Why the Olympics Are So Obsessed With Men and Women Competing Together
· Yahoo Sports
This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
When Charlotte Bankes started her final snowboardcross race of the 2026 Winter Olympics—the mixed team event—only one of her three opponents initially joined her. The other two female snowboarders had to wait, since their male teammates had finished third and fourth in their runs. With the help of that head start, Bankes crossed the line first, giving her and her partner Huw Nightingale Great Britain’s first-ever snow sport gold medal.
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Mixed team snowboardcross made its debut at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, along with many of the 12 mixed-gender events—three in figure skating and one each in biathlon, curling, freestyle skiing, luge, short-track speedskating, skeleton, ski jumping, ski mountaineering, and snowboarding—that were contested at the Milan Cortina Games. While mixed pairs figure skating has been in the Olympics since 1908, before the Winter Games even existed, the rest are relatively new additions. Since the debut of mixed relays in luge and biathlon in 2014, there’s been a steady increase in events featuring both male and female athletes. That trend is set to continue, but who it benefits is a complicated question.
Historically, the Olympics have often sent the message, both subtly and explicitly, that women are less capable than men. It took until 2014 for women’s ski jumping to get added to the Olympics, albeit only on the “normal hill”; the Milan Cortina Games were the first time women jumped for a medal off the large hill, just like the men. Women still do not compete at the Olympics in Nordic combined, while the men have three events.
These were also the first Olympics when women competed in cross-country skiing over 50 kilometers, the most grueling distance in the program. In biathlon, women still race shorter distances than men. And as the Athletic’s Matthew Futterman noted, “Women ski through fewer gates in slalom and giant slalom than men do. The vertical drop for women’s speed races, including the downhill, one of the marquee events of the Games, is [also] smaller than it is for men.”
From the International Olympic Committee’s perspective, mixed-gender events spread a very different message, one of gender equality. Pierre Ducrey, the IOC’s sports director, told me that mixed competitions “help us advance a longstanding objective: offering equal opportunities for men and women at the Games, not just in numbers, but also in the types of events in which they can shine together.”
The IOC has pushed that argument repeatedly in recent years, calling mixed events “a real true embodiment of gender equality—men and women competing in the same team, on the same field of play for their country.”
In reality, these events put forward a very specific vision of what equality looks like. Pairs figure skating and mixed curling are the only mixed events at the Winter Olympics in which male and female athletes compete on the same field of play at the same time. More often, these competitions are strictly segmented, with women competing alongside and against women and men with men. The only deviation from that approach comes in freestyle skiing’s mixed team aerials, in which teams of two men and one woman can take their turns in any order, meaning that each run can, in theory, feature both men and women.
The sports officials I spoke with were adamant that focusing on the binary aspect of these events misses the point. Mixed competitions are less about pitting men against women, they said, than about reinforcing that every single moment within, say, a relay has the same value, no matter the gender of the competitor.
“In many cases, the decisive performance, the one that wins or loses the medal, comes from the female athlete. That visibility is incredibly powerful,” Ducrey told me. He added that these moments of glory bolster “equal respect and recognition. Men and women contribute equally to a shared medal, and athletes repeatedly tell us how meaningful that is.”
From an infrastructure and business standpoint, mixed competitions also present an opportunity to add more fodder to the Olympics—and more inventory for broadcasters. More often than not, mixed relays and team events draw from the pool of athletes who have already qualified for individual races. It’s important to note that the Olympics have yet to reach full gender parity: The 2026 Games featured slightly more men’s than women’s events, as will the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles (though the 2028 Games will include more female than male athletes). Mixed competitions, then, offer a way to feature women more frequently without expanding the number of athletes in the Games or cutting men’s events.
For athletes and national delegations, more events mean more medal-winning opportunities—and more chances for redemption. Nightingale and Bankes were Great Britain’s only athletes to compete in mixed snowboardcross. While both were eliminated in the quarterfinals of their individual races, the mixed team competition gave them another chance, which they seized on to win gold.
That victory, and the celebratory hugs that followed, helps create a vision of intergender harmony that’s rarely seen at the Olympics outside the opening and closing ceremonies. Athletes and sports officials have told me repeatedly that these team competitions are a venue for selfless national pride rather than individual glory. Mixed events transform individual athletes like Ilia Malinin, Amber Glenn, and Alysa Liu into teammates who rely on one another for both victory and emotional support.
As a general rule, men’s and women’s teams, even in the same discipline, rarely practice together. When I rowed in college, our squads stayed mostly on our own even when we were out on the water. Now, at the masters level, rowing in mixed boats has given me the chance to share equipment, space, and camaraderie across gender lines. That’s what international officials say they want at the highest level of sport, and what happens in the Olympics often trickles down to determine how amateur competitions are run.
More mixed-gender events in the Games will likely mean more mixed-gender sports in the world. The 2028 Los Angeles Games could accelerate that shift. New additions include mixed team gymnastics—a surefire ratings bonanza—plus team golf, team table tennis, a mixed 4x100-meter sprint relay, and (of particular interest to me) mixed rowing.
The program at the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps and the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane has not been finalized, but I’m guessing that the number of mixed events will only keep going up. (And if the IOC wants to walk the walk on promoting gender equality, maybe these Games will bring parity to the number of men’s and women’s medal events as well.) For the Olympics, it’s a winning image: men and women competing in proximity, sharing in victory, and (kind of) getting treated equally.