Women are doing the heavy lifting of Australia's Paris 2024 medal haul

As of day nine, Australian women have won gold in canoeing, swimming, cycling and BMX at the Paris Games.

BMX rider Saya Sakakibara is one of the Australian women who have won gold at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Source: AAP / Dan Himbrechts

Key Points

• Australia has so far won 31 medals, including 12 gold, at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
• Of the 31 medals Australia has won, around two-thirds have been won by women.
• Paris 2024 is the first Games attended by equal numbers of male and female athletes.

Despite often facing greater challenges just getting to the starting line or onto the field, women are doing the heavy lifting for Australia at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

In fact, it wasn't until day seven of the Games that a gold medal was awarded to a male Australian athlete (swimmer Cameron McEvoy in the 50m freestyle).

Australia's eight gold medals before that were all won by women.

Including silver and bronze medals, women have also accounted for around two-thirds of Australia's total medal haul at Paris thus far.

Of the 31 medals won by Australia by the end of day nine, 21 were won by individual women or women's teams.

Of the remaining 10 medals, one was won by a mixed men's and women's swimming medley team and nine by individual men or men’s teams.

Australia's golden girls

Australia's most successful Olympian of all time is swimmer Emma McKeon, who won her sixth career gold medal in Paris — taking her lifetime Olympic medal tally to 14.

Fellow Dolphins team member Kaylee McKeown — who successfully defended her 100m and 200m backstroke titles in Paris — has become the first Australian swimmer to win four individual Olympic career gold medals.

Mollie O'Callaghan will be taking home three gold medals for her performances in the pool.

Source: SBS News

Canoeist Jessica Fox has earned two gold medals in Paris and will cheer on her sister Noemi, who is competing in the kayak cross.

Other gold medals won by Australian women at Paris include:

• Saya Sakakibara in BMX Racing
• Grace Brown in road cycling, individual time trial and
• Ariarne Titmus in 400m freestyle swimming.

50:50 gender parity

For the first time in Olympic history, a roughly equal number of male and female athletes will be competing in Paris.

When women first competed in the Olympics in 1900, they accounted for just 2.2 per cent of the participants.

At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, that number had risen to 23 per cent. It hit 48 per cent at the 2020 Tokyo Games.

The Paris 2024 schedule includes 152 women’s events, 157 men’s events and 20 mixed-gender events.

The per-capita Olympic leaderboard

Australia has so far won 12 gold medals and sits fourth on the medal table behind host nation France, which has the same number of golds but has more medals in total.

And while our 31 medals may be less than Great Britain’s 37 medals, the International Olympic Committee ranks countries primarily by number of gold medals won.

Only China and the US, who are both currently sitting at 19 golds each, have won more than Australia and France.

China and the US are, respectively, the world's second and third most populous states. China, which was only recently overtaken by India, has a population of 1.4 billion people and the US has 333 million.

Neither remains on the Paris Games' leaderboard when population is taken into account.

Source: SBS News

In fact, on a gold-medal-to-population-size basis, only two of the countries currently in the top 10 medal tally remain: Australia and the Netherlands.

Dominica — whose triple jumper Thea LaFond won her country's first ever Olympic gold medal in Paris — would rank number one based on the number of gold medals it has won per capita.

The Caribbean country has a population of about 72,000 people, a few thousand more than the regional NSW town of Wagga Wagga.

Ireland, with a population of about five million, roughly the same as Sydney, would come in at number three, while Australia would rank sixth.