Women’s sport is entering uncharted waters – can it remain true to its roots?

O n Tuesday, a new documentary about women’s sport, Game On, received its premiere, and the London screening was followed by a Q&A with some of its participants. When the former rugby union international Ugo Monye was asked what he felt on seeing it, he couldn’t speak for tears – it took a few attempts, and a hug from a fellow panel member, before he could fashion a response.

Here was a fitting reminder of how emotive the subject of women’s sport can be. The provoking of a tear or two has always been the sign of a truly memorable moment in sport’s ultra-masculine history but for women, excluded so long from its halls of fame, even the smallest win resonates with emotion.

The first cinematic history of women’s sport, Game On eschews individual moments of glory (although it does contain some inspiring montages of England’s Red Roses, and their buildup campaign to the 2022 rugby union World Cup). Director Sue Anstiss knows her subject intimately – she has an MBE for her work promoting sport among women and girls – and it’s her clear-eyed perspective on the long-haul, third-class journey towards gender equality that puts a catch in your throat.

Given how recently women’s sport was being dismissed – even among the most progressive of media outlets – as dull, substandard and irrelevant, the trajectory that Anstiss’s film charts is a feelgood one. Amid the great millennial dumpster fire of doping, match-fixing and sportswashing, the advancement of women is arguably the industry’s most meaningful contemporary success.

And while the elite end of men’s sport has proudly taken up the mantle of self-interest and moral ambivalence, its female counterpart continues – for now at least – to embody a higher purpose. For Anstiss, sport