Unit 16 · Bodies, Data, and the State

The first modern Olympics, in Athens in 1896, had no events for women. Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), opposed women competing in public. At the 1900 Paris Games women entered a few sports, including tennis and golf. Charlotte Cooper of Britain won the tennis singles and became the first woman to win an Olympic event.

Track and field, the center of the Games, stayed closed to women for three more decades. The sport’s world body, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), was founded in 1912 and ran only men’s events at first. Swimming added women’s races in 1912 in Stockholm. Each federation decided on its own whether women had a category in its sport.

Women’s track events finally appeared at the 1928 Amsterdam Games, with five events. After the 800 meters, newspapers claimed that runners had collapsed, and officials dropped the race. Women did not run an Olympic 800 meters again until 1960 in Rome. The story shows how a category could be opened and closed by the same officials within one Games.

Alice Milliat was a French rower and sports organizer. In 1919 she asked the IOC to add women’s track and field to the 1920 Games, and it refused. In 1921 she and others founded the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI), an international federation run for women’s sport. It set its own records and rules.

In August 1922 the FSFI held the first Women's World Games in Paris. Athletes from five nations, including the United States and Britain, competed before a large crowd in a single day. More Women’s World Games followed in Gothenburg in 1926, Prague in 1930 and London in 1934. The IAAF objected at first to the FSFI using the word Olympic.

The separate games put pressure on the IAAF and IOC. A rival body with its own records threatened their control of the sport. The IAAF agreed to a small women’s program for 1928, and by the mid-1930s it took over women’s records. The FSFI then faded and dissolved. The case shows a shut-out group building a parallel institution to force a door open.

The Boston Marathon, first run in 1897, had no category for women. In 1966 Roberta Gibb ran it without a number after hiding near the start. In 1967 Kathrine Switzer entered as K. V. Switzer and received an official bib, the numbered cloth runners wear. A race official tried to pull her number off during the race, and photographs of the scene spread worldwide.

The Amateur Athletic Union, which then governed American distance running, barred women from races longer than a few miles. Runners and organizers pushed back through the late 1960s. In 1972 the Boston Marathon officially opened a women’s division. Nina Kuscsik won it that first year. The rule change came from the race and the national body, not from the runners’ fitness.

The IOC added a women’s Olympic marathon for the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Joan Benoit of Maine won it. The women’s 10,000 meters did not join the Olympics until 1988 in Seoul. These dates show that the women’s category grew event by event, each through a vote by a governing body.

In the Cold War years, some Western officials and newspapers claimed that men were entering women’s events. Historians have found little evidence for that claim. Even so, at the 1966 European Championships in Budapest, the IAAF required women to pass a physical inspection by doctors. Many athletes later described the checks as humiliating. The inspections were a new kind of eligibility rule.

In 1968 the IOC replaced inspections with a laboratory test. The Barr body test looked at cells scraped from inside the cheek for a sign of two X chromosomes. It was used at the Winter Games in Grenoble and the Summer Games in Mexico City. Women who passed received a certificate so they would not need to be tested again.

Geneticists soon pointed out problems. Some women have chromosome patterns that differ from the typical XX, yet their bodies gain no athletic advantage from it. Such natural variations are now often called differences of sex development (DSD). A test built on one marker could shut out women who had lived as women their whole lives.

María José Martínez-Patiño was a Spanish hurdler. At the 1985 World University Games in Kobe, Japan, she failed the chromosome screen. Tests showed she had a Y chromosome and androgen insensitivity, a condition in which the body cannot respond to testosterone. She had lived as a woman all her life and did not know of the condition.

Spanish officials told her to fake an injury and withdraw quietly. She refused. News of the result became public, and she lost her place on the national team, her records and her scholarship. She then worked with geneticist Albert de la Chapelle and others to show that her condition gave her no advantage. In 1988 the IAAF restored her eligibility.

Her case helped end universal screening. The IAAF stopped testing every woman in the early 1990s. In 1999 the IOC voted to drop routine sex testing before the 2000 Sydney Games. From then on, officials could still examine an athlete whose eligibility was questioned. That shift moved sex testing from a gate for everyone to a case-by-case review.

In 2011 the IAAF introduced hyperandrogenism rules. Hyperandrogenism means naturally high levels of testosterone. Women above a set limit had to lower their levels to compete. Indian sprinter Dutee Chand was barred under the rules and appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), a tribunal in Lausanne, Switzerland, that hears sports disputes.

In July 2015 CAS suspended the IAAF rules. The panel said the IAAF had not shown enough evidence that natural testosterone gave a large advantage. The IAAF then wrote new rules in 2018 that applied only to events from 400 meters to the mile. South African runner Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic 800 meters champion, challenged them.

In 2019 CAS ruled against Semenya, calling the rules discriminatory but necessary. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2020. Semenya then took her case to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in her favor on procedural grounds in July 2023. World Athletics, the IAAF’s new name, extended its limits to all women’s events that year.

A transgender person has a gender identity different from the sex recorded at birth. In 2004 the IOC adopted the Stockholm Consensus. It allowed transgender athletes to compete after surgery, legal recognition and two years of hormone therapy. Few athletes met all three conditions, and critics said the surgery rule had no link to performance.

In November 2015 the IOC issued new guidelines. They dropped the surgery requirement. Transgender women could enter women’s events if their testosterone stayed below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least twelve months. The guidelines were advice to federations, not binding rules, and federations applied them in different ways.

In November 2021 the IOC published its Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination. It said no athlete should be presumed to have an advantage and handed eligibility decisions to each sport’s federation. In 2023 World Athletics barred transgender women who had gone through male puberty from the women’s category. Swimming’s federation had adopted a similar rule in 2022, so rules now differ from sport to sport.

At the 2000 Sydney Paralympics, Spain won the gold medal in basketball for athletes with an intellectual impairment. That term means a significant limit in thinking and learning skills that appears in childhood. Soon after, a Spanish journalist, Carlos Ribagorda, revealed that he had played on the team. He said most of the players had never been tested and had no impairment.

Spain’s sports officials investigated and confirmed the fraud. The team returned its medals. The International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the world body for the Paralympics, then suspended all events for athletes with intellectual impairments. It said it needed a reliable way to check eligibility before those athletes could return.

The ban lasted more than a decade and shut out many honest athletes. The IPC worked with the international federation for athletes with intellectual impairments, now called Virtus, to build new tests. Athletes with intellectual impairments returned at the London 2012 Paralympics in three sports: athletics, swimming and table tennis. The case shows how one fraud closed a category for everyone in it.

Oscar Pistorius was a South African sprinter who ran on carbon-fiber prosthetic legs, artificial limbs built for running. He won Paralympic gold in 2004. He then tried to qualify for the Olympics against runners without disabilities. In 2007 the IAAF added a rule against devices that give a runner an advantage over one not using them.

In January 2008 the IAAF ruled Pistorius ineligible, citing a study it had paid for. He appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. In May 2008 CAS overturned the ban. The panel said the IAAF had not proven that the prosthetics gave him an overall advantage over a whole race. The ruling put the burden of proof on the governing body.

Pistorius ran the 400 meters and the 4 x 400 meters relay at the London 2012 Olympics, the first double-leg amputee to run on an Olympic track. He then raced at the London Paralympics weeks later. In 2013 he killed Reeva Steenkamp at his home, and South African courts later convicted him of her murder. His eligibility case remains a legal precedent even though his name is now tied to that crime.

Early Paralympic sport sorted athletes by medical diagnosis, such as spinal cord injury or amputation. Each disability group ran its own classes, so one Games could have many small events. In the 1990s the IPC began moving toward functional classification. That system groups athletes by how an impairment affects a particular sport, not by the name of the diagnosis.

In November 2007 the IPC General Assembly approved the IPC Athlete Classification Code. It set shared rules for all Paralympic sports. It listed which impairments are eligible, required trained classifiers, and gave athletes a right to protest a class. A revised Code took effect in 2015 and called for classification to be evidence-based, tied to research on each sport.

Classification disputes still reach the news. Athletes and coaches have argued that some rivals were placed in classes with less severe impairments. Other athletes have lost their eligibility after a review and ended careers. The Code gives these disputes a written process, with protests and appeals, instead of leaving them to a single official’s judgment.

In the early 1920s Chicago’s South Park Commission, a public park board, built a stadium on the lakefront south of Grant Park. It opened in 1924 as Municipal Grant Park Stadium. In 1925 it was renamed Soldier Field to honor Americans who died in the First World War. It was paid for with public money raised by the park board.

For decades the stadium served as a civic space, meaning one used by the whole city. It hosted the 1927 boxing rematch between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, high school football championships, religious gatherings and the first Special Olympics Summer Games in 1968. The Chicago Park District, formed in 1934 from twenty-two park boards, took over the building.

The Chicago Bears moved to Soldier Field in 1971 from Wrigley Field. From then on a private National Football League club became the stadium’s main tenant, a renter who uses a building owned by someone else. The Bears paid rent to the Park District. Questions about who should pay for repairs and upgrades grew over the next thirty years.

By the 1980s Comiskey Park, opened in 1910, was the oldest park in the major leagues. The White Sox owners wanted a new one and talked with officials in St. Petersburg, Florida, about moving there. In 1987 the Illinois General Assembly created the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (ISFA), a state agency with the power to build and own stadiums.

In the summer of 1988 legislators approved money for a new park in a vote held late at night, just as a deadline passed. The ISFA sold bonds to build it, repaid largely with a tax on Chicago hotel rooms. New Comiskey Park opened in 1991 across 35th Street from the old one, which was torn down. The White Sox became its tenant.

In 2001 the state gave the ISFA another job: rebuilding Soldier Field for the Bears. The project kept the old columns and set a new bowl inside them, reopening in 2003. The ISFA again sold bonds backed by the hotel tax. A public authority, an agency set up by law for one purpose, let the state borrow for sport outside its regular budget.

Chicago Stadium opened on West Madison Street in 1929. It was home to the Blackhawks hockey club and the Bulls basketball club. By the late 1980s its owners wanted a larger arena with more premium seats. Jerry Reinsdorf of the Bulls and Bill Wirtz of the Blackhawks formed a joint venture, a business shared by two owners, to build one.

The United Center opened across the street in 1994, and Chicago Stadium was torn down the next year. The owners paid for construction with private loans rather than public bonds. The owners, not taxpayers, carried the construction debt. The arena name was sold to United Airlines as naming rights.

The contrast shows that public funding was a choice, not a rule. Reinsdorf also owned the White Sox, whose park was built by the state authority three years earlier. The same owner used public money for one building and private money for another. The difference depended on what each city and state offered and what each team could threaten.

Chavez Ravine, near downtown Los Angeles, held three mostly Mexican American neighborhoods: La Loma, Palo Verde and Bishop. In 1950 the city’s housing authority planned a large public housing project there. It used eminent domain, the government’s power to take private land for public use with payment, to buy out and remove hundreds of families.

In 1953, after a political fight and a new mayor, the city canceled the housing plan. Most homes had already been cleared. In 1957 the city offered the land to Walter O’Malley to bring his Brooklyn Dodgers west. Opponents forced a referendum, a public vote on a law. In June 1958 voters approved the contract, Proposition B, by a narrow margin.

A few families had stayed on the land. In May 1959 sheriff’s deputies carried members of the Aréchiga family out of their home as television cameras filmed. Dodger Stadium opened in April 1962. The story remains a lasting memory in Mexican American Los Angeles, and it shows how land taken for one public purpose was later handed to a private team.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. For a long time, public use meant roads, schools or parks. Over the twentieth century courts allowed takings for urban renewal, the clearing of neighborhoods officials labeled as blighted. Blight is a legal label for an area judged run-down or unsafe.

In Kelo v. City of New London, decided in 2005, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that a city could take homes for a private economic development plan. The majority said the plan served a public purpose. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in dissent, warned that any property could now be taken for a richer private use. Many states then passed laws to limit such takings.

In Brooklyn, a New York State agency used eminent domain to assemble land for the Atlantic Yards project, which included an arena for the Nets. Residents sued, and in 2009 New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, upheld the taking in Goldstein v. New York State Urban Development Corporation. The Barclays Center opened on the site in 2012.

In 1966 the National Football League and the American Football League agreed to merge. The merger needed help from Congress, because antitrust law, which bans companies from combining to limit competition, could block it. That year Congress passed a law allowing the merger. The same law changed section 501(c)(6) of the tax code to list professional football leagues.

Section 501(c)(6) covers business leagues and trade associations, such as chambers of commerce. Groups under it do not pay federal income tax on their dues. The change meant the NFL’s league office, which collected dues from its clubs, was tax-exempt. The thirty-two clubs themselves always paid taxes on their profits.

Critics in Congress argued that a league earning billions from television should not enjoy a nonprofit status. In April 2015 NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the league office would give up its exemption. The NHL and the PGA Tour had also used the same section of the tax code. The case shows a sports rule written directly into federal law.

The Colts had played in Baltimore since 1953. Owner Robert Irsay wanted a new stadium and weighed offers from other cities. Indianapolis had built the Hoosier Dome, a covered stadium paid for with public money, without a team to fill it. In March 1984 the Maryland legislature moved to give Baltimore the power to take the team by eminent domain.

Before that law could be used, Irsay acted. On the night of March 28–29, 1984, moving vans carried the team’s equipment and offices out of Baltimore in a snowstorm. By morning the Colts were headed for Indianapolis. The city then sued to take the team, but courts ruled that the club had already left Maryland’s reach.

The move became a symbol of relocation, a team leaving one city for another. Baltimore lost NFL football until 1996, when the Cleveland Browns moved there and became the Ravens. That deal also depended on a new stadium paid largely with public money. Cities learned that a team’s threat to leave was a powerful bargaining tool.

Team owners and city officials often promised that a new stadium would bring jobs, tourism and growth. In 1997 economists Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist published Sports, Jobs, and Taxes through the Brookings Institution. The book collected studies of stadium projects in many cities. Its authors concluded that few if any showed a positive effect on local economic growth.

One reason is substitution. A family that spends money on a game usually spends less on movies, restaurants or other outings in the same area. The money moves around inside the region rather than adding to it. Many stadium jobs are also seasonal and part-time, while the players and owners who earn the most often live elsewhere.

Economists do not claim that stadiums have no value. Residents may value a team as a shared civic symbol, a kind of public good that people enjoy even without buying tickets. The argument is over price: whether that value is worth the hundreds of millions of public dollars a stadium can cost. Voters and legislators still weigh that question deal by deal.

In the United States, most future professional athletes first played on teams run by public high schools. Coaches, fields and gyms are paid for largely by local property taxes. The National Federation of State High School Associations, formed in 1920 by Midwestern state associations including Illinois, writes playing rules for most high school sports. Professional leagues pay none of these costs.

Major League Baseball held its first amateur draft in 1965. A draft is a system in which clubs take turns claiming the right to sign young players. Baseball clubs may draft players straight out of high school. Many then play in the minor leagues, a farm system of clubs owned or tied to major league teams, which Branch Rickey built for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s and 1930s.

The National Basketball Association let players enter from high school for years; Kevin Garnett in 1995 and LeBron James in 2003 went straight from school to the NBA. In 2005 the league and its players’ union agreed that players must be at least 19 and one year past high school graduation. That age rule pushed most top players into one season of college basketball.

In many European countries, sport for teenagers is organized by clubs, not schools. Professional soccer clubs run youth academies that recruit children, pay coaches and often house players. FC Barcelona opened a residence for young players, La Masia, in 1979. Ajax of Amsterdam built its academy into one of the best-known training systems in the world.

Under that model, the club pays much of the cost of training and in return holds the first right to sign the players it develops. FIFA’s transfer rules include training compensation, payments that a buying club owes to the clubs that trained a young player. The money flows back toward the institutions that did the training.

In the United States, the training cost falls on public schools, colleges and families. School districts pay coaches and build fields with tax money. Colleges fund teams through tuition, fees and television income. No rule sends a share of a professional contract back to the high school that coached the player. The comparison makes visible the public role that American schools play in professional sport.