Mixed-gender Olympic teams are the future – no matter what the purists and misogynists think

Having men and women compete together at Toyko 2020 is entertaining, entirely relevant, and necessary

They’ve been hugely popular but I’m not sure they’re strictly necessary.

That’s not a quote. You tend not to have a pen and a shorthand notebook to hand when Olympic commentators are saying silly things. Call it a summary of what I heard while watching one of the mixed relays, which have, as the commentator rightly opined in his otherwise wrong-headed screed, proved to be hugely popular additions to the Games’ programme.

You could, I suppose charitably, describe the speaker’s jarring sentiments as motivated by sporting purism or traditionalism. But maybe something else was at work? Men and women competing alongside one another in mixed teams. The horror of it! This should not be!

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it there. But perhaps not.

Despite my misgivings about doping and the lax policing of it – I wrote about them in a column a couple of weeks ago – I got sucked into the Games as I suspected I might. They’re everywhere you look and the broadcasts are a habit that’s hard to break once you check in.

I was intrigued by the mixed relays, the intent of which, I was informed by the Alan Partridge of a commentator I heard, was to encourage smaller countries that might otherwise struggle to put together single-gender teams of four, or whatever.

This may have motivated the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to introduce them across seven disciplines, but if so, I don’t buy it. These events are always going to favour countries with deep Olympic sports programmes, and the cash to spend on them. It helps to explain why Team GB, with its substantial reservoir of lottery cash, took gold in the mixed triathlon and in the mixed medley in the pool.

The, ahem, pool of athletes is expanded for Olympic heavyweights as well as financially less well-endowed nations, so the heavyweights will likely win more often than not.

So let’s set that one aside.

Part of what really justifies their inclusion is clearly, well, inclusion. Having men and women compete together in teams sends a good message at a time when there is still a lamentable tendency to treat the latter as second-class citizens in sporting matters. It’s worth remembering at this point that while female athletes made up nearly half the competitors at this year’s game, the vast majority of Olympic administrators are men. Women have only recently been allowed into some events, for example, boxing.

But it’s clearly the entertainment factor that will solidify their presence in future games.

Some of them were assisted, on that front, by the intriguing tactical element they brought to the fore. The aforementioned medley would be a good example. Who swims what stroke?

In the pool we saw Team GB’s men’s 100m gold medal-winning breast stroker Adam Peaty swimming in the final against America’s Lydia Jacoby, the gold medalist in the women’s event, which GB ultimately won in world record-breaking time.

Who handles which leg on the track? In the four-by-four finals it went man, woman, woman, man in all cases. But at some point, an enterprising coach, maybe one with a particularly fast female athlete in the team, may find a way to successfully upset that orthodoxy.

That said, even where tactics didn’t play such a prominent role, these events were still entertaining.

They could, and should, be expanded further because while people get terribly pompous about sport, it shouldn’t be forgotten the Olympics of today is an entertainment product, and one with a lot more competitors than it used to have.

It’s a hard fact that without eyeballs, especially TV eyeballs, the Games will wither on the vine. This helps to explain why skateboarding is in and the 50km race walk is out. People, and maybe younger people, will watch the former, the inclusion of which was pushed for by the US only to be dominated by Japan. The latter, not so much. Sorry, but that’s the hard truth.

It also explains why the future of mixed relays should be bright.

They’re entirely relevant, and necessary. And if they upset the purists, and the grumps, and the traditionalists, and especially the misogynists, so be it. I’m blowing a big, long, and loud raspberry at them. It wouldn’t hurt to see a few more of them in Paris. I suspect that we will because they’re the future.