1. THE TWO GENDERS
ON A DREARY day in April 1967, Kathrine Switzer did what was once thought unthinkable. She pinned a Boston Marathon race number to her sweatshirt and lined up at the start of the course to run 26.2 miles. She was joined by her training partner and her boyfriend. The latter had instructed her to take off the lipstick she’d put on so as to not draw attention to them, but Switzer refused.1 No woman had ever successfully registered for and run the Boston Marathon before, but though men had been the only competitors up to that point, there was no official rule that kept women from participating, only cultural norms. So Switzer had registered to run, signing her name as K. Switzer. The lack of a clearly identified gender was what allowed her to obtain an official race bid.2
Switzer wrote in her memoir that she was welcomed to the starting line by many of the men she was running with and against. She and her two companions ran together, and for the first few miles everything was fine. They were a handful of miles into the race when things went sideways. Race director Jock Semple swiped at Switzer’s bib and attacked her, trying to remove her from the race. “I’d never been manhandled, never even spanked as a child, and the physical power and swiftness of the attack stunned me,” Switzer wrote. Switzer’s boyfriend trucked Semple and the three runners took off, pursued by journalists. A humiliated Switzer wrote that she briefly thought about leaving the course.
“I knew if I quit, nobody would ever believe that women had the capability to run twenty-six-plus miles,” Switzer wrote. “If I quit, everybody would say it was a publicity stunt. If I quit, it would set women’s sports back, way back, instead of forward.”
Switzer carried on. According to Switzer, her boyfriend ended up leaving their group in dramatic fashion. He paused running and ripped up his numbers, blaming Switzer for ruining his chance at the Olympics because he’d hit Semple. For the record, Switzer said she never asked him to come; he’d insisted. But he made it her fault anyway, in the middle of a marathon in the snow where the literal race manager had just tried to remove her from the race because she was a woman. In the end, Switzer finished. Her boyfriend did too. They went on to get married, though they later divorced.
After the conclusion of that snowy race, the headlines and photos of Semple’s attack on Switzer were what the world paid attention to, even though another woman ran the Boston Marathon that day: Bobbi Gibb. She’d had her registration rejected by the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) in 1966. She said that race director Will Cloney wrote her a letter that said “women were not physiologically capable of running twenty-six miles,”3 but she joined the race unofficially for the second consecutive year and finished an hour ahead of Switzer. After Switzer’s successful official run of the Boston Marathon, women were formally banned from running the race until a women’s race was created in 1972.
Curtailing women’s participation in sports has been a core part of sports culture for much of modern history. It is only relatively recently that women have had access to sports with even moderate encouragement for participation. “In fairness,” Gibb wrote of her experience in the 1966 Boston Marathon, “it should be noted that prior to 1966, people did not know that a woman was capable of running twenty-six miles, even women didn’t know it, and many women officials were opposed to it out of fear that it would cause injury or death.”
The assumption that women were incapable of sports participation drove early policies to keep them out of competition. But as Switzer’s experience showed, there was also fear that maybe women weren’t so incapable after all.
The first modern Olympics took place in Athens in 1896, featuring athletes from fourteen countries. All of those athletes were men. The event was the brainchild of French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, who served as the first president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), a position he held from 1896 to 1925. The stated IOC mission was “to help build a peaceful and better world by educating young people through sport.”4 Though women did not compete in the first modern Olympic Games, twenty-two women competed in five sports—sailing, tennis, croquet, equestrianism, and golf—at the 1900 Games in Paris. Women made up just more than 2 percent of the total number of competing athletes. It wouldn’t be until 2012, with the addition of women’s boxing, that women competed in every sport present at the Olympics. But in the early twentieth century, women were fighting to compete in sports outside of the emerging Olympic Games.
Sixty-five years before Kathrine Switzer ran the Boston Marathon, Madge Syers entered the 1902 World Figure Skating Championships because there was no explicit rule keeping her from doing so. Until her entrance into the competition, all of the events sanctioned by the International Skating Union (ISU) had been male only. She placed second among the four competitors. In response to both her entrance and her relative success, the ISU amended the rules at its 1903 conference to formally bar women from competing in the existing championship. Two years later, the ISU created a separate women’s championship. When figure skating first became part of the Olympic program in 1908, it did so with separate sex competitions and was one of the first sports to ostensibly place women on an equal footing with men and have multiple opportunities for women to compete on the highest stage (a pairs competition also debuted in 1908).5 Syers won gold.
Depending on your perspective, Madge Syers’ saga, and that of figure skating, could be an example of the empowerment of women through opportunities that were guaranteed and protected. However, it could just as easily be an example of how sex segregation in sports may not have needed to happen in the way it has. What if, instead of banning women from competition and creating a separate category, the ISU simply created and sanctioned integrated competitions? Often when questions like that are posed, we try to answer them in today’s context. There is no question that the iteration of today’s figure skating would disadvantage women because of a scoring system that favors jumping skills. Only one woman has successfully landed a quad jump in Olympic competition: Russia’s Kamila Valieva at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (she was later at the center of a doping scandal). In men’s figure skating, however, it is now impossible to be in medal contention without quad jumps. In Syers’ era, however, such athletic feats were not the center of the debate. Degree of difficulty and how routines are scored are about values, and those are human decisions. Why is it considered to be more difficult, and therefore more impressive, to twist four times in the air than, say, to perform a series of complex spinning combinations? Perhaps if figure skating as a sport had developed differently, the scoring system might have also developed differently; the values of the sport might have developed differently; the power brokers of the sport might have been different.
Women were simply assumed to be inferior athletes and therefore were not considered as viable participants in the sport.
Even though the figure skating controversy ignited by Syers was more than a century ago, and Switzer’s run more than fifty years ago, the arguments about what women can accomplish have not dissipated. In fact, they surface in some of the most surprising places. Including on our television screens.
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MICHELLE WARNKY-BUURMA TOOK a deep breath and pointed to the sky as she collected herself after completing the Salmon Ladder obstacle on the eleventh season of American Ninja Warrior (ANW) in 2019. She gripped the handles of the ball on Slam Dunk, the course’s eighth obstacle. She’d never made it past the eighth obstacle on a ten-obstacle city finals course. This one, however, was in her home state of Ohio. She was competing in Cincinnati, a couple of hours south from where she owned a gym in Columbus. She just had to jump this ball to another platform and then do that two more times with two different (and heavier) balls to meet her personal best. No big deal.
ANW is based on the Japanese television show, Sasuke. The show features high-flying laches—airborne swing-jumps between two hanging bars, ledges, dangling objects, etc.—and competitors, often referred to as ninjas, race through balance-and strength-defying obstacles in a bid to claim total victory and be crowned an American Ninja Warrior.
The show divides the courses into qualifying rounds, semifinals, and the national finals in Las Vegas. The qualifying courses are all six obstacles, though not always the same obstacles; the semifinals courses are ten obstacles; and the national finals course is divided into four stages: a timed course for Stages 1 and 2, a grueling upper-body-driven Stage 3, and a seventy-five-foot rope climb up the structure known as Mt. Midoriyama for Stage 4. The climb must be finished in thirty seconds or less for the participant to be eligible for the $1,000,000 prize money. In the first thirteen seasons of the show, only five people had ever made it to Stage 4. In season fourteen, however, five competitors made it to the fourth stage. But out of those ten athletes, only three completed the climb in under thirty seconds. None of them were women. A woman has never even made it to Stage 3, and only three have ever run Stage 2 in regular season competition. As a television program and a sport, ANW offers a unique window into the essence of sex separation in sports. Unlike in figure skating and what Syers experienced, women have always been welcome to compete alongside men. In theory, ANW is an athletic competition where gender doesn’t matter. But women are still running a course designed to test the physical boundaries of men, which means the ultimate successes on the show and in the sport often evade all but the most elite of female competitors.
Only one woman had ever finished the type of course Warnky-Buurma was in the middle of running. That was Kacy Catanzaro in season six. Five years before Warnky-Buurma, Catanzaro made history atop the Spider Climb, successfully wedging her five-foot frame between the walls to climb the height of the obstacle to the buzzer. Hitting a buzzer, or collecting buzzers, means completion in ANW parlance. Every time a ninja brings their hand down on the cylinder to send the smoke into the air, it means they’ve conquered something nearly impossible. On the city finals (or semifinals, as they’re referred to now) courses, though ninja superstars Jessie Graff and Jesse Labreck had come close multiple times, only Catanzaro had ever known the honor of standing atop the tenth obstacle to smash a buzzer.
When Warnky-Buurma cleared the eighth obstacle, she threw her hands up in the air in celebration. She’d been introduced to the show by friends begging her to watch it. Warnky-Buurma grew up playing sports, participating in a mixture of track, hockey, baseball, football, and rock climbing. She’d been climbing for years, and any ninja will tell you athletic fluidity and climbing are the fundamentals of a successful run on the show. After much encouragement, she finally watched it. “I was like, ‘This is awesome,’” Warnky-Buurma said.
She looked up an event in New Jersey that had similar obstacles to the show and that invited folks to try them, but she couldn’t get there in time for the event. She ended up going out to the course anyway and trying the Salmon Ladder. The obstacle is an ANW staple and requires a competitor to hang from a bar resting on a rung on either side and jump the bar up multiple rungs using a kip motion like in gymnastics. Warnky-Buurma got the ladder on the first try, and the guy spotting her was impressed. “He was like, ‘I’ve never seen a girl get the Salmon Ladder before,’” Warnky-Buurma said. “I was like, ‘Really?’ It wasn’t that hard.” He also told Warnky-Buurma that he’d never seen a “girl” get the Warped Wall before, a curved fourteen-foot wall that served as the punctuation to every first-round ANW course. She worked on that the next day and was able to do it.
After that, she started building obstacles on her own. A producer saw her post in a Facebook group about getting building help and encouraged her to apply to the show. Suddenly, she was cast on season five and among the first group of women to hit a qualifying buzzer and find success on the course. Six years after her debut, she was staring down the ninth of ten obstacles on a city finals course, a place few women before her had ever been. All she had to do was lache perfectly across a series of hanging cylinders, then climb thirty-five feet and open three sets of doors along the way that weighed nearly as much as she did.
After successfully bypassing the last part of the ninth obstacle, throwing her body to the platform in a long dismount that was both a calculated decision and a prayer, Warnky-Buurma wedged her feet against the walls of the last obstacle and began the thirty-five-foot ascent. She struggled past the first set of doors, pushed past the second set, and, with excited glee, powered past the last set to become just the second woman to ever finish a ten-obstacle course. She touched the buzzer and fell to her knees against the railing, exhausted and grateful.
Warnky-Buurma’s success was an incredible moment of athletic achievement, and her hitting the buzzer in semifinals was also the exception that has proven to be the rule. Later that night, Labreck also hit the buzzer in Cincinnati, in a historic moment that brought the total number of women who had hit buzzers on ten-obstacle courses to three. There have been three more seasons of the show, but the number of women who have hit semifinals buzzers remains at three. Labreck, however, has done it three times. Labreck also became the third woman to finish Stage 1 in the finals, in 2021, but the pattern of irregular breakthroughs and little sustained success for women on the television show has led some of the highest-performing women to ask hard questions about the future of ANW, both on television and off.
ANW is certainly athletic. I hesitate to call the show a sport because it’s cast and produced like the television show it is, complete with tear-jerking stories pulling at your heartstrings. But the amazing thing about ANW is that, unlike most “sports,” the entire concept was developed around the idea that each ninja competes against the course, and the course remains the same. That means, unlike almost everything else in our sporting culture, all athletes are measured the same, regardless of traits like height, size, and, yes, gender.
When the show started, it was aired on the now-defunct network G4, which was kind of a “nerd-bro” network. When Warnky-Buurma was watching the show with her mom to see if she wanted to apply, they paused the show to count the number of women they saw competing and in the stands. “We scanned the crowd, because I was like, ‘I really want to do this, but are women even allowed to do this?’” Warnky-Buurma said.
Women were allowed to compete, and ANW wanted more women to participate. Seasons five, six, and seven were huge breakthroughs for female competitors. The aforementioned Warnky-Buurma and Catanzaro started competing. So did Graff, who competed during her first season wearing a chicken costume before growing into one of the most successful women to ever compete. Meagan Martin, the lone woman of color in this pioneering group, became a buzzer-hitting mainstay. Labreck started competing during season seven and now holds the record—ten—for the most buzzers hit by a woman on the show.
Fellow competitor and elite ninja Allyssa Beird watched Warnky-Buurma finish the Cincinnati course in tears. She’d been competing on ANW since the seventh season, when she was among an elite foursome of women—which included Warnky-Buurma and Labreck—to hit qualifying buzzers in the same city, something that had never happened before and has not happened since. Beird teaches fourth grade in Massachusetts, but before she became a teacher, she was a gymnast for fifteen years. She first got involved in ninja training after looking for a gym where she could try out obstacles. One thing led to another and she was on the show hitting a buzzer.
ANW’s relationship with gender has shifted over time. In the early seasons, the show employed the same advancement system for everyone. The top thirty qualifiers in each region moved on to the semifinals, and the top fifteen competitors in the semifinals qualified for the national finals. The field would be rounded out with wild cards to create the national finals field of roughly 100 athletes, many of which went to popular women competitors who either missed the cut in their regions, or fell early on a temperamental obstacle. That changed in season nine, when women were given their own advancement system. The top five qualifying women were automatically guaranteed a spot in the semifinals, and the top two from each region’s semifinals qualified for Vegas. The number is now three women from each semifinal. No more wild cards. “I remember talking to a couple other female ninjas about it. We’re like, ‘Okay, this is actually better than crossing our fingers and hoping we’re in the top fifteen, top thirty, or hoping for that wild card call,” Beird said. “There’s just so much on hope, rather than proving that you’re, you know, a top female competitor. But it really hasn’t made that much of a difference in my own like, pride on the course, you know, I’ve qualified both ways now.”
“I wasn’t a huge fan of it, because I felt like it meant something to make it into the top thirty,” fellow top competitor Meagan Martin said. “I still would say I kind of like that better. I do like that now you can for sure have five or more women in the semifinals. But prior to that rule change, there were women already getting into the semi. There were more and more women getting into that top thirty. So, I don’t know if the change was a hundred percent necessary.”
The reality of ANW was that for as many women who have seen success, those successes have been more one-offs than sustained breakthroughs for high-level women competitors. That is not to say that Warnky-Buurma, Martin, Beird, Graff, and others aren’t phenomenal athletes who can (and do) hit buzzers. But their successes are outliers. At least for now. And that uncomfortable truth has led to a lot of reflection among the ninja community about how best to move forward while holding true to the spirit of the emerging sport. “This is a hot-button issue,” Warnky-Buurma said.
In addition to the show, a sporting community sprung up around ninja gyms and competitions. World Ninja League (WNL) holds competitions for kids, teens, and elite ninjas across the country. Just as with the show, all ninjas run the same course. Kids of all genders are competitive in the kid category, but fewer and fewer girls cleared courses during the teen competition, something that only became more pronounced among the elite competitors. For this reason, the athletes began to ask if they should change the course for women. “For so long, I was so adamant,” Beird said. “This is exactly what we need. As women competitors, we can keep up with the men. And sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it’s not.”
The question became how to get more girls and women to complete, or clear, more courses in competition. Lots of options were thrown out for consideration. The field could be divided by height. The field could be divided by sex. Adaptations could be made so the course was more equitable. “But there were some really interesting ideas that went further than just separating by men and women on the specific course,” Beird said. “It’s really coming down to thinking about which type of athlete the obstacle would benefit and how we can more evenly or equitably make the course accessible for all different types of skill levels.”
Each idea opened more boxes (and caused more of what I’ll call “spirited discussion”), but extending the time to complete an obstacle has been the one implemented so far. “And I think that’s been a great change,” Beird said. “You’re now getting to see more female clears. As a competitor, you always approach a course wanting to clear. As an audience member, it’s exciting to see people clear a course. So I think it’s beneficial to like all parts of the sport involved.”
Height has historically been an advantage on the ANW course. The height of an average American man is five foot nine. The height of an average American woman is five foot four. Smaller competitors of all genders have struggled on the course. Former Olympic gymnast Jonathan Horton has struggled on the more advanced courses not because he doesn’t have the upper-body strength to complete it, but because it is just more difficult to traverse a course that is more or less designed for someone significantly taller. Longer arms and the ability to generate more torque help to lache bigger gaps; longer legs help to jump and traverse bigger steps. It’s easier to get up the Warped Wall at five foot nine than at five feet. Kacy Catanzaro, who is five feet tall, was not just the first woman to complete a ten-obstacle course, but at the time she was also the shortest competitor to ever accomplish the feat.
In addition to height, there’s also the simple fact that what makes ANW so compelling to watch is the strength obstacles. It’s amazing to watch “regular people” do the most irregular things, like cling to a two-inch ledge with their fingers. In semifinals courses, the back half of the course is usually stacked with upper-body obstacles. It’s a gauntlet designed to test grip and upper-body strength. Lots of athletes fail to finish because of exhaustion—getting “pumped out”—rather than from lack of ability.
When Jessie Graff finished Stage 1 in season eight, she did so on a night when only seventeen ninjas were able to complete the course, far below the average. Unlike the earlier courses, Stages 1 and 2 are timed. Graff was able to finish Stage 1 in time, but she was also among the top five fastest. Graff, Beird, and Labreck were the only women in the history of the show to advance past Stage 1 at the national finals. The rigidity of that barrier has proved to be formidable, exposing the inequities that exist within the show. Much of that barrier is due to course design. Women have failed to move forward in the national finals despite having guaranteed opportunities to run the course mostly due to three things: the time to run the course, an obstacle known as the Jumping Spider, which requires athletes to jump from a trampoline and land between two walls that are five feet apart, and a modified version of the Warped Wall, which uses a shortened runway.
For much of the show’s history, the only prize money awarded was to the person who successfully claimed the mantel of “American Ninja Warrior” atop Mt. Midoriyama. That meant it took seven seasons for ANW to pay out anything to the competitors. That has since changed, with more money available at different stages of competition. Much of that moneymaking opportunity was skewed to favor male competitors. In the qualifying courses, top finishers received small cash prizes. There was also the Mega Wall, an eighteen-foot version of the Warped Wall. Any athlete who got to the top of that wall to hit a buzzer in qualifying was awarded $10,000. Now, every season, a prize of $100,000 is awarded to the “last ninja standing,” meaning the athlete who went furthest on the course. None of these prizes are gendered, but no woman had ever seriously competed for them. Meanwhile, elite female ninjas were some of the most famous and visible personalities on the show. In 2021, ANW held the first annual Women’s Championship as a special episode of the show. The winner is awarded $50,000.
Copyright © 2023 by Katie Barnes
