Not all in the same boat

08/02/2021

Emma Walters discusses how female athletes face a data gap that sets them back 

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Image by Joanne

By Emma Walters

4am starts, physical changes, exhaustion, hectic schedule, huge rewards. To an outsider, this sounds like the life of either an Olympic hopeful or a mum to three toddlers. What if it were both?

Step forward, Helen Glover.

Few can rival Glover’s career. Winner of Britain’s first Olympic gold in women’s rowing, she is a former world record holder who has achieved a who’s who of British and international titles. Now, fresh off the back of four years out of the sport, three kids under three and a global pandemic, the double Olympic champion has returned to the scene. And she’s on uncharted waters.

A power endurance contest played out in floating carbon fibre at velocity, rowing training is intense and comprehensive. To even have the opportunity to make the team, Glover will be training three or four times a day, six days at a time, racking up a 30-hour working week. The hours on the rowing machine, the hours on the water, the hours of weights: all while maintaining supreme technique when steering the boat. Then there’s stretching, muscle recovery, food. All with three toddlers. Imagine.

Much as the natural reaction to the sight of these programmes is faint nausea, they’re tailored and monitored by experts in their field. The result of years of study, they map the process to achieve international success and world records. Though they’re extremely tough they have made Glover the double Olympic champion she is. British Rowing is the only branch of GB sport to have won a gold medal at every Olympic games since 1984.

But here lies a hidden challenge. Sports science data has overwhelmingly used male bodies. In among the training, the fuelling, the weights, female athletes are at the disadvantage of a lack of knowledge about how their bodies will respond. A recent study of major sports medicine journals covering 6 million participants, found that as few as 4 per cent of studies had female-only study groups. And post-pregnancy competition is of course an exclusively female situation.

This is not a problem that was born in sport – it is the extension of bias across research. There was no requirement to test the effect of drugs on female bodies until 1993. We see the effects today. Companies miss key effects that pull their drugs from the market – a 2005 study found 8/10 prescription drugs had to be removed from market due to adverse effects on women. For women taking drugs untested on female bodies, there are damaging and unexpected side effects. Real-life effects of a failure to look at the responses of female bodies.

Its outcome in sport is a lack of awareness of fundamentals. It will not come as a surprise to anyone that there are different fluctuations of hormones between male and female bodies. Yet studies in sport have repeatedly reported outcomes based on men and then extrapolated the results to women, typically just scaling their findings down to smaller weights. But women are not small men: their differing hormones respond differently. When pushing bodies to the limit, these reactions are critical.

This data gap makes Glover’s post-pregnancy training all the more impressive. Speaking to the BBC, she has described her training as a path “a bit untrodden”. When it comes to muscle recovery, the fundamental aspect of training where the body makes its changes, she says “now every tiny thing makes a real difference." Breastfeeding her twins, she’s contending with low iron. To meet these challenges, she’s changed her training structure, moving from the sessions she’s known for years to “shorter sessions and making them really hard”.

Though she is blazing the trail in rowing, Glover follows successful athletes in other sports who have achieved at the highest level after having children. Serena Williams won the Australian Open whilst pregnant with her first child Olympia. In athletics, Jo Pavey ran a lifetime best and then European Championship gold in the 10,000m after the birth of her son. Track cyclist Laura Kenny, the quadruple Olympic champion, has continued to win on the international stage following the birth of her son, and has been tipped for three Gold medals in Tokyo. This would make her Britain’s most successful Olympic cyclist, taking the title from Sir Chris Hoy.

Glover has explained that her comeback is inspired by wanting to show her baby daughter she can physically achieve anything she wants. This is more than repeating past Olympic success - what she is doing will inspire girls and change the perception of what paths they can choose, whether they have a family or not. Whilst many sportspeople have credited having children with their renewed drive to succeed, overwhelmingly fewer Olympic parents are female than male. In the most recent US Olympic squad, there were 21 parents – 20 dads and one mum. So it is not socially unacceptable for parents to train, or to balance raising children, but the visible imbalance indicates more barriers for mothers.

There is the drive and the ability in bounds for women to compete post-pregnancy. What is needed is greater understanding of female physiology in sport across the board.  Equality isn’t just being on the start line - it’s being given the same resources to train. When sport relies so much on data, a lack of study is a deep disadvantage before you’ve even got in the boat.