For U.S. Women, Medals and a Moment to Celebrate Title IX

LONDON – At a news conference Saturday, Ashton Eaton, the Olympic decathlon champion, sat next to fellow United States gold medalists Brenda Villa, Kayla Harrison and Missy Franklin. A question was posed to all the athletes, and a chivalrous Eaton said, “Ladies first.”
He got that right.
Women have won 27 of the United States team’s 41 gold medals and 54 of its 95 total medals. What better way to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender, than for the American women’s water polo team, whose veteran star, Villa, had to play on her high school boys’ teams because there were no girls’ programs, winning its first gold?
“Does it give me an extra smile?” Villa said. “It does.”
The United States women won the gold in soccer and are playing this weekend for team golds in basketball and indoor volleyball. “Title IX really gave the U.S. a head start in having a national commitment to make sure that young women are getting an opportunity to be involved in sport,” said Scott Blackmun, the United States Olympic Committee chief executive. “The rest of the world is clearly doing the same thing so we are glad we got ahead of the curve