Finally, The Olympics Will Let Women Swim 1,500 Meters

On Friday, the International Olympic Committee formally announced that women will be allowed to swim 1,500 meters at the summer Olympics. This has been a long, long, long time coming and is part of a broader IOC initiative to make the gender participation in Olympic Games equal. The IOC also approved 14 mixed-gender events in sports like table tennis, triathlon, and archery.

But the introduction of the women's 1,500 freestyle breaks an important barrier rooted in longstanding sexism in sport, particularly swimming, and especially from the IOC. As Michelle Martinelli wrote for this website last year, "For as long as the modern Olympics have existed, they have featured inequality between men's and women's swimming, particularly in distance events."

Men have been swimming the 1,500 since 1904, but prior to 1968, there was no women's swimming event longer than 400 meters. Since then, the longest women's Olympic event has been 800 meters. This despite the fact that Katie Ledecky, for example, has swam the 1,500 freestyle under the men's Team USA qualifying time, and almost every other major swimming tournament has a women's 1,500 event.

While the swimming of a women's 1,500 in Tokyo might not get the same attention as a brand-new event like three-on-three basketball or freestyle BMX (also added to the Olympic program), this milestone is, in almost every way, far more important.