I would say the terms girl and boy are used more affectionately when referring to our athletes. I have certainly heard "our boys" and "the boys" mentioned a number of times.
And "Boys team"/"Girls team" is used all over the place, from the olympics to a game at a party, no matter if the team is a bunch of 60 year old men.
That said, the comment in the OP appears to be taken out of context somewhat.
The Cambridge study also found that it's much more common for women to be referred to as "girls" than it is for men to be called "boys".
"Many commentators say 'girls' in sport even if they know they should say 'women'. This is because they think it's a trivial issue to do with political correctness and they forget in the heat of competition," says Woodward.
"But when you call a woman a girl you are actually infantilising her. A girl is a child. Women's bodies have long been infantilised in popular culture as youth is seen as attractive."
The bolded part is probably the most important bit.
There's also this just underneath
It's not just language where there is a difference in attitude - female Olympic athletes are still garnering far fewer column inches and given less TV airtime than their male counterparts. Researchers found men were mentioned twice as often in the CEC and three times more often in the Sports Corpus. When a sport was mentioned it was usually assumed that the report was about the men's game - so for example the media is inclined to refer to "women's football" and call men's football just "football".
"When we stop talking about women's sport and instead just recognise them as equal to the men and athletes in their own right we know we will have changed the terms of the debate," says The Fawcett Society's Sam Smethers.
More difficult one. One of the problems with female athletes is they just aren't the strongest, fastest (etc) person in their sport. Usually, if a sport is divided into male and female it's because one sex is more powerful/"better" than the other. The reason it's called women football is because its exclusively for women, whereas "Football" in most cases (olympics excluded, where it is called mens football) is unisex. If a woman was good enough to get into a premier league team then she could play with the men. Womens teams are inherently sexist, and are usually set up because they/most of them cannot get into the main teams.
It's the same with running, rowing and many other sports. The fastest/strongest are usually the men and studies have shown that both men and women are more interested in "mens" sports. Be that tennis or the 100m sprint (the latter tbh is the fastest
person in the world, as men are faster).
I think a lot of women sports suffer from the paralympic effect. Most people are interested in the best person/team in that sport, and usually in the separated sports that best person is male. Yes you can divide it down by sex, how many limbs they have, or how well they can see, but the reality is the 100m sprint is designed to find the fastest person over that distance, and a woman or paralympian has never been the fastest person. Unfortunately, in most Olympic sports women truly aren't equal in their ability.*
All that said there are a number of truly dubious comments by commentators over the years, so there still is some sexism in the Olympics, even if the examples in the OP aren't great ones.
*Where they are, such as horse riding and shooting, the sport is not divided into male and female.
