Give women’s sport a chance says cycling star

Ms Armitstead said the situation means it is hard for women in sport not to get disheartened. She was speaking after she won a silver in the cycling road race to become Team GB’s first medallist. The vaunted men’s team, including Tour de France heroes Bradley Wiggins and hot favourite Mark Cavendish went home empty handed.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt agreed Ms Armitstead may be right: “She has got a point. And we are making strides. And I think the Olympics is the best possible vehicle to put that right. I saw Rebecca Adlington get her bronze medal yesterday, and she has become an absolute icon in terms of female swimmers, and that’s terrific…

“The Olympics is actually much much better than sports like football and rugby in terms of giving a high profile to women and I think this is a summer when hopefully we can put a lot of those problems right.”

We decided to take the last five Olympics and compare how many medals British men and women team-members won.

Team GB make-up
1992 men: 229 women: 142
1996 men: 184 women: 116
2000 men: 181 women: 129
2004 men: 161 women: 103
2008 men: 168 women: 143

We found that Britain’s women are, on the whole, closing the gap on the men as far as the number of team members to medals-won ratio is concerned – with one glaring blip.

In the 1992 Barcelona Games, the ratio shows there was one medal win per 23.6 women team members. That compares to the more successful men’s team which won one medal per 16.4 competitors.

The worst year as far as our data crunching shows was Atlanta, where the only female medallist was Denise Lewis who got bronze in the heptathlon. It came in a bad year for the team as a whole, which made the podium only 15 times.

But in the 2004 Athens Games, Great Britain’s women overtook the men. Sending 103 competitors compared with 161 male peers, they punched above their weight to bring in 10 medals in comparison with 15 for the men. They were also involved in five medal successes for teams where men and women compete together – for example, in eventing and badminton mixed doubles.

This means that there was more metal hanging round the necks of the women than the men – proportionate to the number of athletes who competed.

By 2008 and Beijing, when Britain was basking in a 47-strong medal haul, the ratios were smaller again. Then there were 7.9 women team-members per medal compared with 6.4 men team-members per medal.

The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, which campaigns for greater female involvement in sport, has predicted that London 2012 may see women winning outright more medals than the men. Athletes like Lizzie Armitstead will be hoping they are right.