Half of the Paris Olympic athletes are women. Are periods in sports still taboo?

It’s been eight years since Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui told the media she’d had her period.

Fu, who had just missed the podium in the 4×100-metre medley relay women final at the 2016 Rio Games, coming in fourth, told China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV: “Actually, my period started yesterday evening.” 

“That’s why I feel very weak and tired, but this is not an excuse. At the end of the day, I simply did not swim very well,” Fu said, breaking taboos and the internet as she became an overnight social media sensation for her frankness.

WATCH | Fu talks about her period: 

Today, the Paris Olympics touts itself as the first to achieve full gender parity, with an equal number of female and male competitors. The Olympic Village has its first official nursery, and is also stocked with menstruation products. The brand Always has been named the Games’ 2024 official period product. Multiple marketing campaigns are encouraging athletes to talk about menstruation.

Many athletes are, including U.S. rugby player Ilona Maher — who, in a TikTok video she posted Tuesday, said she’s not even expecting her period, but still brought “like, 50 tampons, and five pairs of period panties” to Paris.

And then there’s Canadian wrestler Linda Morais, who recently told CTV that this year’s Team Canada singlet has a dark red bottom, which she called “a great idea, so that way girls are less self-conscious in case they’re ever worried about a leak.”

But even with more athletes talking about periods, we’re still a long way from de-stigmatizing them and the challenges people who menstruate face in sports, Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, CEO of the national organization Canadian Women & Sport, told CBC News.

“The stigma around periods is so strong, and it is so pervasive, that it is a really hard thing to change,” Sandmeyer-Graves said.

“But one of the only ways to change that is through conversation and really moving it from this thing that has for so long felt secret, and in some cases very shameful, into the light.”

‘Rolling around on the floor in pain’

Periods in general have historically been taboo, and in sports they just weren’t talked about — unless the conversation was about amenorrhea in young, female athletes, like gymnasts, due to a low body fat percentage, Michele Donnelly, a sport management associate professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., told CBC News.

“It’s kind of astonishing that it took until the 2020s to realize, ‘Oh, it might be uncomfortable for women athletes to be in a sport where they’re expected to wear white shorts or white bottoms while they’re competing while they have their period,'” Donnelly said.

“There’s a distraction of athletes thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, will people know? Will I bleed through my shorts?'”

Susan Auch, 58, a former national team Olympic speed skater and three-time Olympic medal winner, told CBC Radio’s  Information Morning Manitoba earlier this week that, in her past sport experience, it was “super rare” for athletes to talk about periods, even with each other.

“It is an issue, right? It’s difficult as an athlete,” Auch said. “I think it’s great that a conversation is happening.”

Auch, who represented Canada in speed skating for 17 years, says there were times her period affected her as an athlete. Once, at a Canadian championship, she says she pushed herself so hard in a race that she saw stars. Adding her period on top of that physical exertion was too much, she said.

“I was rolling around on the floor in pain. It was shocking to me.”

In recent years, more athletes have started speaking out about menstruation, including French Olympic handball champion Estelle Nze Minko and Israel marathon runner Lonah Chemtai Salpeter, who said her cramps were so bad at the Tokyo Olympics that she had to stop to take a break during her race.

“Women — we struggle sometimes with this kind of situation. Not every day is good for us because every month we receive this period and some ladies, they’re OK with it, and some are not good with it,” she said, according to Runners World.

Periods limit participation

Most sports research has focused on men. As such, there aren’t a lot of studies that look specifically at the impact of menstruation on sports performance.

One study, published in 2022 in the journal Science and Medicine in Football, found menstruation had “a clear negative impact on performance” in the 15 elite players the researchers interviewed, including fatigue and focus.

In another 2022 study, Canadian Women & Sport found that 25 per cent of the 4,500 people surveyed said menstruation limits their sport participation. Studies also show that girls drop out of organized sport at more than twice the rate that boys do, and that menstruation is one of the biggest obstacles.

To adapt, some sports are making changes. For instance, women’s soccer teams have been swapping out white shorts, as new research shows that women’s teams who play in white perform worse. Last year, Team Canada’s game kit at the Women’s World Cup featured a new Nike product with a liner designed to limit period leaks.

And Wimbledon recently changed its white clothing rule for female tennis players, allowing black or dark-coloured undershorts to “help players focus purely on their performance by relieving a potential source of anxiety.”

Even though Sandmeyer-Graves says she thinks it’s “unrealistic” that the Paris Games will finally smash period taboos completely, she acknowledges that sports can play a huge role in making it more acceptable for people to acknowledge that they have periods and talk about what they need to be supported.

Part of that needs to be dismantling the “pervasive belief” among some female athletes that it’s optimal to train so hard and eat so little that you stop having periods altogether, she said. 

That condition, sometimes called exercise-induced amenorrhea, has been linked with cardiovascular disease and decreased bone health. 

“We know that sport can shift culture in really important ways,” she said.

“A healthy period is part of a healthy body.”