There have been many iconic firsts achieved by Black women in sports. Wyomia Tyus is the first person to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals in the 100 meters. Gabby Douglas is the first Black woman to win the Olympic gymnastics all-around gold medal. Teresa Edwards is the first women’s basketball player to amass four Olympic gold medals. Vonetta Flowers is the first Black athlete to win gold at the Olympic Winter Games. Most recently, Erin Jackson became the first Black woman to win Olympic gold in speed skating. Simone Biles is the most decorated gymnast in history. These are just a handful of incredible accomplishments.
What isn’t often discussed are the efforts that went into becoming leaders in sports. Even today, there are struggles with what scholar Dr. Moya Bailey has called misogynoir (the intersection of misogyny and racism).
Challenges
In 2017, Dr. Cynthia Frisby produced a study in which she and a student examined 643 news stories about tennis players Serena Williams and Angelique Kerber, who is white. They found 758 instances of microaggressions against Williams and 18 against Kerber.
Despite the challenges, Black female athletes continue to stand in their power. Today, they are vital to the growing appreciation of and, dare we say, enthusiasm for women’s sports.
WNBA player Brionna Jones of the Connecticut Sun, who won a World Cup title with the USA Basketball Women’s National Team in 2022, said it’s a pleasure to be a Black female professional athlete in 2024. She appreciates how social media allows players to create their own brands and advocate for causes and issues that matter to them. She is well aware it has not always been that way, even in the WNBA.
While the launch of the WNBA in 1997 certainly brought a rush of excitement, it also brought detractors, some of whom wrote opinion pieces trashing the players’ abilities and physical appearance. Today, the players are celebrated for who they are as complete people.
“I definitely feel we have that connection with the fans,” said Jones. “There are moments to talk and have conversations with them. We have a great fan base here in Connecticut.”
Women’s sports finally seem to be entering its sweet spot, but the road has been long and the journey nowhere near done.
Dr. Tomika Ferguson is the assistant dean for student affairs and inclusive excellence and an assistant professor in educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University. She developed the Black Athlete Sister Circle between 2015 and 2016 as part of her doctoral dissertation. It launched at James Madison University in the fall of 2016. A former Division I track and field athlete at the University of Virginia, she was aware of the isolation Black female student-athletes often felt.
There were some young women who were the only individuals of color on a team. Others, in sports like basketball or track and field, had networks within their own teams, but due to their demanding schedules had little time to meet athletes in other sports.
“It was important for me to create a space and to encourage other institutions to create spaces for these Black women athletes that were designed for them—no matter their background, no matter their sport—where they can just be a collective group that’s encouraging one another and gaining leadership skills,” Ferguson explained. “The Black Athlete Sister Circle is a free space to talk authentically about the challenges, the successes, and opportunities that can come from being a Black woman.”
Change Makers
In 1976, Dr. Alpha Alexander came to Temple University as a graduate assistant in the women’s sports administration department while working on her master’s degree. Shortly before she arrived, Tina Sloan Green and Dr. Nikki Franke had been named head coaches of their respective sports, field hockey and lacrosse and fencing. Together with attorney and law professor Linda Greene, they founded the Black Women in Sport Foundation (BWSF) in 1992. They felt Black women needed a seat at the table when it came to national issues around women’s sports.
“We saw that in the non-traditional sports, such as field hockey, we needed to emerge a diversity of girls and women,” said Alexander. “The way you do that, you start them young and let them participate.”
BWSF’s initial vision remains today: develop young girls, particularly in non-traditional sports. “Also, I would say, a seat at the table in terms of organizations and development of minority head coaches and minority administrators,” said Alexander, who after earning her doctorate worked at the national office of the YWCA.
She even developed a video (voiced by Robin Roberts) about women excelling in athletics after their days as competitors are over. There were also professional development opportunities for young coaches and administrators.
“We were able to introduce…the educational framework of encouraging young girls to become involved in sport and young women to become athletic administrators,” said Alexander.
Black women still are underrepresented in many sports. As sporting opportunities increase for girls, those opportunities are often inaccessible to girls of color. Ferguson said she wants to see attention paid to bringing more Black girls into sports other than basketball and track and field, which means building pipelines. While it hasn’t stopped a determined few, advocates are trying to create better pathways.
In 2023, figure skater Starr Andrews became the first Black female to earn a spot on the U.S. Figure Skating Championships senior ladies medal podium since Debi Thomas in 1988. Andrews, now 22, said that as a young girl in skating, she didn’t realize she was any different than the other girls learning their first jumps and spins.
“As I was going through puberty, your brain is developing and I feel I noticed it more, especially when I went to competitions,” Andrews said. “I’d be in the locker room and I’d be the only African American girl in there. It really opened up my eyes that there aren’t a lot of us in the sport.
“There was a moment where I was sad about it, but then it also inspired me to keep going, push hard, and just show this sport is for everybody,” she added. “It’s important that a lot of people know that.”
Andrews has been intentional in selecting music. One year, it was from the soundtrack of “Black Panther.” This year, she’s skating her short program to Beyoncé. During the summer of 2020, she developed an exhibition program to the Mickey Guyton song “Black Like Me.”
“I learned to celebrate all of the victories in me showing aspiring skaters to start in the sport,” said Andrews. “It’s really important for them to see representation.”
Something as simple as finding tights that match their skin color has been an issue for skaters. In the mid-1990s, French skater Surya Bonaly decided to go with bare legs, but she was threatened with deductions to her scores. So, she crafted a solution in which she put a piece of dark material over her skates, replicating a popular look for skaters at the time of having their tights over their skates. Some Black female skaters wore pantyhose, which are not optimal for a cold ice rink.
By the time European and World Championship medal-winning pair skater Vanessa James, who competed in four Winter Olympics (representing France three times and Canada once in 2022, where she was the lone Black skater), was reaching international prominence, the British lingerie company Nubian Skin was making tights, bras, and underwear designed for Black women with a range of skin tones and distributing them worldwide.
“There are skaters and dancers, young Black women and other women of color as well, who want tights to complete their costumes,” said Ade Hassan, founder and CEO of lingerie company Nubian Skin. “It’s amazing that something I thought of as a fashion solution has an impact…far beyond the realm I originally thought about.”
The sports of the Olympic Winter Games have little diversity. Over the past 30 years, there has been a slow change, particularly on Team USA. It came first in bobsled. As the U.S. grew its reputation in the sport, there was intentional recruitment of track and field athletes. At the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Flowers, a former sprinter, served as brakeman in the two-man bobsled for driver Jill Bakken, winning gold.
In 2014, sprinter Lauryn Williams, a two-time Olympic medalist in track, won the silver medal with Elana Meyers Taylor, who is also African American, in the two-man bobsled. With this accomplishment, Williams became only the fifth person in history and first American to win medals in both the Summer and Winter Games. Three years later, Williams would provide insights into her experience for a former triple jump record holder for the University of Kentucky, Simidele Adeagbo.
Looking Forward
In the summer of 2017, Adeagbo was toying with a crazy idea at age 36 and nine years removed from competing in track and field: She was thinking of trying to qualify for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. Adeagbo had seen a video of three women who were endeavoring to be the first Winter Olympic athletes representing Nigeria. All former track and field athletes raised in the U.S. in Nigerian families, the motivation to take up bobsled came from Dr. Seun Adigun, a chiropractor and biomechanist who had represented Nigeria in the 2012 Olympics. Adigun would be the driver and Akuoma Omeoga and Ngozi Onwumere would alternate as brakemen.
At the time, Adeagbo was a marketing executive with Nike based in Johannesburg, South Africa. After a colleague showed her the video, she began to do some research. This led her to a tryout in Houston in August 2017, which led to an invitation to a training camp in Canada. The opportunity to make history for Nigeria proved irresistible after Adeagbo focused on skeleton, which involves only one person on a sled going headfirst down the ice track. In February 2018, she joined Adigun, Omeoga, and Onwumere at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games.
“My teammates and I did all the work to make that happen,” said Adeagbo, who now competes in monobob (one-person bobsled) and has the goal of competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics. “Here we are in front of the world and people are seeing that it is possible for Nigerians to be at the Winter Olympics. … Walking in, you’re carrying those hopes of the nation with you and it feels very powerful.”
While Adeagbo placed 20th, she completed four clean runs, ensuring her name is in the record books. As the first Black person to ever compete in Olympic skeleton, her presence was duly noted. At the conclusion of the event, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach shook her hand. “For me, that was solidifying the significance of that moment,” Adeagbo recalled.
Today, Adeagbo fights for gender equity in the Olympic movement. She has also launched the SimiSleighs Foundation, which issues training grants to women from around the world who are Olympic or Paralympic hopefuls.
Ferguson sees the upswing for women’s sports and how Black female athletes are now being embraced. “I have seen the improvement honestly when it comes to representation, marketing, and earning potential,” she said. “Female athletes now are able to be seen as an option to invest in.”
Alexander mentioned the ongoing dearth of Black women in various organizations and governing bodies, even those developing opportunities for people/men of color over the past three decades, but she has seen positive evolution since 2020.
“The power of sport, how women in the WNBA raised some of the awareness around racism, has had an impact,” said Alexander, referencing the player activism around the election of Sen. Raphael Warnock. “Organizations are now recognizing the importance of the inclusion of Black women in their athletic programs.”