For many women

An impassioned account of why women’s sport matters:

For many women around the world, sport is a pathway to a different future. It can lead to educational opportunities, financial provision for whole families and a freedom to express themselves. All of those potentials, which athletes have spent their lives training in order to achieve, are taken away in one fell swoop. It can be a devastating psychological and material blow.

And yet, bizarrely enough, the context of that sympathetic explanation is a defense of men in women’s sports.