POSTED: February 14th 2010
InDepth
Women flying their own flag for a Winter record in Vancouver
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT / Sports Features Communications
VANCOUVER, Feb 14: Vancouver 2010 can already claim one Olympics record - for women's participation in the Winter Games.
The total of 2,631 competing athletes includes 1,066 which means 40.51 per cent – a ten-fold increase sunce the now-accepted inaugural Winter Games in 1924 in Chamonix when only four per cent of the participants were female.
All seven sports on the winter programme have been open to women since the 1998 Nagano Games, which saw the first women’s ice hockey and curling competitions. In Turin in 2006, they represented 38.28 per cent.
That increase was reflected in the number of women leading their teams into the Opening Ceremony at BC Place.
Some 25 female flag bearers put their best foot forward – including Canadian speed skater Clara Hughes and Britain’s Shelley Rudman – while the eight Canadians who carried the Olympic flag into the Olympic stadium included four women: Betty Fox, an activist in the fight against cancer, Anne Murray, a Grammy award-winning singer, Barbara Ann Scott, the first Canadian Olympic figure skating champion (1948 St Moritz) and astronaut Julie Payette.
Keywords · Winter Olympics · Vancouver · women · Rudman
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