Making a Splash in 2000: A Historical Case Study of Women’s Water Polo at the Olympic Games

‘Gender equity ’ has been a catch cry of the late twentieth century. Noted professional, commercial and global organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), have recently been under intense pressure to become more politically sensi-tive to issues such as gender, race and equity. This pressure has led to an increasing number of women’s sports being included on the Olympic Program at recent Games. For instance, new sports for the Sydney Games include women’s pole vault, women’s weightlifting, women’s wrestling and women’s water polo. All of these events have long established male equivalents at the Olympic Games, but still gender equity is far from being achieved. At the Atlanta Games in 1996 the ratio of male athletes to female athletes was 3:1, it is unlikely a few new sports will rectify this imbalance. Men have always had more events scheduled at the Games than women, but simply to add more women to the program, whilst capping athlete numbers is a problematic exercise. This issue of programming, therefore, is just one of a sequence of processes that when accompanied by different issues and events, can be a stumbling block, or stepping stone to a sport becoming part of the Olympic Program. As women have struggled to redefine their accepted societal role their patronage of sport has undergone similar trends. These trends are defined by events and issues that involve change in influential areas that shape public opinion and affect social values and ideology. These events, social movements, or institutions include wartime, the feminist movement, media, economics, educa-tion, politics, science, and technology.1 They are all underpinned by the notion of ‘dominant societal voice, ’ a concept which has seriously affected the recording of women’s participation in society. This ‘voice ’ in Australia can be defined as white, middl