Conspicuously Absent: An Analysis of the Introduction of Lightweight Women's Rowing into the 1996 Olympic Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction During the late 1980s and early 1990s, international rowing administrators began to discuss the introduction of lightweight events to the Olympic racing program. The international rowing federation (FISA) argued that lightweight rowing had long been in existence and deserved to be on the Olympic program because of its strict adherence to the rules of amateurism. (1) Furthermore, the first ever world champion, Ned Hanlan, was a lightweight rower at a svelte seventy-two kilograms, and men's lightweight rowing had been on the international racing program since 1974. (2) In 1985, FISA delegates met with International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Juan Antonio Samaranch to discuss their intention to include lightweight racing at the Olympic Games. Overly confident, the delegates were certain their request would be 'rubber stamped,' but the proposal lacked one significant component, the inclusion of lightweight women's events. If FISA submitted a request, Samaranch said, should be a complete one ... involving both men and women ... [given that] it was the IOC's intention to avoid any discrimination against (3) Having been Officially introduced to the international racing program in 1985, lightweight women's rowing remained innocuous. At less than fifty-nine kilograms, lightweight oarswomen's limited physical capacity, their smaller and lighter stature, defined views on the merit and importance of lightweight women's races. This paper examines the influence of late twentieth century beliefs and values on the perceived legitimacy of lightweight women's international rowing and how they impacted the introduction of lightweight women's rowing in the Olympic Games. Lightweight Women's International Rowing In the summer of 1984, FISA reluctantly permitted lightweight women's demonstration events to be held at the 10th FISA Championships for Lightweights in Montreal, Canada, despite several male and female rowing administrators' arguments that lightweight women's rowing did not deserve a place on the international racing program. (4) The biologically determined inferiority of oarswomen compared to their male counterparts was compounded by the fact that lightweight women were smaller, weaker, and their races were slower. Thus, not only were oarswomen considered substandard to male rowers, but also lightweight women were considered inferior to heavyweight women. FISA's limited recognition of lightweight women's competitive rowing not surprisingly had an impact on the ways in which others in the international rowing community perceived this discipline. As Foucault has suggested, the opinions of those who hold perceived expert knowledge, such as physicians and in this example sport administrators, become socially constructed discourses. (5) Thus, late twentieth century competitive international rowing discourse was able to dictate the value of lightweight women's rowing, or lack thereof, ensuring the marginalization of lightweight women in competitive international rowing. (6) One former Canadian lightweight oarswomen noted, would be times when we wouldn't be treated the same as the heavyweights. (7) She added: Women [were] not [considered] as good [as the men], and then ... [when] you're a lightweight woman, oh my gosh [that was considered worse]. And then there would be this sort of stigma, because you're making weight, because lightweight women are wacky and weird, it is true ... they go off the deep end all the time and lose it. But of course you'd lose it, you know if you didn't have a lot of food in your system [you would]. There would be a lot of heavyweight men or women who would lose it and no one would make a comment, but because you're a lightweight woman ... it's like oh, they were ... [the] wacky ones. (8) The physical limitations of lightweight women coupled with the perceived psychological side effects of continuous weight management rendered these women pariahs. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".