[The participation of Saudi women remains complicated, even as the Games are under way. On Friday, Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani is scheduled to compete in judo. She is required by Saudi officials to wear a hijab, or head scarf. But the international judo federation said last week that Shahrkhani could not compete with a head covering for safety reasons and to preserve the “principle and spirit of judo.”]
By Jeré Longman
Cameron Spencer/Getty Images
Sarah Attar of Saudi Arabia during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics
LONDON — During Friday’s opening ceremony, Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, drew loud and sustained applause when he said: “For the first time in Olympic history, all the participating teams will have female athletes. This is a major boost for gender equality.”
It is true that women have come light-years from the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896, when their presence was welcomed only as spectators. Women, too, have made significant gains even since the Atlanta Games in 1996, when 26 nations did not send female athletes.
Yet the fight for true equality is far from being won. For the first time, Saudi Arabia sent two female athletes to compete in London, along with at least one sports official. But the three women who participated in the opening ceremony walked behind the men, not among them.
For some Westerners, this has been viewed a reminder of the subordinate place of women in the conservative Islamic monarchy, where sport is forbidden for girls in schools and women are effectively not allowed to drive cars.
The moment was undoubtedly scripted, but it would have been unrealistic to expect anything else in a society where men and women are generally separated, said Christoph Wilcke, an expert on Saudi Arabia for Human Rights Watch, which has forcefully pushed for inclusion of the country’s women in the Olympics.
“If they were walking together and holding hands, that would not have been cool for the domestic audience,” Wilcke said.
The participation of Saudi women remains complicated, even as the Games are under way. On Friday, Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani is scheduled to compete in judo. She is required by Saudi officials to wear a hijab, or head scarf. But the international judo federation said last week that Shahrkhani could not compete with a head covering for safety reasons and to preserve the “principle and spirit of judo.”
On Sunday, a Saudi newspaper, quoting Shahrkhani’s father, said she would withdraw from Friday’s competition if she could not wear a hijab. Olympic officials said Sunday that they were trying to resolve the situation. Soccer once banned hijabs, too, but approved them last month. Granted, judo is a different sport; the use of hands is critical. Safety should be paramount. But surely a remedy can be found. Otherwise, it will be hugely embarrassing to the I.O.C. and to the Saudis.
“The judo situation seems to be a debacle,” Wilcke said. “Participation of Saudi women has been one of the I.O.C.’s major issues. It seems strange the I.O.C. wouldn’t have contemplated clothing. That would be one of the first things on the checklist.”
Perhaps Shahrkhani could compete without a head scarf if the event were not televised, but that seems unlikely, Wilcke said. He suggested a head covering like the one in soccer could be used. Failure to resolve the matter, he said, would result “in hurt feelings on both sides, for the Saudis who tried and feel betrayed, and the I.O.C., which tried to find the right balance line.”
The other Saudi athlete competing, beginning Aug. 8, is an 800-meter runner named Sarah Attar. She grew up and lives and trains in Southern California, where she attends Pepperdine. Her family asked the university to remove photographs of Attar from her online biography. And the only photographs and video issued of Attar by the I.O.C. showed her hair, arms and legs fully covered. She has also declined interviews, further seeming to confirm that hers is but a token presence in London.
Yet, small steps can be important ones. Qatar also entered its first female athletes in the Summer Games. One of them, a shooter named Bahiya al-Hamad, carried her country’s flag in the opening ceremony. Beforehand, she said on Twitter that she was “truly proud and humbled.”
About 45 percent of the 10,500 athletes competing are women. Restrictions are falling away, stereotypes are being turned on their head. NurSuryani Mohamed Taibi, a shooter from Malaysia, became one of the few Olympic athletes to compete while pregnant when she participated Saturday in the 10-meter air rifle event.
“I felt her kicking,” NurSuryani, who is scheduled to give birth to a daughter next month, told reporters. “But I said to her, ‘O.K., be calm; Mummy is going to shoot now.’ ”
Ten or 15 years ago, it would have been unheard-of, and possibly career threatening, for any member of the United States women’s soccer team to publicly announce that she was a lesbian. But midfielder Megan Rapinoe did so just before the Games, and the response has been widely supportive.
“As athletes, we live our lives in the public eye and have a platform to be positive role models,” Rapinoe wrote in a blog on espnW. “I’d like to help create more tolerance and acceptance across the board. That means more people talking about it, more people coming out and, at the end of the day, making less of a massive deal about being gay.”
Not that discrimination, or slights, have exactly ended. Japan’s women’s soccer team is the World Cup champion. But its players were forced to fly coach, while the men’s team rode in business class, on a 13-hour flight to Paris from Tokyo before the Games.
On Wednesday in the women’s Olympic soccer tournament in Glasgow, organizers infuriated the North Koreans by placing South Korean flags next to their faces and names on the scoreboard.
Yet female soccer players have also gained praise for performing without the diving, theatrical writhing and complaining inherent in the men’s game. A British reader named Geoff Cooling wrote to The Daily Mail on Sunday that he had watched an entire match devoid of excessive preening and whining.
“Was I dreaming?” he wrote.