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By Helen Reid
PARIS (Reuters) - Women athletes taking part in a fashion show in Paris to mark gender parity at the Olympics welcomed the Games reaching that milestone but said more work needs to be done to improve working conditions, pay, and visibility of women in sports.
Former and current athletes including beach volleyball gold medallist Natalie Cook, BMX racer Sarah Walker, and U.S. middle-distance runner Athing Mu walked the catwalk in T-shirts with slogans like "Parity Paris" and "I Am".
Paris 2024 is the first Olympics in which an equal number of men and women are competing overall, but the split still varies widely by country and by sport. Paris is also where women first took part in the Olympics, in 1900, when the 22 participating women accounted for just 2% of the total.
"Honestly there needs to be more work done to protect women in sports," Ebony Morrison, who will represent Liberia in the 100-metre hurdles, told Reuters in an interview.
"We're dealing with the outfits that we wear, the harassment online, sometimes we're not in safe spaces with the people that are supposed to be there to help us, like our doctors, our coaches, so there really needs to be more done," she added.
The fashion world has taken a renewed interest in women athletes ahead of the Paris Games, with U.S. sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson featured on the cover of Vogue magazine earlier this month, and Marie Claire magazine publishing a Women in Sports issue featuring basketball player A'ja Wilson.
More than half the content on Olympics.com and on Olympics social channels is dedicated to women, Olympic Broadcasting Services CEO Yiannis Exarchos told journalists in a press conference on Sunday.
"I don't think that there are many sports platforms, and especially such big sports platforms as we have become, that have this balance," Exarchos said.
Still, for every woman Olympian that manages to nab the spotlight, there are still many more that are unable to make ends meet, said Cook, a five-time Olympian for Australia.
"I never ever want to hear an athlete say I left my sport because I couldn't afford it, and we find that most of those athletes are female."
Australia is aiming for gender parity in coaches as well as athletes for the Olympics it is hosting in eight years' time, said Cook, who is on the board of directors for Brisbane 2032.
BMX racer Walker, who won silver for New Zealand at the London 2012 Olympics, walked the catwalk six months pregnant.
"I'm having a girl, and I already have a two-year-old girl as well, and I want to show them that no matter what we think of our bodies or what they should look like, they can do amazing things, they can be Olympic athletes in all different shapes and sizes, and they can walk a fashion show in Paris," she said.
Walker also said more needs to be done to increase female representation in coaching.
The show included Qatari swimmer Nada Mohamed Wafa Arakji, who was one of the first women to compete for Qatar in the Olympics, at London 2012, when she was just 17.
In 2012, three women athletes formed part of Qatar's team of 12, but this year in Paris the country's 14-strong delegation includes only one woman athlete, Shahd Ashraf, who will make her Olympic debut in the 100 metres.
(Reporting by Helen Reid, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
