Daft pseudo-scientific excuses have been used to exclude women from sports.

It may have taken 90 years, but women were finally able to compete in the ski-jumping at this year’s winter Olympic Games at Sochi.

Although women have been ski-jumping since Ingrid Vestby first soared through the Norwegian skies in 1862, at the Olympics the competition has been ‘men-only’ since the first Games in 1924.

The inclusion this winter of women’s ski-jumping in the Games was the result of a long battle.

Women ski-jumpers have repeatedly petitioned the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to be able to compete in the games.

And in the run up to the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics, a group of women ski-jumpers even sued the Vancouver Organising Committee for flouting Canada’s anti -discrimination law.

The judge agreed that the IOC was discriminating in forbidding women’s ski-jumping, but she ruled against the group as she believed British Columbia’s law courts did not have jurisdiction over the Olympic Committee.

The ensuing public furore and the media attention women’s exclusion in 2010 generated did, however, help pave the way for the inclusion of the sport in the 2014 games.

Why this resistance to women’s ski jumping?

Some officials, including the President of the IOC in 2010, argued that the pool of competitors was too small and that including this sport in the Olympics would ‘dilute the medals’.

Strange then, that the IOC introduced the new sport of ski-cross to the 2010 Olympics, which reportedly had fewer high-level competitors than women’s ski-jump.

And anyway, excluding a sport from the Olympics for this reason is a bit of a catch-22 – without inclusion in the Olympics, it is hard for a sport to attract the necessary funding to increase the numbers of competitors.

The strangest argument, however, for not wanting women in the games was that it could be dangerous to their health.

Because hurtling down a mountain at 60 miles per hour and flying 150m isn’t dangerous at all for men.

No, ski-jumping was deemed particularly dangerous for women because of their ‘fragile’ reproductive organs and ‘limited energy reserves’.

In the 19th century it was believed that ski-jumping could make your uterus ‘unmoor’ and make women infertile.

This notion was still prevalent in the 1950s.

Fast-forward 50 years, and attitudes hadn’t progressed very far.  In a now infamous interview in 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, a member of the IOC who was head of the International Ski Committee, said, “Don’t forget, it’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”

This is a story that has been played out time and again in the history of women and sports – women fighting for inclusion as those resisting change offer pseudo-scientific excuses to maintain the status quo and reinforce the idea that sport isn’t for women.

After the 1928 Olympics all women’s races longer than 200m were dropped from the Games because it was feared long-distance running caused infertility and premature ageing.

The first woman to run the Boston marathon, Kathrine Switzer, had been told that running long distances would cause her uterus to fall out. In 1967.

The British Boxing Board of Control only gave a woman a licence to box in 1998 when Jane Couch won a landmark case against the Board for sex discrimination; they had previously argued that  premenstrual tension made women “too unstable” to box.

In 1997 Frank Maloney, champion heavyweight boxer Lennox Lewis’s manager, is said to have called a women’s match he had watched a “freak show”.

It was only in 2012 that women’s boxing was accepted as an Olympic sport – and even then women had to fight a proposal that they wear skirts in the ring.

The notion that PMS and ‘fragile’ reproductive organs make women fragile and unsuitable for certain activities has been around for centuries.

And using medical ‘authority’ to reinforce the patriarchal structure and control women was particularly popular in the 19th century.

But to hear these tropes persist well into the 20th, and even 21st century, is dire.

Not only does it smack of a fear of and quasi-revulsion over women’s bodies, but it places women’s bodies under public control.

A trope that may well have evolved from the theory that sport is dangerous to women is the idea that sport is ‘unsuitable’ for women because it does not match up to ‘feminine’ ideals.

A survey in 2012 revealed that schoolgirls in the UK were put off sport because it was deemed ‘unfeminine’.

Combine these social attitudes with a lack of funding and a lack of exposure, and it’s a wonder we have any sportswomen at all.

There is still significant progress for the Winter Olympics to make: allow women to compete in the Nordic jump, increase the number of women’s events (although, for example, women can compete in the ski-jump, they only have one event to the men’s three) and increase their distances.

Yet, the Games have come a long way. If you look back at the inaugural 1924 Games, there were only 11 women competitors altogether, and they could only compete in figure-skating.