Mixed-sex sports are individual and team sports whose participants are not of a single sex. In organised sports settings, rules usually dictate an equal number of people of each sex in a team. Usually, the main purpose of these rules are to account for physiological sex differences. Mixed-sex sports in informal settings are typically groups of neighbours, friends or family playing without regard to the sex of the participants. Mixed-sex play is also common in youth sports as before puberty and adolescence, sport-relevant sex differences affect performance far less.
A mixed-gender badminton match
An unofficial mixed doubles match of beach volleyball.
Equestrian at the 2012 Summer Olympics – Team dressage, 7 of 9 medalists are women
A mixed-sex pair, participating in FINA World Championships of synchronised swimming, waves to the crowd before diving into water.
Pair skating is a figure skating discipline defined by the International Skating Union (ISU) as "the skating of two persons in unison who perform their movements in such harmony with each other as to give the impression of genuine Pair Skating as compared with independent Single Skating". The ISU also states that a pairs team consists of "one Woman and one Man". Pair skating, along with men's and women's single skating, has been an Olympic discipline since figure skating, the oldest Winter Olympic sport, was introduced at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. The ISU World Figure Skating Championships introduced pair skating in 1908.
German pair skaters Anna Hübler and Heinrich Burger, 1908 Olympics
German pair team Madge Syers and Edgar Syers at the 1908 Olympics
Liudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov (the "Protopopovs"), in 1968
Irina Rodnina and Alexei Ulanov, in 1972