But the I.O.C. seems rightly ever more committed to the idea that its Games should put men and women on equal footing. This is quite a turnabout for an organization that was founded in 1894 and did not name its first female members until 1981, under the leadership of Juan Antonio Samaranch.

“Like many other organizations throughout the world, the I.O.C. was slow to recognize the importance of gender equality,” the current I.O.C. president, Jacques Rogge, wrote in an opinion piece the committee released this month. “Even so, we were ahead of our times by some measures. We opened doors for women long before most regions of the world accepted the idea of gender equality.”

The I.O.C. still has only 20 women among its 106 members, but female members have been added at a rapid pace since 2006, and women are taking on increasingly prominent roles. Nawal el-Moutawakel, the 1984 Olympic hurdles champion from Morocco, is in charge of the oversight committee for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro after having headed the evaluation committees that examined candidates for the 2012 and 2016 Games.

Moutawakel, a potential successor to Rogge, remains a symbolic figure herself. She is the first woman from an Arab or predominantly Muslim country to win an Olympic title. Though she has lobbied for change in the Muslim world’s attitudes toward female athletes, she has avoided direct confrontation since her early support for a protest group, then called “Atlanta Plus,” that was pushing hard for nations to include female athletes in their teams at the 1996 Games.

“When we brutalize things, brutalize people, the wound is very difficult to heal,” Moutawakel told me in 1996. “These people who come from these countries never imposed on the Occidental athletes to wear the veil when they run. Why should the Occidental world impose that they wear shorts to run?”

In 1996, 26 nations sent only male athletes to the Olympics. In 2008, only three nations took that approach, and it looks likely to hit zero in London. A more aggressive I.O.C. tack might have accelerated that, but it also could have created a cultural backlash in the Muslim world. And there is no questioning the healthy trend.

The I.O.C. has also drawn criticism for dropping softball, a women’s sport, from the Games after 2008. But there has been undeniably steady growth in female participation at the Games. Women made up 20.7 percent of the athlete pool at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, 34 percent in 1992 in Barcelona and 42.4 percent in 2008 in Beijing.