinheiro describes the development of women’s sport in Portugal in the last three decades of the twentieth century. These were years following the ‘Carnival revolution’ of 1974, when women gained greater autonomy and new opportunities to participate in physical and sporting activities, albeit still at a glacial pace and mostly in what have been considered female-appropriate sports such as gymnastics, swimming and equestrian sports. Finally, Sylvain Ferez addresses the issue of sex testing in competitive sport and retreads the much-discussed topic of the many efforts of the sporting establishment to preserve gender categories at all costs. Referring to Caster Semenya, he reminds us of the fate that awaits those who innocently confront the rigid control of gender classification imposed by international sporting authorities and underscored by the medical profession.