Hi, this is Tani, and I'm an 11 times gold medal winning Paralympian, and over my career I broke 30 world records,

so I guess I know a thing or two about what it's like to compete as a woman in sport.

But long before my success on the track, women all over

the world were competing in sport, often unsung and many forgotten about. As the Olympic Games in Tokyo edge ever closer,

I want to introduce just some of those women

who really made a difference over the decades.

I whipped off that shirt and I dropped to my knees as a yes moment.

All of a sudden everybody in the world knows who I am.

I could walk along the beach in Uruguay and the man selling magazines would say hello.

In Jamaica now when I look and see people like Stephanie Taylor, we say, well, we started it.

I'm Tanny Gray Thompson and this is sport in heroines of history on the BBC World Service.

2021 marks the hundredth anniversary of the world's first international sporting

event for women known as the Women's Olympiad it was held in Monte Carlo and featured competitors from five nations. The

organizers Camille Blanc and Frenchwoman Alice Millier was certainly ahead of their time

but there are records of women taking part in sport going back centuries.

We have evidence of women playing football here in Scotland in 1628.

Dr Fionna Skillin is senior lecturer in sports and gender history, a Glasgow Caledonian University.

It's a kind of folk football, so the rules are very loose, it can be quite vicious, quite often

it's married women versus single women, or it might be quite vicious, quite often it's married women versus single women or

it might be different villages or towns against one another. In the Victorian era

in many countries sport was thought not suitable for women to take part in.

There are a number of reasons why there was a kind of backlash to women trying to participate in sport.

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