Olympic-themed event examines the long fight for equity in women's sport
ASU sports historian Victoria Jackson (left) listens as Olympian and professional skateboarder Lizzie Armanto speaks during the “A Marathon, Not a Sprint: Women in the Olympic and Paralympic Games” event at the ASU California Center Broadway on Feb. 2. Photo by Vivien Killilea
Show up for the stories of sport, stay to learn about how they change the world — or how the world changes through sport.
That is the promise of Arizona State University’s Great Game Lab, which explores the global convergence of sport, media and geopolitics. That was on full display at a St. Brigid’s Day event co-hosted recently by the lab and the Consulate General of Ireland, Los Angeles at ASU’s California Center Broadway in downtown LA.
On the cusp of the 2026 Winter Olympics, the Irish consulate partnered with ASU and used the holiday that honors one of Ireland’s three national saints — St. Brigid of Kildare — as a marker to sponsor an event titled “A Marathon, Not a Sprint: Women in the Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
Consul General Caitlín Higgins Ní Chinnéide welcomed the audience by noting that St. Brigid’s Day was a day “designated a public holiday by the government of Ireland in recognition of the talents and contributions of women to culture, community and innovation.”
The Feb. 2 event, which featured three panel discussions moderated by ASU sports historian and Great Game Lab Co-Director Victoria Jackson, brought together athletes, scholars, journalists and local leaders to explore the long arc of women’s participation in global sport — from the early trailblazers and the ignorance they overcame to today’s elite competitors and how gender equity in sport continues to evolve.
Jackson opened the discussion on a historical note by reminding the audience it has been nearly 100 years since women first began participation in track and field events at the 1928 Olympics. She shared with the audience that the International Olympic Committee’s co-founder, Pierre de Coubertin, was openly opposed to women competing at all. He thought their role was to “crown the victors,” not become them.
“Modern sports were a political product of their origins,” said Jackson, who is also a clinical associate professor in ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. “They were born in a moment when industrialized societies were organized around class, race and gender-based hierarchies. The men who ran amateur sports at the turn of the century — the lords, the barons, the dukes — they saw sport as a space for elite, mostly white men to state claim to and remain at the top of this hierarchical ordering of society.”
The first panel featured Cara Hawkins-Jedlica, a Washington State University associate professor of practice, and Patrick Bixby, an ASU Foundation Professor of humanities. They focused on the period of advocacy in the years that led to women’s first formal inclusion in the 1928 Olympics. Hawkins-Jedlica highlighted the slow rate of progress, noting that more recent steps toward equity arrived in the 1950s and 1960s when gymnastics and swimming were added, followed by a period of time when female distance runners actually snuck into races to participate.
Hawkins-Jedlica recounted the story of Kathrine Switzer, who registered for the 1967 Boston Marathon using her initials. Mid-race, an official realized she was a woman and physically tried to remove her from the course. Her male teammates had to block him so she could keep running. She finished.
It was 1972 before the Boston Marathon finally began including female runners. And it would not be until 1984, the last time the Summer Games were held in Los Angeles, when the women’s marathon was finally added to the Olympics.
After that fast-forward through slow progress, the event turned to a one-on-one discussion between Jackson and Lizzie Armanto, an American-Finnish professional skateboarder and Olympian. Armanto was the first woman to complete Tony Hawk’s legendary 360-degree loop, and her name and likeness are used in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game.
Skateboarding is a career that traditionally has not included many women. As Armanto began to take parts in events early on, she nurtured connections with sponsors, hired a manager and entered contests.
“Even when it first started happening, I was like, ‘This is amazing.’ When the Olympics came up, that was an opportunity that was not on my radar whatsoever,” Armanto said. “It was another milestone in representing the skate culture on a world stage. And the cool thing about skateboarding is that you can do contests, but there’s also a whole industry outside of that. It is beyond what I ever could have imagined.”
Jackson pointed out that all of the hard-earned Olympic “equality” for women comes with some important footnotes: Near parity in athlete numbers doesn’t mean equal funding, media coverage, coaching access or cultural respect. She noted a 2022 Gender Equity Review that showed women’s sports were undervalued, undersold and fundamentally set up to fail. Run mostly by men, the effect of people undervaluing the sport they were running influenced the media to treat them as non-comparable products to men’s sports, which means less viewers, which then reinforced the belief in lower value.
That story provided a transition to the final panel: business and the media, which featured Julie Uhrman, CEO and co-founder of Angel City Football Club, and Iliana Limon Romero, the assistant managing editor for sports at the Los Angeles Times.
Uhrman said her experience building the Angel City franchise with co-owners Kara Nortman, a venture capitalist, and actress Natalie Portman taught her to think bigger and focus on making games a spectacle, like the Los Angeles Lakers teams of Magic Johnson who made the game “Showtime.” If you weren’t there to watch the game, you were there to see Jack Nicholson sitting courtside next to Adam Sandler.
“We were huge sports fans, and we felt that there wasn’t a single experience for women that replicated where we thought the bar should be set,” Uhrman said. “Simply put, if it’s not fun and not entertaining and not cool to go to a woman’s game, no one’s going to go.”
To accomplish that meant attracting large investors. Though they first went the “traditional route” when looking to raise money, a phone call with Eva Longoria changed their strategy. The actress, Uhrman said, told them the team was going to advance equity in women’s sports, and she wanted to be part of that. Angel City’s three-woman ownership team took a lesson from that and started talking to people “who looked more like us,” Uhrman said.
“We believed that if we did everything right, if we invested in the product, the players, the experience and the community, more people would pay attention,” she said, “and if we did it on a global basis, which was our goal, more people around the world would pay attention, and that would drive everyone to invest more.”
Romero said her work at the Los Angeles Times is to have a strong relationship with their audiences and to serve readers what they want. She also described overcoming misconceptions in leadership that mirrored what Uhrman found with investors. That, too, is changing. For the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, LA Times coverage will be led by a female executive editor and by a female managing editor, Romero.
“You have to move forward,” Romero said. “The people who led coverage of the ’84 Olympics are not the same people who will lead coverage of the 2028 Olympics. It will be the first female majority games, and we will have female majority leadership.”
And as of 2026, it all will happen under the leadership of a new International Olympic Committee president: Kirsty Coventry, a former Olympic swimmer from Zimbabwe who now serves as the first female president in the history of the IOC.
“This has been happening for over a century, and each generation of women athletes has understood the assignment: Leave the sports world in a better place than where it had been when you first entered it,” Jackson told the audience.
“Sports victories’ greatest impacts inevitably happen outside of the games themselves.”
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