We can do it
On college football, the 1984 Olympics, and the vanguard of cultural change
The advent of college football season takes on epic proportions in much of the United States. It does so more than ever, now that the Big Ten Conference literally stretches from sea to shining sea. The cultural touchstones are many, from tailgates to team colors at work on Fridays.
■ This, though, may be the first college football season of a new era -- for nothing directly to do with football. It is the first season to follow a year in which the biggest names in sports belonged at least as often to women as to men. It's a tidal shift.
■ Thanks in part to their proportional over-performance at the Summer Olympics, but also to other striking moments in the spotlight, it's no longer the "women's sports" enthusiast but rather the ordinary fan who recognizes names like Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Caitlin Clark, and Sha'Carri Richardson. Not just one of them, but all of them.
■ Forty years ago, women were outnumbered two-to-one by men on the US Olympic team. Women were barely an asterisk in Congress at the time and headed just two Fortune 500 companies. Neither of those statistics has yet balanced out quite like the Olympic medal count, but indisputable progress has been made.
■ The genuine surge in popular enthusiasm for women's sports may prove to be a sort of vanguard for helping to knock down the resistance that remains in the way of recognizing women's eligibility for other high-performance activities. For now, that's only an effect we can really detect in equality-committed countries like the United States. The ultimate goal, though, would be to see those effects carried over elsewhere around a world that often remains unequal and explicitly sexist.
