A new day for women's sports.

In July and August, the Olympics filled households all over America with images of powerful, athletic women. Female athletes always get more attention in Olympic years than at other times. But this year, the attention was greater than ever. Olympic coverage was geared specifically to women, who made up more than half the television audience. Sappy, soap-opera-style coverage of the Olympics was part of NBC's strategy for reaching out to women viewers. Silly as the network's packaging of sports for women was, it is part of a significant--and positive--cultural trend.

To a great degree, the rise of women's sports in the United States is the product of a single piece of legislation: Title IX. The 1972 law, which forbids gender discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, has had a revolutionary impact on women's participation in sports, and on the culture at large.

One in three high-school girls now participates in athletics, up from one in twenty-seven the year Title IX went into effect, according to the Women's Sports Foundation. While a generation ago there were virtually no intercollegiate women's sports, today college women's basketball and volleyball teams are playing in front of sold-out crowds. And this is the inaugural year of the new U.S. professional women's basketball league.

The thanks go to pioneers like Billie Jean King, who set up the Women's Sports Foundation in 1974 to help teams fight Title IX battles, and to other, lesser-known activists who have made it their mission to level the playing field.

Participating in sports and having female sports heroes give young women and girls a far different sense of their own potential than their mothers had. As an athlete and a coach of a high-school girls' team, I have experienced this change first-hand.

Testing myself, meeting the challenges of competition, and developing lifelong friendships with other athletes have been among the most rewarding experiences of my life. Likewise, sports have a profound effect on the girls I coach. Being an athlete is an alternative to the oppressive passivity and self-consciousness of female adolescence and a chance to develop physical and mental confidence in what was once a strictly male domain. It has been touching to watch the girls on my cross-country team develop a jocky swagger and bond with each other in a way formerly reserved for boys.

Corporations have noticed this cultural shift, and are cashing in on it. Nike has been running ads for several years that appeal to women's enthusiasm for sports as a symbol of female liberation and power. The ad campaigns are misleading, of course: They directly contradict Nike's real-life repressive policies toward its mostly female work force in Indonesian sweatshops. Other companies with an eye on a new pool of consumers are also jumping on the women's-sports bandwagon. Conde Nast, Inc., Sports Illustrated, and Outside magazine are all starting new sports publications for women this year.

Even Barbie is becoming an athlete. Olympic Barbie comes in a gymnastics uniform, complete with her own gym bag and hairbrush. At thirty-five, Barbie is about twenty years too old and rather awkwardly proportioned to be a believable member of the U.S. gymnastics team. But her creators have given her a makeover, knocking off a few years and a few millimeters from her plastic bustline to give her a more girlish, athletic figure. It's no surprise that Barbie chose to go out for gymnastics, the most ladylike of women's sports, where you can be a great athlete and still be compared to a doll.

"They brought America to tears of pride and joy," sportswriter John Lopez wrote in a wrap-up story on the U.S. women's Olympic gymnastics team. "But Thursday night, it was tears of sorrow for the American gymnastics dolls, who broke down mechanically, then emotionally."

A lot of viewers were disturbed by network coverage of those weeping dolls, little girls under enormous pressure turning in robotic performances. Girls' gymnastics, while requiring tremendous strength, skill, and courage, nonetheless showcases traditionally feminine qualities that are painfully restrictive--extreme youth, daintiness, even sexiness. In a way that is not true of other sports or even men's gymnastics, girls' gymnastics can be oddly degrading, subjecting the contestants to a kind of merciless critical gaze while they dance and preen in front of the judges.

It would be a less mixed spectacle if they got rid of the ridiculous little bump-and-grind routines in the floor exercises and changed the events to suit mature women's bodies instead of tiny prepubescent ones.

But the visibility of athletes like diver Mary Ellen Clark, who was a portrait of power and composure, and the great, muscular sprinter Gail Devers, and the fabulous, hugging, high-fiving women's basketball team represents a welcome change in our sense of what women can be and do.

That's why I loved watching the Olympics--not for the soap-opera coverage, but for the sheer joy of seeing those wonderful, powerful women in action.