(Lausanne) For the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, will there be as many women as men in Paris? Among athletes, yes, but not among coaches, where parity still requires models and support.
“A real gender gap still exists in the athletes’ entourage,” recognizes the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which counted 13% of women coaches at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and 10% at the Beijing Winter Games in 2022, compared to 11% at Rio-2016 and 9% at PyeongChang-2018.
Seeing a woman training a man remains a widely commented rarity, as the former world number one tennis player Amélie Mauresmo experienced when she accompanied Andy Murray in 2014-2016, at the cost of a concert of sexist reflections .
“Before, I was always the problem, and the criticism was directed at me in case of defeat. With Amélie, the questions I was asked most of the time if I lost a match were about our relationship. I had never been confronted with this,” the Scotsman told the Swiss daily Le Temps in 2020.
Before arriving on the bench of Les Bleues, Corinne Diacre had also created an event by becoming in 2014 the first coach of a professional men’s football team, Clermont, while the American Becky Hammon pushed the door the same year. of the NBA, named assistant coach of the San Antonio Spurs.
The high level of women remains very largely supervised by men, even if among the leading athletes, Simone Biles trained with Aimee Boorman before joining the French Cécile and Laurent Landi, and Mikaela Shiffrin chose in 2023 the American-Norwegian Karin Harjo.
“It’s about putting more spotlight on female coaches,” the best skier in history announced to the New York Times. “I’ve accomplished a lot, but maybe at this point in my career I can give other female ski coaches some insight into what to aim for.”
Harjo, shaped by a Norwegian childhood “without separation” between girls and boys, takes on the role of example: “For young women who want to coach at the highest level, it is much easier to believe in it if they can see someone else doing it,” she confided last year.
Focusing on the ripple effect is also the strategy of the British agency UK Sport, which in 2021 intended to increase from 10 to around 25% of female coaches by Paris-2024, at both the Olympics and the Paralympics: the organization has appointed mentors such as Mel Marshall, coach of double Olympic 100m breaststroke champion Adam Peaty, or Jane Figueiredo, who notably led Tom Daley and Matty Lee to gold in the 10m synchronized diving at the Tokyo Olympics .
However, the scarcity of models is far from being the only obstacle, explains to AFP Elizabeth Pike, sociologist at the English University of Hertfordshire and head of the IOC’s “Wish” program for female coaches, referring to “a more social context wide “.
Coaches are most often recruited “via informal channels” favorable to men, historically more present in sport, underlines the researcher. For her, women also face “stereotypes” about their skills, “a limited support network”, as well as a “lack of flexibility” in reconciling family tasks, which still fall largely on them.
Furthermore, beyond the initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada or New Zealand, the idea is to also reach “more traditional countries, where it is all the more important to have female coaches than men cannot work in the same way with women athletes,” emphasizes Sheila Stephens Desbans, head of sport development at the IOC.
Since 2019, the IOC has therefore offered 123 female coaches – from 22 disciplines and 60 countries – a course combining online workshops, mentoring and meetings. At least six of them are guaranteed to be in Paris, including the Tunisian Marwa Amri, bronze medalist in wrestling (58 kg) at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, who began training children during her career and will supervise two wrestlers in Paris.
“I learned a lot: gaining confidence, taking on leadership responsibilities, meeting coaches from all over the world in various sports, sharing our experiences,” the ex-champion tells AFP.
The program will continue after the Games, as developing elite coaches is long-term work, recalls Yassine Yousfi, head of the entourage unit at the IOC: “At the amateur level, there are a lot of women involved in the clubs. . The higher you go, the more difficult the selection, hence our programs so that these women have all the tools. »
