The media with the female sport in Rio 2016

Among all these sporting successes there are also some negative aspects that have not gone unnoticed for anyone; Something that is really sad, since they have to do with matters outside the sport and not with the performance of the athletes. What do I mean? To the coverage that the media have made of women's participation in the Olympic Games.

Media from around the world made lists with the different participants in the Olympic Games on subjects of such depth as to determine which of them was the most beautiful, the sexiest or the one with the best body. This, which could be anecdotal (there are also some media that perform the same lists with male athletes), is not so much if we proceed to analyze the issue more deeply. And so has the University of Cambridge.

The University has conducted a study on the words most used by the media to refer to both male and female athletes. The result of this analysis showed that, when talking about a male athlete, the media used terms such as "fast", "great", "fantastic" or "strong". Something very normal if you are analyzing your sports performance. The problem is that these words were far from those used to talk about female athletes, since in this case terms like "age", "senior", "pregnant", "married" and "single" were used. That is, a set of concepts totally foreign to the sport.

Undoubtedly, women's sport has been making progress thanks to the merits and hard work of our champions. The problem is that all these successes end up being overshadowed if the media set the focus on issues totally external to the sport. Hopefully in the next Olympic Games this is no more than a last memory