Racewalkers' long march for equality deserves recognition at Tokyo 2020

To Lausanne then, home of the International Olympic Committee, and the source last week of an exciting press release about the latest developments in its “global licencing strategy”. The IOC has teamed up with the toy manufacturer Mattel, which has designed a set of Olympic-themed Barbie dolls. “The collaboration with Mattel is a great way to engage with an important audience, our younger fans and their families, and through these high-quality products to connect them with the Olympic brand and values” sayzzzzz, sorry, says Timo Lumme, managing director of IOC television and marketing servicezzzzz. The new line is designed to highlight the IOC’s spirit of “inclusivity and innovation”.

“Innovation” because Barbie is taking part in the hip new sports the Olympics has brought in – “How do you do fellow kids?” – to win over a younger audience. So we have skateboarding Barbie, surfing Barbie, sports climbing Barbie, and kick-ass karate Barbie – more power to her pink plastic elbow. “Inclusivity” because … actually, on that, one second. There is one thing that Barbie definitely won’t be doing this summer, even though you’d think her stiff limbs might make her a natural at it – the 50km racewalk.

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Women aren’t allowed to race over the distance, even though the IOC charter states that gender discrimination is “incompatible with the Olympic movement”.

Right around the time the IOC was putting the finishing touches on that press release, the last twists in this little story were unfolding just across the other side of Lausanne, at the court of arbitration for sport, where seven female athletes were fighting the IOC for the right to compete in the 50km race this summer. The court decided that it was out of its jurisdiction, which means the 50km will be the one event on the Olympic athletics schedule in which women are not allowed to compete. The crux of the problem is that World Athletics only asked the IOC to consider including the event in the programme in December 2018, 18 months after the deadline. The IOC says this left it too little time to change the schedule.

There are a couple of problems with this argument. One is the women’s 50km would be held on the same course, on the same day, as the men’s event, just like it was at the last two world athletics championships. The idea that this little inconvenience is a little too much inconvenience for the IOC to deal with in the 18 months it had to work in was somewhat undermined when, eight months later, it unilaterally decided to shift all five of the men’s and women’s marathons and race walks from Tokyo 500 miles north to Sapporo because it was so worried about how it would look if the athletes started keeling over in the heat.

You’ll be beginning to figure, by now, that its objection isn’t really about logistics.

Because there are people at the IOC, and maybe even World Athletics, who would happily get rid of the men’s competition too. There are already plans to replace the 50km race with a 30km race, and the 20km race with a 10km race. Which some people at the IOC seem to think is 10km too many. As long ago as 2003 they warned that racewalking was “on trial” as an Olympic event. You don’t need to be an IOC mandarin to understand why. It is a perfectly absurd sport with tricky rules and a tiny audience, strange and ungainly, memorably described by the NBC commentator Bob Costas as “a contest to see who can whisper the loudest”.

It wasn’t always that way: back in the 19th century pedestrianism was one of the most popular events going. In 1815 so many people went to Blackheath common to watch a man walk in a loop for 1,000 miles that the police arrested him for causing a breach of the peace. There were “tens of thousands of idle and disorderly persons” there. The heath was, apparently, “alive with acrobats and rope-walkers, fire-eaters and ballad singers, dog fights and pony races. Brothels were brought in from London to the spot, and drunkenness and debauchery were rife upon every part of Blackheath.”

So racewalking doesn’t pull in the crowds quite like it used to. But what it does have, these days, is a small, passionate community entirely dedicated to it, and who don’t give a damn that none of the rest of us really get it. People such as the US attorney Paul DeMeester, who led the legal challenge to get the women’s 50km into the Olympics.

DeMeester explains his sport this way: “Racewalking is a long-distance discipline. When we want to catch the bus arriving at the corner, we sprint. Late for an appointment downtown, we jog at a steady pace like a miler. When having to cover a great distance, we walk. Race walking in a competitive context makes sense only over distances longer than the ones we typically contest in running events.”

Which is why it matters so much to him, and the thousands of others like him, that women should be allowed to compete over 50km as well as 20km. DeMeester compares the seven women who brought the case against the IOC to Kathrine Switzer, who fought so hard for the right to run in the Boston marathon.

The IOC is not going to be able to sell many Barbie dolls off the back of the race walking competition, it’s not going to pull in millions of new viewers, and it won’t play well with the Generation Z demographic it covets, but it will serve the small group of athletes who practise this punishingly difficult discipline; athletes who don’t do it for the money, or the fame, but for the love of it; athletes who live, and compete, in utter obscurity; athletes who see the Olympics as the very pinnacle of their sport. The very sort of people the Games ought to be for, and was, once upon a time, if not any more.