VANCOUVER - In the run-up to the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, several female runners launched a court challenge against Olympic officials in the United States and abroad, claiming the decision not to include women's 5,000- and 10,000-metre events amounted to illegal discrimination.

And, like a group of female ski jumpers currently engaged in the same fight ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the runners lost.

Observers say the parallel cases - one heard a quarter-century ago and the other dismissed by the B.C. Court of Appeal earlier this month - are part of a long history of gender divides at the Olympics Games that still continues today.

While ski jumping and Nordic combined (an event that includes ski jumping and cross-country skiing) are restricted to men, the Summer events of synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics only include women. Others such as boxing were off-limits to women until very recently, and there are still differences between the men's and women's components of the same events.

It all goes back to the revival of the modern-day Games in the late 1800s, says Cecile Houry, an expert on gender and the Olympics at Florida International University in Miami.

Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, saw the Games as a way to train young boys in France to become strong leaders.

"Women were not supposed to be in the Olympics - de Coubertin did not want women as participants,'' says Houry.

"It has to do with gender roles and the roles of men and women in society when the Olympics were reinvented.''

The first modern Games in 1896, like the ancient Olympics, were a men's-only gathering, although it wasn't long before women started making small gains.

At the 1900 Games in Paris, women competed in several events such as tennis and croquet, but there were just 22 women athletes compared to nearly 1,000 men.

Houry says other women's events were slowly added, but for the most part they were no-contact sports that weren't overtly masculine, such as swimming and figure skating.

The most significant challenge was in the area of track-and-field, which Houry says has long been seen as a man's sport that is too strenuous for women.

"That was the biggest opposition, because that was definitely a man's land,'' says Houry. "It was OK (for women) to do certain sports, as long as it was moderate.''

For example, women's 800-metre running was added in 1928, but it was scrapped after several runners collapsed at the finish line. It stayed off the Olympic program for more than three decades.

Fast forward to the 1984 Games, when Olympic officials added a women's marathon event, but still kept the 5,000- and 10,000-metre runs restricted to men.

A group of runners and the American Civil Liberties Union launched a lawsuit that went through several levels of appeal until it was ultimately defeated.

"I began thinking, naively, that if you petitioned, a letter-writing campaign, telephone calls, that would take care of it,'' says Jacqueline Hansen, a former world champion runner who was part of the lawsuit.

"I had the same feeling that I'm sure the (ski jumping) girls today are feeling: 'OK, we pointed out what's wrong with this picture, why won't anybody help us fix it?' ''

Hansen says she realized her Olympic ambitions were over when, in 1984, rather than acquiesce to the runners, officials decided to add the women's-only events of synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics instead.

Houry and Hansen suggest women's-only events such as rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming are more about ensuring female athletes are competing in feminine sports, rather than about excluding men.

Still, Houry acknowledges it's not as simple as adding men's components for sports with few male competitors.

"Men were more oriented to competitions that (involved) showing off, which was appreciated in men, as opposed to women who, especially in gymnastics, are still today supposed to look very feminine,'' says Houry.

"But it is tricky, because you can't force people to practise the same sport, and there are some that women are more attracted to and men are not.''

The International Olympic Committee now has rules designed to ensure gender equity at the Olympics, with criteria for adding new events to the Games that focus largely on how prevalent the sport is around the world. The standards for women's events are less strict to encourage their development.

The IOC, which was unavailable for comment, cited those criteria in rejecting women's ski jumping, while allowing men's ski jumping to be grandfathered in despite those rules.

Those criteria have also been used to argue against attempts to allow men to compete in synchronized swimming, which has few male competitors.

California-based synchronized swimmer Bill May knows this all too well.

May competed around the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s alongside women, but only at open events that weren't sanctioned by the Federation International de Natation, the governing body for the sport that manages many international swimming meets, including the Olympics. The federation doesn't recognize male competitors.

May says rules that exclude events based on the number of competitors actually work to ensure new athletes don't take up those sports.

"It's hard for a male to do synchronized swimming because he's kind of spinning his wheels,'' says May, who stopped competing in 2004 to join Cirque du Soleil.

"A guy doesn't want to have a long career because there's nowhere to go, and at the same time they don't want to add the event because there's not many men. They want numbers, but the numbers can't grow.''