Women have been winning championships far longer than the record books let on, and often without the credit. These stories run from the first Olympic Games that admitted women to a 268-mile winter race won outright, by way of a league that sent its ballplayers to charm school, a protest in a Yale office, and thirty-seven words of federal law that never mention sports.
Every tile in a Women in Sports game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pioneers
nine stories
1The golf champion who never knew she was an Olympian
On the tile: M. Abbott1900
Margaret Abbott of Chicago was studying art in Paris when she entered a golf tournament there in 1900. She shot a 47 to win and took home an antique porcelain bowl trimmed with gold. The tournament was part of the Paris Olympics, which had been folded into that year's world's fair, but Abbott understood it as an exposition event and died in 1955 still believing so. Her mother, Mary, shot 65 in the same tournament, and the two remain the only mother and daughter to compete in one Olympic event together.
2The first woman to win an Olympic title did it afloat
On the tile: Pourtalès1900
The 1900 Paris Games were the first that let women compete, and the first woman to win a title was not a runner or a tennis player. On May 22, 1900, Hélène de Pourtalès sailed aboard the Lérina with her husband and her nephew and won the one-to-two-ton class, which Guinness World Records recognizes as the first Olympic championship won by a woman. The first individual winner came seven weeks later, when Charlotte Cooper took the tennis title on July 11.
Alice Milliat was a French sportswoman who wanted women admitted to Olympic track and field. The International Olympic Committee kept refusing, so in 1921 she founded the Federation Sportive Feminine Internationale, and the following year she staged her own Women's Olympic Games, which drew more than 300 athletes. The pressure worked. In 1928 women's athletics entered the Olympic program, although only five events were offered. Milliat died in 1957, remembered far less than the Games she pried open.
4The official who tried to pull her out of the race
On the tile: K. Switzer1967
The Boston Marathon rule book said nothing about gender, so Kathrine Switzer, a 20-year-old journalism student at Syracuse, entered and signed the form the way she always signed it, K.V. Switzer. She was given bib number 261. A few miles in, race official Jock Semple came onto the course and grabbed at her number, shouting at her to get out of his race. Her boyfriend hit him with a cross-body block. Switzer, scared and embarrassed, decided that quitting would be taken as proof that women could not do it, and finished in 4 hours 20 minutes.
5Buried by an avalanche, on the summit 12 days later
On the tile: Junko Tabei1975
On May 4, 1975, an avalanche buried the second camp of the Japanese Women's Everest Expedition. Junko Tabei was pinned under snow and ice, unable to move, and it took four Sherpas to pull her out; she was unconscious until they reached her. She refused to go down to base camp to recover. Twelve days later, on May 16, she reached the summit with the Sherpa Ang Tsering, the first woman to stand there. In 1992 she became the first woman to climb the highest peak on every continent.
The Triple Crown races had run for more than a century without a woman in the winner's circle. Julie Krone changed that in 1993, riding Colonial Affair to take the 125th running of the Belmont Stakes, the first woman to win one of the three. Riding is a trade where the mounts go to whoever the trainers trust, and the trust took a long time to arrive. Krone finished with 3,704 winners, and in 2000 the National Museum of Racing made her the first woman in its Hall of Fame.
Ann Meyers was the first woman at UCLA to hold a full athletic scholarship, a four-time All-American, and a starter for the United States at the 1976 Olympics, the first Games with women's basketball. In 1979 the Indiana Pacers signed her and brought her to camp. She did not survive the final cut, and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame still lists her as the first and only woman signed to a National Basketball Association contract.
In August 1961 a charity exhibition in Waterbury, Connecticut, put Ted Williams, a year into retirement, in the batter's box against a 20-year-old local softball pitcher named Joan Joyce. Some 17,000 people turned out. Williams fouled off three pitches and then struck out. Joyce went on to a record that reads like a misprint: 753 wins against 42 losses, 150 no-hitters and 50 perfect games. Williams later told a fishing friend that the toughest pitcher he ever faced was a girl.
9She cut her hair, and Little League wrote a new rule
On the tile: Tubby1950
In 1950 Kathryn Johnston of Corning, New York, had her braids cut off, pulled on a baseball cap, and signed up as Tubby, a name borrowed from a character in the Little Lulu comics. She made the team, and when she told her coach she was a girl, he kept her at first base. Little League answered in 1951 with a rule barring girls, known afterward as the Tubby Rule. It held until 1974, when a New Jersey civil rights case forced the league open and Congress rewrote its federal charter to match.
Montreal's scoreboards were built to display three digits, because nobody expected a gymnast to need four. On July 18, 1976, Nadia Comaneci of Romania, 14 years old, finished her uneven bars routine and the board read 1.00. The crowd worked it out a moment later: the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics. She collected six more of them at those Games and left Montreal with three gold medals, one of them the youngest all-around title in Olympic history.
Trischa Zorn was born legally blind and swam at seven straight Paralympic Games, from Arnhem in 1980 to Athens in 2004, three decades of competition. She finished with 55 medals, 41 of them gold, nine silver and five bronze, more than any other Paralympian has won. The last of them came in Athens in the year she retired, when she was 40: a bronze in the 100-meter backstroke, 24 years after the first.
3Thirteen birdies, no bogeys and a number never seen
On the tile: Annika2001
At the Standard Register Ping at Moon Valley in Phoenix in March 2001, Annika Sorenstam started on the back nine and birdied her first eight holes. Five more birdies came on the front nine, four of them straight, and she signed for 13 birdies, no bogeys and a 59. The LPGA record had been 61. She was the first woman to break 60 in an official round, matching a feat that only five men had managed in American professional golf.
4More World Cup goals than any player of either sex
On the tile: Marta2019
Marta Vieira da Silva plays under one name, and the record she holds is not a women's record. Her 17 goals in World Cup finals are more than any other player, male or female, has scored, and she was the first footballer to score at five different World Cups, a feat since matched by Christine Sinclair and Cristiano Ronaldo. FIFA has named her the world's best player six times, in five straight years from 2006 and again in 2018.
5She drove into the blizzard everyone else sat out
On the tile: Libby Riddles1985
In March 1985 the Iditarod field reached Shaktoolik on the Alaska coast and stopped, pinned down by a storm off Norton Sound. Libby Riddles harnessed her dogs and went out into it. When the visibility vanished she zipped herself into her sled bag and spent the night alone on the trail. She reached Nome in a little over 18 days, the first woman to win the race, and took the humanitarian award for the care of her team. Her sled is now in the Smithsonian.
6Eight national titles and no shot at the champion
On the tile: O. Washington1929-1937
Ora Washington won eight of the American Tennis Association's nine national women's singles titles between 1929 and 1937, and played center for the Philadelphia Tribune Girls, taking ten of the team's eleven straight Colored Women's World Championships. She challenged Helen Wills Moody, the best player in the white game, to an exhibition match. It never happened; tennis officialdom had no interest and Wills never went on record about the request. Washington worked as a housekeeper and coached young players on public courts in Germantown.
7The vault no other woman had landed in competition
On the tile: Biles II2023
The Yurchenko double pike begins with a round-off onto the springboard and a back handspring onto the table, then two flips in a folded position. Only male gymnasts had completed it in international competition until Simone Biles did it at the 2023 world championships in Belgium. Land a new element at a world championship and it takes your name, so the vault is now the Biles II, the fifth element in the code of points to carry her name and, at 6.4, the hardest vault women perform.
Agnes Keleti won a Hungarian gymnastics championship in 1940 and was then banned from sport altogether because she was Jewish. She survived the war in a village south of Budapest on false papers; her father was killed at Auschwitz. She won her first Olympic gold at Helsinki in 1952, aged 31, when gymnasts her age had long retired. Four years later at Melbourne she won four more, the oldest woman ever to take a gymnastics gold. She finished with ten Olympic medals and lived to 103.
9Around the world alone in 71 days, sleeping in naps
On the tile: MacArthur2005
Ellen MacArthur was 28 when she sailed a 75-foot trimaran, built with a cockpit sized for one short sailor, around the world alone without stopping. She crossed the line off Ushant in northwest France in February 2005 in 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds, taking about 33 hours off the outright record, which was not a women's record but everyone's. Her sleep for the whole voyage came in 30-minute snatches between watches on deck.
The law that reshaped American sports is one sentence long and says nothing about sports. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 provides that no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii helped write it and fought off an attempt to roll it back. In 2002, after her death, Congress named the law for her.
Nina Kuscsik ran the Boston Marathon four times before women were allowed to enter it. She spent years bringing the Amateur Athletic Union medical evidence that its distance limits for women had no basis. In 1972 Boston held an official women's race: eight women registered, eight started, all eight finished, and Kuscsik won it. That autumn she was one of six runners who sat down at the start of the New York City Marathon to protest a rule that women had to run separately.
3Nineteen rowers with Title IX written on their backs
On the tile: Yale crew1976
Yale's women rowers changed in a trailer with four cold showers, then sat wet on a bus while the men used the boathouse. One of them caught pneumonia. On March 3, 1976, nineteen of them walked into the office of the director of physical education, pulled off their sweats and stood with Title IX written across their backs while Chris Ernst read a statement calling them the bodies Yale was exploiting. A hot water line was connected quickly, and a locker room followed the next year.
4She beat the men at skeet, and the event went away
On the tile: Zhang Shan1992
At Barcelona in 1992 Zhang Shan of China shot an Olympic record 223 in skeet, finishing one target ahead of four men to become the first woman to win an Olympic shooting gold in a mixed event. No other woman got the chance. The international shooting federation then changed its rules so that women no longer competed against men, and when the Games reached Atlanta in 1996 the skeet field was male only. Women got a skeet event of their own at Sydney in 2000.
Everyone remembers Kerri Strug landing on one foot in Atlanta in 1996 and being carried off by her coach, and the story attached to it is that her injured ankle won the team gold. It did not. By Strug's own account, Russia's last two gymnasts would have needed a pair of 9.9s, and the best they managed was 9.725 and 9.5. She could not know that. Their scores had not been posted, and she had about thirty seconds to decide.
Sarah Thomas was the first woman to work a major college football game, the first hired as a full-time National Football League official, and the first assigned to an NFL playoff game. In February 2021 she stood on the field at Super Bowl LV between Kansas City and Tampa Bay, one of seven officials working the game. The Pro Football Hall of Fame asked for the gear she wore that night, and it is on display in Canton.
Kim Ng came into baseball as an intern with the Chicago White Sox in 1990. At 29 she was an assistant general manager with the Yankees, the youngest in the majors, and she later held the same post with the Dodgers before running baseball operations for the league itself. In November 2020 the Miami Marlins hired her as general manager, the first woman to hold that job with a major league club, thirty years after the internship.
Boxing was the last Olympic sport closed to women, and it opened at London in 2012. That made these the first Games at which women competed in every sport on the program, and the first at which every national team included at least one woman, Saudi Arabia having sent two. About 44 percent of the athletes in London were women, a larger share than at any Summer Games before. Men still had 30 more medal events to enter.
In August 2014 Mo'ne Davis pitched the Taney Dragons of Philadelphia to a 4-0 shutout at the Little League World Series, striking out eight, walking nobody and needing only 70 pitches. Her fastball was clocked at 70 miles an hour. She was the first girl to pitch a shutout and the first to win a game in the tournament's history, and later that month she became the first Little Leaguer to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
1The wartime league that sent players to charm school
On the tile: Charm school1943
Philip Wrigley, who owned the Chicago Cubs, started a women's league in 1943 to keep ballparks busy while the men were at war. Four teams opened play on a 108-game schedule: the Rockford Peaches, South Bend Blue Sox, Racine Belles and Kenosha Comets. The uniforms had short skirts, which made sliding a painful business. After practice the players were sent to a charm school run by the Helena Rubinstein company to learn makeup and deportment.
2The league that changed its own game every season
On the tile: Underhand1943-1954
The All-American Girls league began in 1943 with a 12-inch ball and underhand pitching, closer to softball than to baseball, because that is what its recruits had played. Then it kept moving the pieces. Sidearm pitching was approved in 1946 and overhand in 1948, while the base paths and the pitching distance were stretched almost every year. By the end it was simply baseball. Ten teams drew 910,000 paying fans in 1948, the peak, and the league folded in 1954.
3They played men's teams by men's rules, and mostly won
On the tile: Red Heads1936
The All American Red Heads were founded in 1936 in Cassville, Missouri, by a beauty parlor owner whose players all wore red hair, dyed when it did not grow that way, as advertising for his shops. They barnstormed for fifty years, taking on men's teams by men's rules at a time when women's college basketball still limited how far a player could run, and they won about seventy percent of those games. They stopped touring in the 1980s and came back for one last game in Arkansas in 1996.
4Toothbrush money, standby seats and a national title
On the tile: Mighty Macs1972
Immaculata College, a small Catholic school outside Philadelphia, was seeded fifteenth in the first national tournament run by the new Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, in 1972, and nearly stayed home over the cost of the trip. The players sold toothbrushes to raise money, and the college president talked the trustees into buying a plane ticket apiece; eight of the twelve flew standby. They beat West Chester 52-48 for the title, then won it again in 1973 and 1974.
5Nine players signed dollar contracts and walked out
On the tile: Original 91970
By 1970 the prize money for women at the big tournaments was a fraction of the men's. Nine players signed one-dollar contracts with Gladys Heldman, who had founded World Tennis magazine, and played her unsanctioned tournament at the Houston Racquet Club for a purse of $7,500. The U.S. governing body threatened to end their careers. The circuit they started grew anyway, and in the summer of 1973 the players formed the Women's Tennis Association. The nine included Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals and Nancy Richey.
The WNBA played its first game on June 21, 1997, at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California. Jeffrey Osborne was booked to sing the national anthem but got stuck in traffic, so the arena fell back on a scratchy recording. Lisa Leslie won the opening tip, Penny Toler of the Sparks scored the league's first basket, and New York won 67-57 in front of 14,284 people. The teams had been practicing together for two or three weeks. Nobody shot well, and nobody much minded.
7A women's team that played men's clubs for four years
On the tile: Silver Bullets1994-1997
The Colorado Silver Bullets were a women's professional baseball team built to play men's opponents: minor league, semipro, college and amateur clubs. Phil Niekro, the knuckleball pitcher, managed them from 1994 to 1997. On June 25, 1995, about 3,000 people watched them lose to the Otsego Macs at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown. When Niekro was inducted into the Hall of Fame in August 1997, he saluted his players from the podium, calling it a privilege to have been part of the organization.
The Professional Women's Hockey League played its first season in 2024 with teams known only by their cities. On April 20 that year, Montreal hosted Toronto at the Bell Centre and 21,105 people came through the doors, the largest crowd ever recorded for a women's hockey game anywhere. The record it broke was two months old and belonged to the same two teams, who had drawn 19,285 to Scotiabank Arena in Toronto in February.
Before the NCAA took any interest in women's sports, women ran their own governing body. The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was founded in 1971 and grew until it was bigger than the NCAA, with nearly a thousand member colleges and championships in nineteen sports across three divisions. Then the NCAA began staging women's championships of its own, on the same weekends and with expenses paid. Member schools left, and the association ran its last championships in 1982, ten years after the law that had helped it grow.