(Reuters) – Sports scientists from Australia, the U.S., Britain and New Zealand have formed a partnership focused on helping female athletes fulfil their potential by providing access to research and best-practice information, the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) said on Friday.
The Global Alliance for Female Athletes (GAFA) will give athletes, coaches and support staff access to “world-leading evidence, performance insights and best-practice information” for free, the ASC said.
The partnership comes at a time when anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are on the rise in women’s sports, with studies showing female athletes are two to six times more likely to sustain the injury than male athletes.
“For female athletes having access to best practice information that we can trust and is freely accessible and also translated into language that we can actually understand is going to be life changing for a lot of female athletes,” Australian race walker Jemima Montag said.
“For the last many decades, unfortunately, we’ve only seen about 6% of sports science research focusing on female athletes. The rest has been done on male humans, male rodents, and then directly applied to female athletes.
“And not only is that dubious, but it’s actually dangerous because of our anatomical and physiological differences.”
Rachel Harris, Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) Female Performance Health Initiative Project Lead, said health literacy around female-specific conditions is poor.
“This gap in knowledge, coupled with widespread misinformation, means athletes often miss the early warning signs and go undiagnosed or are inadequately treated for conditions like endometriosis or dysmenorrhea,” Harris said.
“Athletes are then forced to miss training days which reduces their chances of making competition or in some cases sees them leave the sport altogether. Our goal is to change this.”
(Reporting by Pearl Josephine Nazare in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
