Team USA Women Dominated the Medal Count at the Tokyo Olympics

Now that the Tokyo Olympics are officially over, we have the final numbers of how many medals each country won…and exactly who won them. As USA Today reported on August 8th, women won most of Team USA’s Olympic medals, marking a first for women at the games. No big deal or anything!

Women won almost 60% of Team USA’s 113 medals, bringing home a total of 66 of them. Men won just 41 of them in comparison. (The other six medals were won in mixed events with both men and women on the teams.)

This also means that if women from the United States had competed in the games as their own country, they would have come in fourth overall, which is pretty impressive—and this is after all of the challenges that this year’s Olympics brought with the pandemic, the games being postponed, and everything in between.

Women who competed in the games are attributing this to Title IX being passed in 1972, the law that requires women to be treated equally in sports. Opening up opportunities to girls to get into sports and compete has created an environment where they can grow up to be women like Simone Biles and Allyson Felix and can train to become medalists.

Katie Ledecky, the 24-year-old Team USA swimmer who has seven Olympic medals under her belt, told USA Today that progress still needs to be made, though.

“For progress to continue, we’re going to have to continue to advocate for equality for female sports, not be afraid to speak out, to pursue legal and political remedies and have a seat in corporate boardrooms, and not be timid about participating in those processes that will continue to bring change,” she said.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, but a victory like this deserves to be celebrated, too. We’ve always known that women run the world, but maybe now everyone else will start catching on, too.