Olympic games first woman

This is the story of the first women to win. It makes this year the sixth disrupted year since records began: the , , and Games cancelled due to war, and the and Games boycotted on a mass scale due to the Cold War. For example, the first women to break ground by participating in — and winning! The first official modern Olympic Games dates back to , but it was another 30 years before the first woman would compete in the Games in Paris. Yet only 22 female competitors took part compared to men.

Also competing during these Games was Charlotte Cooper. They won silver in the class' second race three days later, losing to Germany. There were 22 women out of athletes competing in Paris in , just four years after the first modern, and male-only, Olympics in Athens. Women were allowed to compete in five non-contact sports — tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrian and golf — but only golf and tennis had women-only events.

British tennis champion Charlotte Cooper was the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in an individual event. But that wasn't Cooper's first Olympic gold medal. Sarah Frances "Fanny" Durack was the first Australian woman to win an Olympic gold medal, competing in the m freestyle at the Stockholm Games. Durack and fellow swimmer Wilhelmina Mina Wylie were also Australia's first female Olympians, with Wylie winning silver in the same race.

But the pair almost didn't make it to Stockholm, which was the first time women's swimming had been included in the Games. At the time, women and men were banned from swimming together at Australian public pools and men were not allowed to watch women compete.

Australia's all-male Olympic selection committee was reluctant to send Durack and Wylie to the Games, and the NSW Ladies Swimming Association attempted to ban them from swimming in front of men. But Durack was already a world record-breaking swimmer in the yards 91m and yards m freestyle, and Wylie was hot on her heels. Public support for the duo helped sway the association, which ruled they had to pay their own way to the Games.

Durack set a new world record in the heat of the m freestyle and went on to comfortably win the gold medal with a time of 1 minute, Spartan girls married later, allowing more years in education. Aristocratic girls such as Kyniska learned poetry and also trained to dance and sing competitively, so she may have even been literate. This ambition drove her to compete in the four-horse chariot race, or tethrippon , at the Olympics in and BCE.

This feat was especially impressive because women could not even step foot on the sacred grounds of the Olympic Sanctuary during the festival. Married women were forbidden on penalty of death from even attending as spectators. In sports like wrestling or javelin, the victors individually competed on the field.

In the chariot race, the winners were the horse owners, not the riders — who were almost always slaves. Much like with the modern Kentucky Derby or Melbourne Cup, the victors are the horse and its owner, not the rider. In fact, chariot team owners did not even have to be physically present at Olympia during the games. Kyniska could enter her chariot team in the race without ever stepping foot on the forbidden sacred grounds.

News that a woman had won an Olympic contest would have spread quickly. What motivated a Spartan royal to break through the difficult glass ceiling of male-dominated Olympic competition and culture?