Front and center

Nikita Ducarroz of France, an elite BMX rider, once spun and whipped her bike through audacious freestyle moves in almost total isolation at international competitions.

“Four years ago, there might be eight women at major World Cup events,” she said about the tournaments held by the International Cycling Union.

Then, in 2017, the International Olympic Committee announced that men’s and women’s BMX freestyle park riding would be added to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, instantly upending the women’s side of the sport.

“Suddenly, so many new girls got interested in riding,” said Ducarroz, 24, who will represent Switzerland at the games. “A few years ago, I could name every other woman who was competing. Not anymore. It’s like a new sport now. The Olympics changed everything.”

The Olympics, which start in July but retain their original name despite being postponed to this year, are poised to be the most women-centered games in history. According to the IOC, women will make up 48.8% of the total field of Olympians, an increase from the 45% participation at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games and the 2.2% at the 1900 Olympics, the first to include women. There, 22 women appeared in five genteel “ladies” sports, including golf and croquet.

This summer, more than 5,000 female athletes will compete in more than 300 events, many involving speed, risk, strength, smarts and guts.

The competitive schedule will also highlight women’s events, slotting many during major, global broadcast periods.

This focus on the numbers and visibility of women at the Olympics represents the culmination of a strategy begun in 2014, when the IOC adopted a new planning agenda that explicitly included a commitment to “gender equality.” That goal will have been realized with these games, a committee spokesman said.

If so, the 2020 Olympics could become a liminal moment for women’s sports, amping interest in and opportunities for female athletes, attracting new sponsors and broadcast deals, opening coaching jobs and leadership roles, and furthering the push for equal pay in women’s and men’s sports. But analysts and even some athletes remain unconvinced that the games can — or should — accomplish so much.

“Historically, the boost that the Olympics and all big sporting events have given to interest in and coverage of women has not translated into lasting changes,” said Olga Harvey, the chief strategy and impact officer at the Women’s Sports Foundation, an advocacy organization founded by tennis star Billie Jean King.

These games also suffered an early dent to their reputation for supporting women after the president of the organizing committee and the executive creative director of the games’ opening and other ceremonies resigned following remarks considered sexist.

Still, most analysts and female athletes are at least grudgingly hopeful that the games will be different. No previous global sporting event has showcased women to the same extent, including in marquee new sports.

In fact, all five of the new sports debuting at or returning to this year’s games — surfing, skateboarding, sport climbing, karate, and baseball and softball — offer identical numbers of events for men and women and nearly equal totals of male and female competitors. Softball, where team rosters are smaller than in baseball, will field fewer female athletes than on the men’s side.

Similarly, multiple existing Olympic sports, some once male-dominated, have added mediagenic new events with women’s divisions, including BMX freestyle park riding and canoe singles.

Other sports have created new mixed competitions, where men and women compete together. All told, 18 events this summer will be mixed, twice as many as at the Rio Games. These mixed-gender competitions include a 4x400 track relay, mixed doubles in table tennis and a four-person mixed relay in triathlon. In that event, each racer swims 300 meters (about 325 yards), cycles 8 kilometers (about 5 miles) and sprints a final 2 kilometers, before slapping the hand of her or his teammate. (Only equestrian events allow men and women to compete head-to-head.)

For the female athletes, these new events and the games’ overall focus on women loom as a challenge and a thrill.

“I like to compete with men,” said Léonie Périault, 26, a top-ranked French triathlete, who expects to represent France in the individual triathlon at the Summer Games and the new mixed relay.

“Doing triathlon since a young age, I used to race against boys, and I wanted to beat them!” she said in an email. “Now, at the elite level, races are separate, but we do race on the same distances, and I think it shows that women are as much capable of great performances as men.”

The mixed-relay format, in particular, underlines how slight the margins are separating the top men and women. A male Olympian likely can zip through his relay leg in under 19 minutes and a female teammate in about 20, she said.

“In the mixed relay, we are on equal foot, men and women,” she said. “Mixed events like this relay make it possible to realize not only that women can run with men, but that the difference in athletic level is not very important. Sport is universal and made for everyone.”

Giancarla Trevisan, 28, an American-born athlete who will represent Italy at the Olympics as part of the nation’s mixed 4x400 relay, said she had been hesitant. “When I first heard about mixed relays, I thought the idea sounded a bit silly, to be honest,” she said, “like a stunt sport.”

But her opinion flipped during her first mixed race. “I really enjoyed it,” she said. Racing with men increased the levels of competition and camaraderie: “We are doing the same distance in almost the same time, and we support each other completely.”

At the Olympics, she continued, the time difference between the women’s relay legs and the men’s has become barely discernible, a matter of seconds.

“I hope girls out there watching us will pick up on the lesson that they can be just as good as anyone on the track and in life. I hope they learn to feel confident in themselves, to try new sports, to take on challenges. That’s what I hope” the mixed relay and the Olympics themselves “can accomplish.”

She has a caution, though. “I have learned that I have to be extra ready” during the handoff portion of the mixed relay, she said, if the runner is male. “The guys come in hot.”

In a wider context, the 2020 Summer Games are expected to expand spectators’ perceptions of what constitutes women’s sports and women’s capabilities. For the first time in the Olympics, women will flip BMX bikes, foam-climb waves and pop-shove skateboards in front of one of the largest global audiences for a sporting event.

“So many people are going to see skateboarding for the first time” at these games, said Lizzie Armanto, 28, of the United States, who will be skating for Finland in Tokyo. “And I think they will be pretty surprised. The girls do a lot of the same tricks as the guys. We fall as hard. We get up as fast. We keep trying more and harder things. It’s going to be so fun to watch, and I think it will teach people a lot about what girls can do.”

Of course, not all athletes and commentators have been delighted by the rise of women’s participation in and profile at these Olympics. Some men’s events were canceled or scaled back to make way for more women, with predictable grumbling and backlash.

“At first, some male athletes showed their frustration at the losses of male events,” said José Perurena López, the president of the International Canoe Federation, which replaced several men’s canoe and kayak events with women’s races after the 2016 Games.

But the men “immediately understood that there was no other alternative,” López said.

“I am more than satisfied” with the situation today, he continued. “Women have shown in just four years that they are capable of competing in canoe with the same technical level as men.”

More concerning to some observers, including those affiliated with the Olympics, is the possibility that any beneficial influence on women’s sports could be fleeting or insubstantial.

“Off the field of play, the IOC and the Olympic movement must focus on gender equality within the athletes’ entourage and most specifically on coaches,” said Lydia Nsekera, an IOC member and chair of the organization’s Women in Sport Commission. “On average, over the past 10 years, women only represented 10% of the coaches at the Olympic Games. The fact this number has not moved in a decade is alarming and needs to be addressed.”

Harvey, of the Women’s Sports Foundation, said this year did indeed seem different.

“There has been a steady building of interest, coverage and pay for women in sport,” she said. But unless the momentum from these Olympics translates into a surge of money and leadership positions for women in sports, she said, the hype will have been only that.

Still, the athletes remain not only optimistic but also stoked about the games and their reverberations, said Ducarroz, who will be Switzerland’s sole BMX athlete.

“It’s opening so many doors, at so many levels, for women and for BMX,” she said. “It’s making us better athletes, because, with more of us competing, we’re pushing each other.”