HAS Failing to be a day of glory for French sport, Sunday July 31 will remain as a day of hope for the advent of women’s sport. The arrival of the Women’s Tour de France and the final of the Women’s Football Euro, won by the English team, mark a sequence during which the visibility of women in sport has reached a new level. Attractiveness of the show, progression of performances, presence in the media: all the indicators are pointing in the right direction, that of a women’s sport capable of expressing itself beyond the shackles in which some have wanted to lock it up.
“Sport must have an aesthetic side, when you remove the aesthetic side of sport, it loses 50%. You, you are ugly! » So spoke in 1987 the cyclist Marc Madiot from the height of his two titles won in the Paris-Roubaix race to Jeannie Longo who, in her career, will have been thirteen times world champion, triple winner of the Tour de France and Olympic champion.
In recent days, the scene, taken from a program broadcast after a stage of the Tour de France, has been looping on social networks, causing embarrassment, anger, bewilderment and, no doubt, also in a small minority, a certain nostalgia. “I love women too much to see them suffer”added Madiot in a final argument of a tirade that he only recently regretted.
Voluntarism
A few months ago, the former presidential candidate, Eric Zemmour, said without embarrassment about female footballers: “I’m not forbidding them to play football, but it’s not football anymore. » Misogyny elevated to the rank of arbiter of the elegances of a discipline that would have been created exclusively for men.
In cycling, it took thirty-three years for Amaury Sport Organization and a handful of sponsors to relaunch the idea of a women’s Tour de France. If the audiences are not yet there, we must salute the voluntarism of the audiovisual public service, which by broadcasting each of the eight stages of the competition live has helped to break with the invisibilization of women’s sport, which society is too long accommodated.
A 2019 study by Purdue University (Indiana) showed that television coverage of sportswomen in the United States totaled only 5.4% of all airtime, barely more than thirty years ago (5.1%). And yet, these figures remain misleading because between two major competitions, such as the Women’s Football World Cup or the Olympic Games, sportswomen are condemned to return to almost total anonymity.
Everyone must realize that the media’s representation of sports and athletes can, more or less consciously, contribute to the construction of sexist stereotypes that operate well beyond the field of sport. Beyond the low frequency of broadcasts, the coverage of women’s disciplines is still too often limited to the appearance, age or family life of athletes, while for men, it is the performances that are more valued. .
The fields for progress in women’s sport remain immense. Whether it is the encouragement of sports practice from an early age, demands for equal pay, professionalization conceived as a virtuous driver of the attractiveness of the spectacle, or even the evolution of a governance bodies that are still too masculine, sport must be in tune with the values it upholds. He must make an indispensable contribution to the harmony of society.