Athletes in England are coming together to tackle what they see as gender inequality in cross country running. Although men and women usually run the same distances on the track and in road races, women’s races are often much shorter at cross country events, sometimes barely more than half of the men’s distance. A petition calling for the distances to be equalised has gathered over 1,600 signatures and that number is rising rapidly.

Preferring to ignore gender, Faldo credits Sunesson for the most successful spell of his career. "I didn't get the relevance of having Fanny Sunesson -- a lady on my golf bag," Faldo tells CNN Living Golf. "I thought she was a great caddy, a great girl, good entertainment. "You know, the most important thing is you've got to be able to communicate. She was very professional, did her yardage books which take eight hours to do, so you got every bit of information. We had a great relationship."

While volunteers have remained the backbone of the grassroots game, the wave of women’s participation in rugby league (both on and off the field) has advanced exponentially from a decade ago. England looking to blaze a trail at Women’s Rugby League World Cup Read more As reported to the Guardian by the NRL, female registrations in the tag and tackle versions of the game have grown by 32% this year alone. With 9,029 new women playing a form of rugby league in Australia, the demand for a national women’s competition has never been greater.

The most popular wrestling style in Senegal, a free-form variant called laamb, dates back centuries, when it was used to celebrate harvests and folklore. Among the Jola people, techniques were passed on during secret initiation rites into manhood, which culminated with displays at festivals. In most of Senegal, women are still forbidden to wrestle — partly because of conservative religious values, and partly because they’re banned from even witnessing some of the lavish mystical rites that surround the sport.

"Women's football kits have links to the suffragette movement in Britain. Lady Florence Dixie, a prominent suffragette and president of the British Ladies Football Club, saw football as a weapon to subvert Victorian dress. "There is no reason why football should not be played by women, and played well too, provided they dress rationally and relegate to limbo the straitjacket attire in which fashion delights to attire them," she wrote in 1895."

"She ran to the store, bought two jockstraps and brought them back to the costume shop. "The waist band became our rib band," Miller says. "We crossed the straps in the back because we didn't want them to fall, and it went over our head. And that was it.""

"Life is too short to be comfortable, to sit around and wait for something exciting to happen — if I had a message for anyone, it would be, get out there and give it a go."