Can our Olympic winning women help to turn the tide on the WAG culture?

There is something very special about the Olympic Games, watching your fellow country men and women perform in sports that you don’t normally get to watch, and bring home the medals; it makes you feel incredibly proud and also quite inspired.

Being in my autumn years, I will never be an Olympic gymnast, no matter how much I imagine myself doing flamboyant backflips on the beam.  But I am sure that kids up and down the UK are also being inspired, inspired enough to ask their parents where the nearest cycling, judo, swimming club is.  Because this is the thing about the Olympics, it’s everyday people doing extraordinary things.  People from your town, people who ride bikes, swim, run, row, sports that with training and access to a decent local club any teenager could take up.

Olympic Silver Judo Winner Gemma Gibbons

I sincerely hope that the country’s young women and girls are watching their tellys.  That they feel inspired to do something equally positive with their lives.  That for once their attention is turned to Rebecca Adlington, Lizzie Armitstead, Helen Glover and Heather Standing, instead of reading silly magazines concerned solely with the ever-changing love lives and yo-yo dieting of Z-list celebrities.   

I hope that by watching Gemma Gibbons pick up a silver medal (against the odds), that even just a handful of girls put down their mascara wands and look up their nearest Judo club online. That girls and young women can share in the pride that these amazing athletes have, and that it makes them realise that they can be something in life, in their own rights!  That they are worth so much more than being the arm candy for a Championship footballer. That they can look at their bodies as a symbol of strength, to marvel at just what amazing things it can achieve, rather than look toward the surgeon’s knife in a misguided attempt at making them feel more confident about themselves.

I hope they’re watching these athletes, women that are wonderful, strong, beautiful, and elegant, but also driven, focused and thoroughly independent.  Even if the girls sat at home wearing too much spray tan and false eyelashes think for just one minute about what they could achieve, not necessarily in sport, but as a women rather than an object, how much more self-respect would they have?

Have we got some new positive role models for young women to look up to and emulate?  I hope so.

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