Kirsty Gilmour: Badminton must change rules so women are not punished for period breaks
Playing against the world No 1 is already a daunting task, let alone when your period has started only minutes before the match.
Yet instead of being allowed time to deal with the situation when she faced An Se-young at the All England Open Badminton Championships last month, Kirsty Gilmour was penalised for taking more than the allocated two minutes between sets to visit the bathroom facilities.
'I was playing the world No 1 and 30 minutes before I went on the court, my period started unexpectedly,' three-time Team GB Olympian Gilmour tells Telegraph Sport. 'That's fine, I had tampons and pads and everything and I dealt with it.
'For me, the first few hours are tricky. I lost the first set and then I won the second set. Not many people have taken a set off of the world No 1 this year, she has a 20-to-zero win-to-loss ratio. So I've won the second set, but I've also been quite aware that there's some movement in my shorts. I asked the umpire if I could go to the toilet to deal with it.'
Gilmour did so but was then shown a yellow card for 'delaying play' after failing to return within the allocated time period. Although the card and subsequent fine were later overturned by the Badminton World Federation (BWF), Gilmour is now urging the sport to review its rules and regulations to allow for the 'rare' occasion that an athlete will need a longer break because of their period.
'The point of this is that there's just not a protocol for it. We have protocols if you need the bathroom, we have protocols if there's a blood injury, but we don't have protocols for the middle ground of the bathroom involving blood,' she says.
Gilmour does not blame the umpire nor the tournament referee, but wants the BWF to change the rules to account for these unlikely, but possible, circumstances.
'It happens so rarely. I've been playing for 13 years, and I've never been caught short on court before,' Gilmour adds. 'I don't think it's a case of we need to be careful of people using it as a delay tactic or something.
'There's just not a person that has a period in the world that wants to stand in front of a few thousand people and tell a person with a microphone that they're bleeding. I'd like there to be some sort of protocol put in place for people with periods to deal with the situation because it's something that you just absolutely can't help.'
'We just default to men'
In 2022, Wimbledon changed its strict all-white dress code to allow women players to wear dark undershorts because of concerns by menstruating players. Manchester City changed their women's shorts colour that same year, while female cricketers have also been asked about the rare occasions they have to don their whites for Test matches as awareness over periods and kit as well as the sport in general increased.
Gilmour wants to encourage more conversations on the subject in badminton, despite only becoming so open herself since the incident.
'This is probably the first real discussion we've had of periods around badminton,' says Gilmour, 31, as she uses careful and deliberate language to talk about the issue and what occurred during her match.
'I think we need to start to be so comfortable having these conversations, even just with me doing these kind of interviews over the last few days I've become so much more blasé about saying periods or bleeding or menstrual cycle, or all that stuff because 50 per cent of the population deal with it every month and the other 50, if any of them are creeped out, I'll just tell them to grow up.'
Badminton allows for a bathroom break during the two-minute intervals between games but there is no dispensation should players need longer.
'I think with so many rules, we just default to men,' Gilmour says. 'The men are mostly the ones in positions of power in governing bodies and I think we're slowly seeing that change, but it just takes an extra breadth of knowledge that women bring to life, to the world.
'More knowledge in a room is better than a whole chunk of knowledge of people's experiences missing, so the more women that we can get into leadership positions in sport... I think the more ground we can cover on these kind of rules and these situations.'
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