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HONG KONG — It was precisely a year ago that the Japanese women’s soccer team won the World Cup, beating the United States in the final and giving a boost to the spirits of a nation that had been battered by an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster.

But when they flew to Europe on Sunday along with the men’s team, the women were in coach seats while the men were up in business class. The Japanese Football Association said the teams had left Tokyo together on the same Japan Airlines flight.

“I guess it should have been the other way around,” Homare Sawa, the leading player on the women’s team, told Japanese reporters this week. “Even just in terms of age, we are senior.”

Similar treatment was given to the Australian women’s basketball team, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Thursday. The men’s team, known as the Boomers, was seated in business class, while the women, the Opals, were in premium economy seats.

The Herald reporter Samantha Lane said the women players “have never protested publicly about this longstanding treatment of national teams and players would not comment on the record today, but they do not like it and say such inequality has been a longstanding source of contention.”

The Opals have won silver medals at each of the last three Olympics, losing to the Americans in the 2008 final in Beijing. The Boomers have never medaled.

A Basketball Australia spokeswoman told Ms. Lane that each team had its own travel budget and decided how to spend it.

The Japanese women’s soccer team is widely known as Nadeshiko, after a hardy pink perennial. The squad has been in a training camp outside Paris this week and was scheduled to play the French team on Thursday before heading to England for final Olympic preparations.

The Japanese women are ranked No. 3 in the world. The men, ranked 20th, last won an Olympic medal, the bronze, in the 1968 Games.

Ms. Sawa, 33, has been in more than 175 international matches for Japan. She was the world player of the year in 2011. London will be her fourth Olympics.

She said this week that the team had been bumped up to business class after winning the World Cup in Germany, then added, “I hope we can produce a good result again and be treated the same way.”

My colleague Rob Hughes wrote last year that the victory in the World Cup was “the best thing that could happen to the sport.”

Any succor that sports might give to a nation devastated by the earthquake, tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster can be only fleeting, and small. But the real legacy is that the Japanese women have tackled and laid bare a myth. Some of the men’s teams from Asia, and their coaches, have used the excuse that physical size legislates against their winning world soccer events. Led by Homare Sawa’s extraordinary amalgam of talent, vision and tenacity, the Japanese women simply would not give in to that preconception. “Japan has been hurt and so many lives have been affected,” Sawa said. “We cannot change that. But Japan is coming back and this was our chance to represent our nation and show that we never stopped working.”

Justin McCurry, writing for The Guardian from Tokyo, reported that Japan’s Olympic committee routinely upgrades professional judo players and large athletes on long flights, although most of the Olympic athletes are put in economy because of their alleged amateur or semi-professional status.

“Well-known athletes often get round the rule by upgrading with help from their sponsors,” Mr. McCurry said, “but that isn’t an option for players in team sports aiming to preserve the esprit de corps.”