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Alice Dearing has campaigned to increase diversity in swimming. Stef Evans has created her own clothing company to provide women with sports kit tailored to the female body. Ali Donnelly has launched her own website to raise the profile of women’s rugby.
These are just three examples of women helping to bring about change in sport – and all three are guests on the latest episode of the Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast with Sam Quek, the Olympic gold medal-winning hockey player.
While the phrase ‘sport and politics do not mix’ has often been espoused in the past, recent research by UK Sport found that 66 per cent of adults believe that athletes have “a role to play in championing causes they believe in and raising awareness of social issues”.
Donnelly is the founder of Scrum Queens and the CEO of More Than Equal, a not-for-profit initiative aiming to find and develop F1’s first female world champion, while she has also worked in communications for Sport England and the government. So does she think athletes should get involved in politics?
“The two things are so intrinsically bound together that anybody who thinks that sport can just operate in this kind of vacuum on its own, separate to politics, is wrong because that’s just not how it works,” Donnelly told the podcast. “When we think about politics and sport mixing together, I think we instinctively go to athletes doing interesting things – Marcus Rashford, Colin Kaepernick in America. That’s a proactive choice by an athlete. And if they have a platform and they want to use it, they absolutely should do that because they’ve got a moment where they can make change.
“But if you look at it from the other perspective, sport has not been able itself to keep politics out of sport and it’s increasingly being pulled into huge societal challenges. I spent three or four years working at Sport England as a director, and we spent a lot of our time working with individual sports on massive issues like transgender inclusion, racism, child safeguarding… these huge societal issues smashing into sport and sport having to deal with those.
“So it’s not just about athletes taking a proactive step to stand for something. It’s also about sport now being a microcosm of society and politics and not having any choice in that. They do mix and they have to mix because politics and sport are such big arenas for all of us.”
Those points are echoed by Evans, a Worcester prop who set up the women’s rugby clothing brand Ruggette RFC. “Even if there were a want to separate politics from sport, it’s simply not possible,” said Evans. “Nothing that we do in this world can be separated from the fact that we live in a system together and we’re constantly re-evaluating that system. There is no such thing as a neutral when it comes to using your voice in sport or in politics or in the world we live in. If you choose to not use it, that’s your choice – but that’s the same as saying something.”
Of course, there is a risk in athletes speaking out – it could affect their place on a team, impact their commercial deals or lead to a backlash on social media for example. Still, Dearing, the first black female swimmer to represent Great Britain at the Olympics, has spoken about experiencing racism and co-founded the Black Swimming Association to help increase diversity in her sport.
“I didn’t want to look back on swimming and not see anything changed from when I started out,” said Dearing. “I do have a voice – it’s not a huge voice, especially in swimming and being an open water swimmer – but I thought if I can help influence the sport and change it in any way, then I’d have done something.
“All I’m saying is that everybody should know how to swim. I can’t fathom how you can say that is troublemaking or anything like that.”
Listen to The Telegraph’s new podcast, The Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.