BEIJING — In early 1940, a 24-year-old bobsled driver named Katharin Dewey piloted three men to unprecedented victory at the AAU national championships in Lake Placid, N.Y., shattering a once-impenetrable icy ceiling. “Bobsledding, since its inception a stronghold of male sport, bowed … to femininity,” the Associated Press wrote at the time. But the thrill proved short-lived. As the Saturday Evening Post reported later that decade, “This pill was too bitter for some of the lads to swallow. The next winter Katharine was barred from racing.”
A half-century-plus passed before more meaningful progress arrived: Not until the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City did the IOC finally allow two-woman bobsleigh into its program, despite both four- and two-man versions appearing in every Games at which sliding events were held since the Great Depression. Sexist arguments predictably fueled this exclusion, chiefly the belief that women faced greater risk of injury than their male counterparts.
“There’s always going to be people who says it’s too dangerous,” Canadian bobsledder Cynthia Appiah, 31, says today, “and funny enough it’s never the women saying that.”
