Sport England and Nike take different tacks to get women active

There is more than a whiff of paternalism about two big campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic to encourage more women into sports.

In the UK, Sport England's much-praised #thisgirlcan advert - which has been viewed more than 13m times online - revolves around the astounding fact that exercise often involves getting out of breath.

And this week sportswear giant Nike has launched a somewhat suspiciously similar campaign in the US, #betterforit, which has the equally profound message that you need to practise to get better at sports.

However sceptical you are about the campaigns' concepts, it is worth thinking about how infrequently billboards - let alone TVs - around the country are filled with pictures of women actively doing sport.

A glance at the upcoming UK sporting schedules for the next couple of weeks shows that aside from the London marathon, the next sight of elite female athletes in most British households will not be until the Badminton horse trials in May.

While equestrianism is one of the few sports in which women compete alongside men at a world-class level, the requirement to have a horse to compete puts participation beyond the means of many.

Men looking for role models or inspiration to get off the couch have a far wider diet. Football, cricket, snooker, motorsport, cycling and rugby union - sports showcasing a huge array of male physiques and talent - will all be beamed into British living rooms over the next few weeks.

If you are a woman - or a young girl - what do you have? Perhaps the most visible British female athlete is Olympic gold medal winner Jessica Ennis, an image of veritable - and unobtainable - physical perfection. Even she is more often seen on billboards advertising products, rather than plying her trade.

Or you have champions in sports that require access to substantial kit, like a horse or a boat which, despite notable efforts from sporting bodies to widen their appeal, are still mainly the preserve of the middle classes.

Figures from the Sutton Trust also show that of the British women who won medals at the 2012 London Olympics, 46.5 per cent attended selective schools - either fee paying or grammar - but only about 7 per cent of the population are educated privately.

Sport England will get its first hint of whether its campaign has had any impact in the real world in June, when the next set of numbers on how many Britons participate in sports are published.

It currently estimates 2m fewer 14 to 40-year-old women than men play sport regularly in the UK - despite 75 per cent saying they want to be more active.

Nike, after all, is not spending big money on a new advertising campaign for altruistic reasons: it is betting that it can grow its womenswear line from $5bn a year at present to $7bn by 2017.

This is where the differences between the two campaigns start to grate. The Sport England campaign deliberately casts non-models and features an array of accessible sports from boxing to football on an urban artificial pitch and swimming in an ordinary municipal swimming pool.

The Nike campaign by contrast remains focused on the body beautiful, and far more traditional female activities like yoga, running and studio cycling.

One particularly jarring clip, entitled "Inner Thoughts", shows a woman admitting being intimidated by the presence of models in her spin class. There is no noticeable difference in physique between her and them.

But, in the end, the more women are encouraged to do a wider range of sports, the better. Not just for the nation's health - and goodness knows we all need to be fitter - but for its sporting future. Talent, the real talent that wins medals, does not have to come from the playing fields of elite schools.

British Cycling has proved that participation and elite success do go hand in hand: 15 per cent more women now cycle recreationally once a week than four years ago, while its women's team continues to break records and win medals - and hails mainly from state school backgrounds.

Many years ago, I was one of a group of children running around on a rundown, sloping, plastic, all-weather tennis court - the type of venue that would give elite coaches kittens - ineffectively trying to hit a hockey ball.

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