Like King, who eventually bypassed the United States Tennis Association in her fight to fix the sport’s 12-to-1 gender pay ratio, cyclist Iris Slappendel envisions one day going around the Union Cycliste Internationale, allowing women’s cycling to strike its own deals for TV rights, sponsorships, racecourses, and coverage in a way that benefits women cyclists, not their governing body.

In June 2016, pro cyclist Alison Tetrick faced a panel of Specialized Bicycles’ saddle designers—most of them men—and invented a slew of euphemisms for 'labia.'

The first Mini was intended less as an athletic competition than as a marketing stunt for race sponsor Johnson Wax, which was looking to promote a new brand of pink shaving cream (i.e. Crazylegs). To help generate publicity, race director Fred Lebow hired Playboy Bunnies in bushy-tailed hot pants and black turtlenecks to pose for pre-race photo ops. Not all of this has aged well.

The Colorado girl became the youngest known person to summit the California peak. “I was scared just sometimes,” she said at the top. “I thought it was really fun.”

She grew up in a trailer park and weighed more than 300 pounds when she graduated from high school. Her first experience riding a bike was commuting on a heavy old Schwinn she spray-painted purple and rode 20 miles round-trip to her job at the University Hospital in Madison. “I was 20 years old and 70 pounds overweight,” she says. “It would take two hours to ride ten miles.”

When it comes to making money in the climbing industry, Instagram is king. Sponsored athletes commonly have social-media clauses included in their contracts. And yet, the prevalence of harassment on Instagram has sparked a new wave of activism online, as both individuals and groups attempt to call attention to the problem by harnessing their own followings.

On the surface, the World Surfing League’s announcement of equal pay in September seemed as flawless as it was groundbreaking. But the news was followed by a damaging, 9,000-word article in the February issue of The New York Times Magazine, in which a group of women big-wave surfers outlined pro surfing’s longstanding, systemic sexism and homophobia and accused Sophie Goldschmidt, the CEO of the World Surf League and the WSL of proliferating these biases.

Before 2018, of the 4,738 people to have summited Everest, 12 percent - or 605 climbers - were women. In 2018 alone, 18 percent of total summitters were women. And the 2019 records released by the Nepal Department of Tourism showed that women climbers account for 76 out of 375 permits (20 percent) issued to foreigners.

In July of 2018, a group of Afghan women set out to climb 24,580-foot Mount Noshaq, their country’s highest mountain. No Afghan woman had ever reached the summit, and many challenges stood in their way, from hostile Afghan men who think that women shouldn’t exercise, to the terrorist attack in a district near the peak two days before the climb began. This is their story.

As the surfboard industry moves toward prefabricated, machine-cut mass production, hand-shaping surfboards keeps it tied to its roots. Masters at their craft, these four women represent a small handful of female board builders who prefer making boards (which range in style from the classic San Diego fish to long nose-riders to big-wave guns) the old-fashioned way.