Probably.
I really ought to kick my own butt for being this way. (Really I ought to. Thank goodness I can't!)
While out of Saudi for my very long summer break I've enjoyed watching women play touch rugby, girls playing basketball, loads of people cycling, (including myself), and top teams playing rugby league on the weekends with its mixed crowd of male and female spectators, young and old. It made me start to wonder how the hell I manage my sport fix in Saudi. And the short answer is...not very well.
Till very recently, sport for women was practically non-existent in Saudi. Even going to the gym was put on the 'not a female activity list' thanks to the General Presidency of Youth Welfare (GPYW), the agency responsible for all sporting, cultural and social activities in KSA.
The first time I saw the 'Sport For All' slogan emblazoned across the offices of the GPYW, I had to laugh. It was just after they had closed all the women's gyms in Saudi down, their excuse for the closures being they didn't have any female officers to monitor ladies gyms, nor did they have an office in which to put them if they did have them. Obviously at that time hiring a few women and finding a new office in which to house them was just too difficult a concept to comprehend, much less implement. (I did wonder, though, who had been sent along to find all the existing women's gyms to shut them down. Given men can't go into women's gyms they must have found some women somewhere to do that job!) Equally obviously their slogan should have been 'Sport For All...Men'. Back then, (a long three years ago), women were directed to the gentler cultural pursuits of art and poetry. And I'm fairly certain there is a segment of the Saudi community that still thinks only two places women ought to be directed are the kitchen and the bedroom.
It grates me, as I drive around Riyadh, to see so many Fitness Time gyms going up for all the blokes. Currently women's gyms are few and far between, at risk of being closed again if the Bearded Ones don't like them, and they're not cheap to join. (In typical Saudi style, after the hoopla of closing them down, women's gyms have kind of, sort of, but not really officially, been reopened if you know where to look. This was, I presume, because the Ministry of Health, a much bigger official body, pointed out in a newspaper article, just over the page from the closing of gyms headlines, the extremely bad obesity figures for Saudi nationals - especially the women. Somebody had to do a spot of back tracking me thinks).
Things are improving.
In early 2013 the first private sports club for females was opened in the eastern region (woop, woop). And later in the year private schools got the official go ahead to offer sport for girls in schools - probably because they found out most western private schools were offering sports anyway. But there is still a long way to go before women participating in sport in any capacity in this country is considered 'normal'.
Women aren't even encouraged to be spectators in sport...I know this from the performance over whether or not we female Kiwi expat supporters were allowed into the King Fahad International Stadium to watch the NZ Football Team playing in Riyadh in September last year. (We managed to get in for the first game because nobody up the hierarchical chain got around to announcing an actual decision. However, due to the fuss created we decided to graciously decline attendance at follow up games).
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At the game.
Woohoo! |
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| The only other group of Kiwi supporters we could find. |
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| The stadium was practically empty - loads of room for more women! |
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