What Donald Trump has performed for ladies’s rights in sport has been essential, says new Conservative peer Sharron Davies

Nestled in her home in Bath, Sharron Davies is the personification of calm and resolute determination.

Often vilified and relentlessly targeted for her strong opinions on women’s rights, the newly-appointed Conservative peer is well used to fighting her own corner.

Death threats against her and her family? She’s had them all. Yet, still, there is something in the 63-year-old Olympian that simply refuses to give up.

As an athlete, she learned early on in life to carry on regardless.

From a young age, she made multiple sacrifices, pounded the pool and fought through injuries to become an elite-level swimmer.

In 1980, at the Moscow Olympics, she was denied a gold medal by East Germany’s Petra Schneider, who later admitted being part of the doping programme that was so heavily integrated in the GDR regime.

How does she feel about it now?

‘I actually feel quite sorry for her,’ admitted Davies. ‘I went and met her when I was doing a documentary for Channel 4, and she was living in this pretty grotty council flat in Germany.

‘She was really ill. She had one little girl and she was told she shouldn’t have any more kids because it was too dangerous.

‘And I had just had my second baby, and she was with me and she was all over my baby. And I actually just genuinely felt very sorry for her (as she was) really unhealthy.

‘It’s the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that I’ve always had the issue with, because the IOC did nothing to stop it.

‘(The doping) went on for 20 years and it was only stopped when the Wall came down and East Germany ceased to exist.

‘So their complacency to allow this to go on meant a whole generation of young women lost their medals and lost their opportunities. I had friends that came fourth behind three East Germans that no one has ever heard of. And their whole lives would have been different as Olympic champions.

‘Then there’s a generation of those East Germans that are dying. And it was just literally a propaganda exercise by East German men who couldn’t have cared less what these drugs were going to do to these young girls. And the IOC just let it happen.

‘They ignored it over and over and over again, which is why I have absolutely no time for the IOC. The IOC does not care one hoot about women or women’s sport.’

A sense of injustice is one of the reasons Davies has now set up the Women’s Sport Union with sailing pioneer Tracy Edwards MBE. Questioning the likes of the IOC will most definitely play its part.

‘We are having to claw our sport back one sport at a time, one age group at a time, one level at a time,’ said Davies as she reflected on the union’s mission statement of protecting the ‘women’s category’ in sport, given the controversy surrounding the inclusion of trans women.

‘We’re still so far away from it. We’ve got lots of sports that still don’t protect the female category, and what we have found is that we are still having to deal with this. Grassroots, pathways, recreational The number of women self-excluding from sport is growing every day.

‘We want to give everyone a voice. It’s still a difficult place for people to put their heads above the parapet and we know that the general consensus is that people want women to have fair sport.

‘We want people to get brave and speak out but, if they feel they can’t, we will do that speaking for them.’

For Edwards, speaking out publicly has not always been an option. The yachtswoman entered the history books in 1990, skippering the first all-female crew to sail around the world. Her boat ‘Maiden’ won two of the legs in the Whitbread Round The World Race and came second overall in class.

In 2024, a crew assembled by Edwards went one better, becoming the first all-female crew to win a round the world yacht race, taking gold in the Ocean Globe.

Going public, she admitted, may have had a devastating impact on those who worked around her.

‘I had a £6million sponsorship deal,’ said Edwards. ‘I employed 22 people. I couldn’t afford to be cancelled. That’s 22 people’s jobs. So, I decided to bite my tongue.

‘I called Sharron all the time, because I couldn’t speak out publicly. That nearly bloody killed me. Not having a voice. So I funded the start of Sex Matters. I helped people as much as I could.

‘When Maiden retired, I started speaking up at the right time. People talk about inclusion and kindness, but they didn’t write about the fact that we had the first three black women to ever sail around the world on Maiden. And that was in 2024. That’s how long it’s taken to get women of colour into sailing.

‘We had the first Afghan to ever sail around the world, male or female. She was the camera woman. All that kind of stuff gets totally overlooked because we didn’t have a trans woman on the boat.’

Edwards’ frustration is evident and, with Davies, she’s now keen to tackle the issue of biological males competing in women’s sport, head-on.

How do they feel, then, about the intervention of Donald Trump? In February, the US President signed an executive order preventing biological males from competing in female categories of sports. Surely that will only serve to strengthen their cause?

‘What he has done is very important,’ admitted Davies.

‘One of the first things he did was to restore women’s rights. Whether you agree with his politics or not, what he did was huge. And it’s particularly huge with the Olympics being there (in 2028).

‘What we saw last year in Paris made the IOC realise they can’t carry on like this. There has been such an upheaval that the general public will stop watching if the IOC allow this absolute shambles to carry on.

‘Nobody wants to ban transgender people from sport, they just need to play sport in the category to which their biological body belongs.’

What happens within the IOC, meanwhile, remains to be seen. A working group has now been set up to look at protecting the female category.

It’s understood that a blanket ban on trans athletes could be forthcoming, although no decisions have yet been made.

Their new union, Davies said, is one that they now hope to ‘grow organically’.

She continued: ‘We want to be in a place where people can come to us with their issues and say: “Look, are you aware of this?” We can either highlight it for them extremely loudly in the media, or we can highlight it as a movement. And if you want to be anonymous and say to us: “Look, have you seen this? This is terrible”, we’ll try and bring the spotlight on it, we will try to reason with people, present the law to them, you know, talk to CEOs and say: “This is your job to do this. And if you don’t do it, there will be consequences”.

‘There are so many challenges to women’s sport, and we want to try and address them all, to be a voice for women, which has, for a long time, been largely ignored.’