By: Kritisha Danwani
As the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Games kick into high gear, the spectacle of elite athleticism is undeniable. Featuring 43 sports across 45 countries and around 10,000 athletes, the Games bring together some of the best athletes in the world.
The margins between standing on a podium and going home with nothing at the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Games come down to tiny fractions. A millimetre on a weightlifting platform or an extra inch on a long-jump runway can decide who wins a gold medal and who misses a direct ticket to the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. When we watch these women compete, they look invincible. We see explosive power, perfect focus, and athletes performing at the absolute peak of human ability. But away from the television cameras and the national anthems, a quieter failure is taking place. Our elite women are winning, but they are doing it while flying almost completely blind. They are standing on the world’s biggest stages using a physiological playbook written largely by, and for, men.
To understand how deep this problem goes, you have to look past the sports laboratories and stand where these athletes actually train, where the sweat hits the concrete. Consider Indian weightlifter Gyaneshwari Yadav. She stepped up to an international barbell with the hopes of her country on her shoulders, while fighting an exhausting internal battle that no one in the crowd could see: “It was the first day of my period. I didn’t know how my body would respond.” Think about the pressure of that moment. An elite athlete spends years preparing for a competition that is decided in a matter of seconds, yet she is still left guessing how her body will react because sports science has not done enough to understand her biology.
A few stadiums over, newly crowned two-time Asian Games silver medallist Ancy Sojan is fighting a different, grueling battle against her own endocrine system just to stay competitive on the long-jump runway. “I have PCOD and weight gain problems,” Sojan says, speaking with the raw honesty of someone fighting a battle in the dark. “It affects me mentally and physically. As a jumper, I need to stay lightweight, so I have to work extra hard. More than the injury risk, I feel this affects my journey mentally and physically.“
The paradox is stark: women’s sport is booming, but women’s sports science is not.
These are not isolated stories of pre-game nerves. They are the direct result of a massive global data shortage. While billions of dollars flow into broadcasting and professional women’s leagues, the medical and scientific foundation supporting these sports remains far behind. Women’s sport is booming, but the science protecting female athletes is stuck in the past. For decades, mainstream sports science has operated under a flawed assumption: that a female athlete is simply a smaller version of a male athlete. Because women experience fluctuating hormone levels throughout the month, researchers historically left them out of clinical trials, arguing that their bodies were too complex or too expensive to study.
Because of this neglect, only about 6% of studies published in major sports science journals focus exclusively on women. Across all sport and exercise research, women make up barely a third of total participants. This data vacuum has very real consequences:
● The Performance Tax: It is well documented that female athletes can experience reductions in strength, power, and endurance during parts of the menstrual cycle, particularly around the early follicular phase. Yet, because the vast majority of performance studies do not consistently track menstrual phases, coaches often have little guidance on when or how to adjust caloric intake, hydration, training, or recovery.
● The Injury Epidemic: Female athletes suffer ACL tears at significantly higher rates than men in the same sports, with estimates ranging from 2 to 8 times higher depending on the sport and level of competition. This is not simply a matter of women being “more vulnerable.” Anatomy, hormones, biomechanics, and training all play a role. Yet athletes are still too often trained using models that were developed primarily around male bodies.
● The Symptom Burden: A staggering proportion of female athletes report severe menstrual symptoms, including cramping, fatigue, and bloating, that can actively interfere with their training and performance. These are not minor inconveniences when an athlete’s entire competition can come down to seconds, centimetres, or kilograms. Yet without proper scientific guidance, many are left to take painkillers, push through the discomfort, and hope for the best.
Furthermore, because women are often forced to train using movement models built around male skeletal frames, they face a significantly higher risk of ACL injuries in many sports. It is too easy to call this a natural “female weakness” and move on. But if we know that female bodies move differently, respond differently, and have different hormonal patterns, then why are we still designing so much of their training around a male model? This is not about pretending biology does not matter. It is about actually understanding it.
When you look at an athlete like Ancy Sojan, the burden isn’t just physical. It can take a massive mental toll too. Active female athletes dealing with conditions like PCOS can face significantly higher risks of anxiety and depression while simultaneously dealing with the pressures of elite sport. Imagine sprinting down a runway knowing that your metabolism and hormonal health can make the weight requirements of your sport harder to manage. Imagine working twice as hard as the athlete next to you, not because they have more discipline, but because your body is dealing with something that science has not invested enough time and money into understanding. Globally, only a small share of health research and development funding goes towards women’s health, and much of that funding remains concentrated around reproductive cancers and other major diseases. Daily athletic performance, metabolic health, and hormonal care for active women still receive far less attention than they should.
To make matters worse, this scientific void hits a steep cultural wall. In sports ecosystems like India, coaches and stakeholders increasingly recognise that the menstrual cycle can affect how an athlete performs. Yet recognising that fact and actually changing training schedules to accommodate it are two completely different things. The root of this disconnect is communication. While many female athletes feel more comfortable opening up to a female coach about their cycle, that conversation can become much harder with a male coach. In a sporting landscape where senior coaching staffs remain overwhelmingly male, thousands of elite women may choose to swallow their pain, hide their symptoms, and suffer in silence rather than have an awkward conversation.
As the medals are handed out in Aichi-Nagoya and teams begin looking towards LA 2028, we need to stop romanticising the struggles of our female athletes.
The fact that Yadav, Sojan, and countless other women are standing on international podiums is not proof that the system works. It is proof that they are winning despite sports science, not because of it. They are outperforming a system that has ignored them for far too long.
Investing in female-specific sports science is not a charity initiative, nor is it about checking a diversity box. It could be the single greatest unmapped frontier of human performance. Until universities, sports federations, and governments properly fund research that respects the nuances of the female body, we will never truly know how fast a woman can run, how high she can jump, or how much weight she can lift.
If we want our women to capture gold on the world stage, we need to stop asking them to bleed for a system that still acts like they don’t.
