Nicknamed “The Goldfish,” Yana Oleksandrivna Klochkova is a Ukrainian swimmer, who won five Olympic medals (four gold, one silver) at the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games in the 200 meter individual medley and the 400 meter individual medley at the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics and the 800 meter freestyle at the 2000 Summer Olympics.
The first known all-girls tackle American football league in the United States, the Utah Girls Tackle Football League, was formed in March 2015. The non-profit, volunteer-run youth league has since expanded to include three age divisions: elementary (grades 3-6), junior high (grades 7-8), and high school, with 400 girls on 24 teams as of 2020; 35% of the players are members of minority groups.
Football player Sam Gordon, who garnered acclaim playing with the boys when she was 9 years old, helped found the league and has played in it each season since.
Cynisca was a Spartan princess and athlete. At a time when women weren’t allowed to compete – and married women weren’t even allowed to attend – the Greek Olympiads, an exception was made for the chariot races, where women could enter as owners of the horses. Although the women weren’t actually expected to race, Cynisca competed in the four-horse chariot races and won in 396 BC and 392 BC, becoming the first woman to win in the games. She was not allowed to collect her prize in person. According to the Greek travel writer Pausanias (C.E. 143–176), two monuments were erected in Olympia to commemorate Cynisca’s victories, including a statue of her and an inscription in the sanctuary of Olympia in her honor. Other women later won the chariot racing, including Euryleonis, Belistiche, Zeuxo, Encrateia and Hermione, Timareta, Theodota and Cassia.
One of the most decorated figure skaters of all time, the 1924 Olympic champion and a five-time world champion (1922–1926).
Poet Juvenal recounts a tale of a venatrix (hunter) named Mevia who was known for killing Tuscan boars and holding spears “like a man” in her right hand with her breast uncovered. It is unclear if this was a fictional creation or based on a real woman.
Helene Hathaway Robison Britton was the first woman to own a Major League Baseball franchise. She owned the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team of the National League from 1911 through 1916, having inherited the franchise upon the death of her father, Frank, and uncle, Stanley Robison.
Britton attended National League owner meetings where other owners spent time trying to persuade her to sell the team because she was a woman. She sold the team in 1917.
Vera Menchik astounded the chess world by defeating high-level male opponents in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1927, Menchik won the first Women’s World Chess Championship. Routinely winning women’s matches, she started playing in male tournaments, becoming the first woman to do so. She played in more than three dozen men’s tournaments, beating many top players; newspapers around the world covered her matches. She was killed in 1944, during a a Nazi air raid on London, when a bomb hit the home where she lived with her mother and sister. She was only 38.
Astrid Gøssel was a music educator who worked for many years as a movement educator. Based on her work with children’s sensory-motor and rhythmic-musical development, she developed a pedagogical method she called “the guided and motivated movement game”.
Her practice was based on a holistic view of a “unity between learning, understanding and creative activity”, and between a child’s motor, rhythmic and other musical development. Studying young children’s spontaneous play, Gøssel focused on the importance of play for the young child’s physical and mental development and emphasized that limiting opportunities for play also limits development. She was also inspired by jazz music, its rhythmic expression and improvisation, and studied different forms of movement across various cultures.
Angela Madsen was an American Paralympian athlete in both rowing and track and field. In her long career, Madsen moved from race rowing to ocean challenges before switching in 2011 to track and field, winning a bronze medal in the shot put at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. Madsen and her teammate Helen Taylor were the first women to row across the Indian Ocean. She died in June 2020 while attempting a solo row from Los Angeles to Honolulu.
Libby Riddles is an American dog musher, who became the first woman to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 20, 1985. After finishing 18th and 20th in the 1980 and 1981 Iditarod races, she mad ethe decision to breed her own sled dogs. She later moved to Teller, Alaska where she started breeding and training dogs.
Riddles wrote three books about her experiences and became a professional speaker. In 2007, her Iditarod Trail Race victory was declare a “Hall of Fame Moment” by the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame.