Men, women and sports

Elena Rossell is the first Spanish women in participate in the Motorcycling World Championship and the first women in the history in do it in Motorcycly2 followed by Ana Carrasco, who in his 16 years-old debuted in the category of Moto3. Laia Sanz is a Spanish pilot who ends 16º in the absolute ranking and won the Dakar Rally Trophy Women 2014. Does anybody hear something about this sportswoman? It’s more than probably that you have never listened to something about this women’s but I’m pretty sure you know who is Marc Coma, Dani Pedrosa, Jorge Lorenzo, Marc Marquez,… they always appear in the newspaper, on TV, and in all mass media. Maybe this lack of knowledge could be because the motorcycling world is not as popular as others sports, but happen the same in all ambits: tennis, athletic, swimming and even, with the main sport: football. Does anybody heard about Carli Lloyd, Abby Wambach, Charli Lloyd,…? They are fantastic football players and all of them had won, at leats once, the Fifa Golden Ball like Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo.

We believe that in a “modern society” as our society, people are equal and there aren’t any differences on grounds of sex and that the reference model is not the male one so, why women who play football or any other sport charge, without exaggerating, 1% of what men charge for play the same sport? Why is the basketball player Amaya Valdemoro best known as “la Gasol”?

The “golden season” of the Spanish sport is, overcoat, thanks women and there’s a lot of examples: handball, synchronized, water polo and if we have to mention a mainstream sport, we can’t forget basketball. This last summer, the Spanish women's basketball team had managed to win the European Championship in all categories, the sub-16 national team won the Eurobasket and the sub-20, proclaimed world champion just two weeks after the main team won in France but, despite all this, how many people realized this? Does anyone become this wins into a national event as it happens with men wins?

The difficulties for keep women's teams in all ambits: basketball, handball, volleyball, water polo,… is leading that the majority of our athletes have to migrate to live in a professional way their sport like men does in our country. They win championship and they bring gold medals but they don’t have any possibility to become elite athletes because there aren’t economic and informative support that allows the players develop and, unfairly, this not only happen in our country, it happen around the world although in one places this problem is noticeable than in other: in many cases, for instance, most of the women who participate in the Olympics Games, in World Championship,… have to lead with all journey cost and they have to spend their holiday days for not lose their job because they have to combine her “sports life” with another “real job” and at the end, who recognized their efforts and achievements?

For all of this, we can say that there’s a clear difference between the social, economic and media reinforcement that is done with them in front of the lack of professional consideration of women's sports. Someone could say that this happens because “sportswomen’s doesn’t give money” and that’s the problem: sportswomen’s doesn’t give money because there aren’t any invest in it and if there aren’t any invest is because people don’t value what we do. Even so, is also true that, little by little, this is changing: twenty years ago nobody talks about women's football and nowadays, for example, some newspapers have a specific section for women’s sports and the international events has every time, more audience.

I like to think that this thoughtlessness is changing: before, if you google “women’s football”, the only you could find was sexist jokes but now, you will find pictures of icons and idols of this sport. Besides, every time are more the countries that try to rise the women athletes to the "popular" level of men and sports like football or basketball has more and more support. Even so, I think that there's still much to achieve.