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The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics will see female participation in the games hit new heights, with around 45 percent of all athletes set to be women, the highest number since the tournament began in 1896 in Athens, Greece, according to a report in the El Comercio newspaper Sunday.
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Statistics compiled by the newspaper suggest that around 5,600 women will make up the 12,000 athletes set to compete in South America’s first Olympic games.
In the previous London 2012 games women made up 44 percent, or 4,776, of the participants.
Female participation in athletics' premier event has come a long way since the inaugural games in Athens, which forbade women from taking part.
In the 1900 games hosted in Paris, women were allowed to compete for the first time, although out of 997 athletes only 22 were women.
The Middle Eastern nation of Qatar is set to increase the number of women in its teams for this year’s games, according to Thani Abdulrahman Al-Kuwari, the secretary-general of the Qatar Olympic Committee in April, although the full number of females in the squad has yet to be formally announced.
The tiny nation had just four women in its team at the last Olympics four years ago.
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