Sir Andy Murray calls for more gender-mixed sport following Team GB's success in new events

Sir Andy Murray led calls for more gender-mixed sport on Saturday night after Team GB landed another two golds in contests featuring women and men racing together.

The double Wimbledon and Olympic champion, who has repeatedly championed feminism, said mixed events are "a huge asset" and "so many sports miss a trick" by not including them.

After Britons triumphed in both the mixed relay triathlon and mixed 4x100m swim, Murray's first suggestion was that it would be "brilliant" for golf to combine the men's Ryder and women's Solheim cups.

He went on to poll his Twitter followers on his idea for a new European versus America team event, with 83 per cent apparently agreeing it was a good idea.

The games in Tokyo, meanwhile, were already a landmark for the sexes as Team GB have taken more women athletes than men for the first time in 125 years.

Of the 376 athletes selected to represent Great Britain in Tokyo, 201 are female while 175 are male. The division of talent paid off twice on Saturday as a host of mixed-gender events took place, some of them for the first time.

Relays in track and swimming, mixed pistol and rifle competitions on the shooting range, mixed judo and mixed table tennis have all made their debuts this year.

Britain claimed their latest two golds in the mixed events before most of the nation back home had woken up. The first came early on Saturday as Jessica Learmonth, Jonny Brownlee, Georgia Taylor-Brown and Alex Yee won the first-ever Olympic triathlon mixed relay.

Then a swimming quartet of Kathleen Dawson, Adam Peaty, James Guy and Anna Hopkin won in a world-record three minutes 37.58 seconds, with China taking silver and Australia bronze. Dawson said afterwards that it was “incredible” to become the first British women to win a relay medal since 1912.

"I wasn't going to let them bully me, I was going to swim my own race and it didn't matter if it was two guys or two girls I was up against," said Dawson. "It's unbelievable what we've done. I couldn't have imagined it in my wildest dreams, honestly."

Describing swimming as “a male dominated sport”, she said she hoped it would inspire girls and women into the pool.

Prior to the Games, the International Olympic Committee pledged to make this the "most gender equal" Games. Its president Thomas Bach also said they would be "more youthful, more urban and include more women".

Other efforts at diversifying its appeal include skateboarding, sport climbing and BMX freestyle. At next year's Beijing Winter Olympics there will be mixed snowboarding, freestyle skiing, short track speed skating and ski jumping in the line up.

Team GB's chef de mission Mark England had said prior to the Games that he was "delighted we will be taking more women than men to a summer Olympic Games". "It is a first for Team GB in its 125-year history - 2021 is truly the year of the female Olympian," he added.

Murray, meanwhile, has previously described sexism in sport as "unreal" and repeatedly campaigned for equal pay.

The IOC deserves credit for the introduction of mixed sporting relays

By Jeremy Wilson

Social media, it would seem, has at least agreed on two points during these Tokyo Games. That Hazel Irvine is a sports broadcasting giant, and that mixed sporting relays must not just stay part of the Olympics, but any sports governing body worth its salt should be working out whether it can introduce their version of the concept.

Saturday was the day that three brand new events took their Olympic bow and, while British approval might be inflated by the collection of two gold medals, the reaction of just about every athlete and neutral told its own story.

Having tweeted his approval, Andy Murray then carried out his own poll and found that more than 80 per cent of respondents were also in favour of a new golfing event that combined the very best of the Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup. The possibilities are endless and, at a stroke, the International Olympic Committee - not generally known as radical innovators - have demonstrated a wider point: By sticking with what we have always done, and assuming other sporting formats and variations could never provide superior drama, we short-change not just the public but athletes who seem genuinely energised by a different challenge.

Adam Peaty, so dominant in the individual breaststroke event, declared that winning with his team-mates had given him the greatest buzz of the week and you could just feel how much James Guy, Kathleen Dawson and Anna Hopkin all gained from racing together. Jess Learmonth, part of the triathlon winning team, said that the dynamic was very different than performing alone. “I’m not bothered if I do badly, but I’d be very bothered if I messed it up for these guys - we had a right laugh.”

With the athletes racing over a sprint distance in the triathlon - (just 300m swim, 6.8km bike and 2km) - the great intrigue was its quick-fire nature and the additional importance of rapid transitions.

The athletes had all trained for individual races around five times longer and so, with someone like Jonny Brownlee considering a move up to Ironman events, we saw his all-round quality as an athlete with a 2km run that was faster even than team-mate Alex Yee.

The triathletes were obliged all to go in the same order - woman, man, woman, man - but, in the 4x100m medley swimming and 4x400m athletics, there was the added intrigue of the option to mix things up

It is a shame, then, in athletics that the teams have basically all now settled into a belief that the optimum order should be man - woman - woman - man. They should draw the order from a hat and then go with whatever comes out. The swimming was the most fascinating. Different teams have different specialists at certain strokes. Peaty, for example, was hardly going to sit out of the breaststroke leg for Team GB - and so we had the extraordinary sight of him motoring through a field of women and men. Similarly, when Caeleb Dressel was handed over in last place for the United States, he somehow still felt like the biggest danger to Hopkin as his huge tattooed arms began thrashing down the pool.

There are huge tactical considerations. The churn of the water at the turn is considerable when you have an 88kg man like Dressel on the charge and there is an entire piece of analysis that can be devoted to second-guessing the various orders. Get the likely positioning of an opponent right and your swimmer can have the benefit of that churn propelling them along at the turn. Get it wrong and they could find themselves swimming into a considerable current.

The best thing about it, though, is the spectator experience. Working out the significance of an early gap becomes an art-form in itself and, while logic told any British swimming fan not to panic when Dawson found herself backstroking against four men on the first leg, it was still hard not to fear that they were already out of it. The ebbs and flows were dramatic. The International Swimming League has also introduced ‘skin’ races in its glitzy evening meets, which are basically a series of elimination races that conclude with a final head-to-head. Why shouldn’t that be an Olympic event? There is also more to come. Paris will be the first Olympics with an equal number of men’s and women’s events and, with mixed snowboarding, freestyle skiing, short track speed skating and ski jumping to come at the Beijing Winter Olympics, sailing intends to bring in mixed kiteboarding and 470 events in Paris. The IOC, so long in the dark ages with its event selection (cycling did not even have any women's events until 1984), deserves credit. This little version of ‘Super Saturday’ should be the catalyst for administrators in Olympic sport and beyond.