EQUAL PLAYInG FIELD
As a great man once said, “You must face up to the altitude and not be afraid of it. If you fear it, then the doubts start.” This was a motivational briefing from Argentina manager Diego Maradona ahead of his team’s crucial World Cup qualifier away to Bolivia in April 2009. Los Altiplanicos (The Highlanders, of course) are renowned for their formidable record on home turf, with visiting teams often bemoaning the strain of playing matches in La Paz, a whopping 9,000 feet above sea level. The fear clearly got to Diego’s boys – Joaquin Botero hit a hat-trick as La Albiceleste were humiliated 6-1 at the Estadio Hernando Siles, their heaviest defeat in 16 years.
“Every Bolivia goal was a stab in my heart,” said Maradona after the game, a little less philosophically. Playing at high altitude is something even the very best have struggled to master, so why on earth would anyone try to play a match 19,000 feet above sea level? Well, to prove a pretty big point.
“I’ve never played at professional level, but I’d definitely call myself a ‘committed amateur,’” says Laura Youngson, who helped to form Equal Playing Field, a non-profit initiative aiming to challenge gender inequality in sport. “I’ve always loved the game and it’s brought me so many cool friendships and experiences wherever I’ve been living around the world. But one thing that frustrates me is that the men’s teams will always get funding, and the women’s teams often won’t.
“I lived in Azerbaijan working on the 2015 European Games. They set up a football team, and while the men’s team instantly got funding and the opportunity to train, the women’s side didn’t. We had to fight for the same treatment.
“Eventually, to their credit, the Azerbaijanis gave us the funding, and that meant we had the amazing experience of witnessing Azerbaijani women playing football who’d previously only played in gardens with their brothers. The thought of having those conversations every time women want to play football gave us the idea of doing something so incredible, that people would sit up and take women more seriously.”
That something, as you may have surmised, was playing a match at ridiculously high altitude – in a crater atop Mount Kilimanjaro, no less – and breaking a world record in the process.
“I suppose the mountain was a bit of a metaphor,” Youngson tells FourFourTwo. “It’s what women have to climb every day just to be equal. It’s not even about equal pay or whatever else – it’s about actually having the opportunity to get out onto the pitch and play.”
But, as if the idea of trekking up Africa’s highest mountain before taking part in a football match wasn’t challenging enough, the most widely-recognised adjudicators of world records were set to throw a major spanner in the works.
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