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A hundred years ago, women were barred from the Olympic marathon, banned from most professional sports, and politely informed that their bodies couldn’t handle distance running. The record books have been arguing with that claim ever since. The female athletes who made history didn’t just win things — they often had to force the door open first, then hold it for whoever came next.
The Women Who Ran Before They Were Allowed To
In 1966, Bobbi Gibb hid in the bushes near the start line in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, wearing her brother’s shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. Her Amateur Athletic Union entry had been rejected on the grounds that women were physiologically incapable of running 26.2 miles. She ran anyway, finishing in 3:21:40 — unofficial, but faster than two-thirds of the men in the field.
A year later, Kathrine Switzer did something smarter and riskier. She entered Boston as “K.V. Switzer,” collected bib number 261, and started with the pack. When race official Jock Semple spotted her mid-race and tried to physically pull her off the course, her boyfriend shoved him aside and she kept running. She finished in 4:20:02. The photograph of that scuffle became one of the most recognisable images in sport.
It took until 1984 for the women’s marathon to become an Olympic event. Joan Benoit won the first one in Los Angeles, in 2:24:52.
Gertrude Ederle and the Cold Water of the English Channel
On 6 August 1926, a 19-year-old New Yorker named Gertrude Ederle swam from Dover to Kingsdown in 14 hours and 39 minutes. She was the first woman to cross the Channel, and she beat the men’s record by nearly two hours. The weather was so foul that her trainer gave up on her twice. Ederle, greased in lanolin and fuelled by chicken legs passed to her on a pole, kept going.
New York threw her a ticker-tape parade attended by an estimated two million people — more than any returning hero before her. She was still partially deaf from a childhood illness, and she spent much of the rest of her life teaching swimming to deaf children.
Olympic Firsts That Rewrote the Rulebook
Women first competed at the Olympics in Paris in 1900: 22 of them, out of 997 athletes, in five sports. To understand how radical that was, consider that the ancient Games were staged for centuries with married women barred even from watching. The history of how Olympia became the world’s biggest sporting event is, for most of its length, a story told entirely by men.
Progress came in lurches. In 1928, women ran the 800 metres in Amsterdam, and several runners collapsed at the finish. Rather than accept that the distance was simply hard, officials removed it from the programme until 1960.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
At the 1932 Los Angeles Games, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson won gold in the javelin and the 80-metre hurdles, then took silver in the high jump after judges ruled her technique illegal — despite the fact that she’d tied for first. She went on to win 41 professional golf tournaments and helped found the LPGA. Any list of the greatest Olympic athletes ever that leaves her out is missing something.
Wilma Rudolph
Rudolph was born premature, the 20th of 22 children, and wore a leg brace until she was nine after contracting polio. In Rome in 1960 she won the 100m, the 200m and the 4x100m relay, setting world records in two of them. The parade held in her honour in Clarksville, Tennessee, was the first integrated event in the town’s history.
Nadia Comaneci
In Montreal in 1976, a 14-year-old Romanian gymnast scored a 10.0 on the uneven bars. The scoreboard, which had been built assuming perfection didn’t exist, displayed 1.00. Comaneci collected seven perfect scores across those Games and changed how the sport was judged, coached and watched.
Billie Jean King Won the Match, Then Changed the Money
The 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” was theatre, but it had consequences. Bobby Riggs, 55, had beaten Margaret Court and was loudly insisting that even an ageing man could beat the best woman in the world. King beat him in straight sets — 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 — in front of 30,492 people at the Houston Astrodome and a television audience estimated at 90 million.
Two things mattered more than the result. She had founded the Women’s Tennis Association that same year, giving players collective bargaining power. And she threatened to boycott the US Open unless it paid men and women equally; in 1973 it became the first major to do so. The argument over the greatest tennis players of all time rarely accounts for how much of the modern game’s infrastructure she built.
Althea Gibson and Serena Williams
Gibson won the French Championships in 1956 and Wimbledon in 1957 and 1958, becoming the first Black player to win a Grand Slam singles title. She did it while being denied hotel rooms at some of the tournaments she was competing in, and she later became the first Black woman to join the LPGA tour.
Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of any player in the Open era. She claimed her first US Open at 17 and her last major at 35, in 2017, while roughly eight weeks pregnant. Between those two points she spent 319 weeks ranked world number one — a span that also included a pulmonary embolism and two comebacks that would have ended most careers.
Records That Have Stood for Nearly Four Decades
Florence Griffith Joyner ran 10.49 seconds for the 100 metres in the quarter-finals of the 1988 US Olympic trials, a time that has never been seriously threatened. She also set the 200m world record that year, at 21.34. Jackie Joyner-Kersee scored 7,291 points in the heptathlon in Seoul in 1988; nobody has come within 100 points since.
Katie Ledecky, meanwhile, is still writing hers. Her 800m freestyle world record has stood since 2016, and she has won Olympic gold at three different distances across four Games.
Mountains, Open Water and Athletes Over Fifty
Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit Everest in 1975, twelve days after an avalanche buried her team’s camp and knocked her unconscious. She was 35, and Japanese media had spent the expedition complaining that she should be home looking after her child.
Diana Nyad swam from Cuba to Florida in 2013 at the age of 64, on her fifth attempt, after nearly 53 hours in the water. Sarah Thomas swam the English Channel four times without stopping in 2019, covering roughly 130 miles in 54 hours. These aren’t outliers so much as proof of what happens when women finally get to train without being told not to. The women over 50 rewriting the rules of athletic ageing are the direct descendants of Ederle and Gibb.
Simone Biles and the Right to Step Back
Biles arrived at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 as the most decorated gymnast of her generation. She withdrew from the team final after losing her sense of where she was in the air — the “twisties” — a condition that in her sport can lead to a broken neck. She took a bronze on the beam anyway.
What followed was just as significant: a public conversation about whether the athlete or the medal mattered more, and a return in 2023 where she landed a Yurchenko double pike at the World Championships. It is now officially named the Biles II. She won three golds in Paris in 2024.
Equal Pay and Equal Ground
The US women’s national soccer team spent six years fighting for equal pay, and in 2022 reached a settlement with US Soccer including $24 million in back pay and a new collective bargaining agreement with genuinely equal rates. The team had won four World Cups while being paid less than the men who hadn’t.
The Paris 2024 Olympics were the first in history with an even split of male and female athletes: 5,250 of each. Retail followed, with women’s-specific running shoes now a serious engineering category rather than a pink-tinted afterthought — the same shift you can see across the best sneaker brands made for both men and women.
What Still Needs Fixing
Participation has surged, but coverage hasn’t kept pace. Studies of sports media consistently put women’s sport at well under 10 percent of total coverage, and sponsorship follows the cameras. Research funding is uneven too: female footballers tear their ACLs at roughly two to six times the rate of male players, and only recently has anyone started seriously investigating why.
Then there is the pipeline. Fewer women coach at elite level than play at elite level, and fewer still run the organisations that set the rules. Switzer’s bib number 261 is now worn by runners every year in Boston as a tribute, which is a lovely gesture. The harder work is making sure the people who follow have coaches who understand their training, doctors who study their bodies, and broadcasters who show up. That’s the next chapter — and the athletes are already running it.
