After Atalanta

Or maybe it's the new red--depends on what the usual color of boxing gloves is. I feel as if I have devoted a lot of blog space to the pinkification of women's sports and so I am not seeking out the pink stories, but when things come my way--in 3s--it's hard to ignore. So the latest is something called Pink Gloves Boxing. And it was featured on NPR's Morning Edition today . NPR! Guess it's time to write a letter. Pink Gloves Boxing is a fitness enterprise started by two former football players who started to train women in boxing. They have developed a whole package that they now sell to gyms. And the package includes not just information on training routines but the gear which includes: dog tags, t-shirts, and pink gloves--of course. The thing is, this program doesn't sound to me like it's any different than programs that already exist in gyms. My gym has a boxing class and many gyms have cardio boxing/kickboxing. After all, as the story states "There...

So it turns out the rumors around Caster Semenya are still based on things that very loosely resemble facts. Semenya has no intention of suing either the ASA or IAAF. She has retained a lawyer--the same firm that represented Oscar Pistorius in battle against the IAAF to run in able-bodied events with is cheetah legs. But the lawyers are there to help with what whatever issues arise from the continued inquisition over Semenya's gender. I am kind of disappointed.

On December 22 the Canadian Supreme Court refused to hear the case of female ski jumpers trying to get into the 2010 Olympics. This was the last ditch effort of the group which has pursued legal means and made appeals to the IOC, including a letter to President Jacques Rogge--who refused to grant the group's request for a meeting. I was pleased to see that South African runner Caster Semenya has not faded away after speculations about her gender and intense invasions of privacy. Instead she is fighting back-- with a lawsuit against IAAF and Athletic South Africa (ASA) for leaking information about the gender testing. The bungling of her case has also resulted in the president and board of the ASA to step down. It appears that testing began before Semenya went to Berlin for the World Championships and that ASA president Leonard Cheune decided to send her anyway because results were not yet in. But, as we know, questions were raised and information that should have stayed private was...

Indeed it is, Mother. Indeed it is. That was my mother's response after Christmas dinner to the news (as told by me) that two horses made the AP's list of the top female athletes of 2009. Plenty has been written about this already and even feminists have taken note. (The italics refer to the sometimes contrived strained relationship between feminism and sport.) The feminists over at Feministing had something to say about it. And so did a lot of other people. I don't feel the need to add anything else substantial. I don't have some kind of new angle on this story. The highly problematic comparisons between female athletes and horses and the ones between Serena Williams and the horses are obvious and dismaying. We could talk about how the people who created the list, the sports editors at AP affiliated newspapers, are predominantly men and predominantly white and middle class. But that's not a big insight either. And it's disappointing any way you look at it. If...

...I'm not the only one who has noticed that all this end of the decade stuff is a little premature. Check out Peter Bodo's (of Tennis magazine) column about the best of the almost decade. I usually dislike Bodo but I actually did not take offense at anything in this column--and it's not just because he agrees with me about how to count.

...to name the athlete of the decade until it was the actual end of the decade, this might not have happened.

To Kacey Bellamy the only UNHer to make the US National Women's Hockey Team. (She's also a western MA native so yea!) I have to admit I was a little peeved that, after Ben Smith retired after Turino and suggested having a female head coach, USA Hockey went with Marc Johnson of Wisconsin. But after reading this column , I was somewhat appeased.

• I n basketball, the $5.85 million per year average NBA salary (in 2008-2009) is 59 times higher than the $99,500 salary of WNBA athletes. • I n golf, the annual prize money for women in the LPGA rose by 234 percent between 2006 and 2008 to $62 million, while the PGA annual prize money for men rose by 310 percent to $214.4 million. • I n tennis, even though five of the top 10 highest-paid players are women, the top-paid male tennis player, Roger Federer, earns $9 million more than the top-paid woman, Maria Sharapova. • I n all sports, the 50 highest-earning athletes in the U.S. (salary, winnings, endorsements, appearances and bonuses) in 2008 were exclusively men. These are stats from The White House Project Report on equity in various fields including sport. The report also notes the lack of leadership and pay equity at various levels of sport, in the US and internationally. In college coaching and leadership, there is a wide salary differential, linked to the gender of the coach an...

Maybe, according to this article out of an Atlanta paper, a city which will host three women's professional teams in 2010 (soccer, softball, and basketball). Chicago has just as many. [Not sure if they are counting football at all, though. I know there are at least two leagues for women's football but I do not know if they qualify as professional or how that designation is made.] Anyway, some are hopeful that it's a good time (recession notwithstanding) for professional women's sports. That perhaps people are getting a little sick of male professional athletes behaving badly. That fans don't always like to see their favorite athletes getting arrested (guess we better not look too hard at Diana Taurasi then!) and that female athletes are generally seen as more accessible and more willing to do promotion and hang out with kids, etc. While I would love 2010 to be a great year for women's professional sports that have no historically been so successful, or even thos...

Seems to be all about the Seminoles this week. Except this time it's not the actual Seminoles, its the student-athletes at Florida State who call themselves Seminoles. The academic cheating issues at FSU have been covered. The school was investigated for a fairly widespread cheating scandal involving an online course. But ESPN's Outside the Lines has brought to light an interesting component of academic support in FSU athletics: the prevalence of student-athletes diagnosed as learning disabled (LD). It's a very thorough report that talks to specialists, a former member of the academic support team there (she was fired for allegedly providing too much help), and LD specialists--including the one FSU uses to diagnose their athletes. He is an outsider but gets paid $800 per test he gives to FSU students. He was very candid about the process but the article noted that his testing method is controversial. The model he uses produces an LD diagnosis at almost twice the rate of the...

So after I wrote this post I realized that I was kind of writing about pool. And I don't know if I think of pool as a sport. I didn't have a tag for it--not that that means that much. I kind of mentioned football so I am going with that. I just needed a jumping off point to get to my social commentary/soapbox and have decided that I don't really want to get into a debate about the "what makes a sport" criteria this morning. Not the collegiate football team in Florida, but the actual nation of American Indians. I was watching ever so briefly yesterday evening a Women's Professional Billiards Event (and, by the way, I turned it on when my onscreen guide said "Pool" was on ESPN and I was surprised--pleasantly--to see that it was women's pool; usually the unmodified on ESPN means it's a men's event. But then of course that gets me thinking about why billiards is segregated by gender in the first place...) Anyway, the event was happening in Fl...

So I am not, let it be stated for the record, going to discuss any of these best of the decade stories. It is a principled stand based on the fact that it's not the end of the decade. Not until next year. 'Cause you can't start counting at zero. That said I read one of those very pieces (I said I wouldn't blog about it, not that I wouldn't read them) that included some of the best or most interesting or ironic sport quotes of the years 2000-2009. Some indeed interesting, some not so much. But I was reminded of that incident with John Rocker in 2000 (which, as we know was not the start of the current decade or even century; I am being too nitpicky about this?) where he said to Sports Illustrated that he would never play baseball in New York because he didn't want to ride the subway with, among others, the queer with AIDS. That got Rocker a lot of press and a two-week suspension at the start of the season and a $500 fine. So I was thinking about this in light of t...

It's so lovely to find someone who agrees with you--especially on a cold, windy Friday morning as you feel a cold (but hopefully not the flu) coming on. The IOC has been making some changes to the summer games program, allegedly in the name of gender equity, that has a few puzzled. LA Times writer and blogger Philip Hersh is one of those and I agree with him--for the most part. The addition of mixed doubles to the roster seems a little silly. While I enjoy mixed doubles and seek it out when I am lucky enough to get to a tournament that actually has it (mostly the Grand Slams), it's another thing to include it in the Olympics where tennis should not be in the first place. Track cycling, with a much smaller international presence, has seen its events reduced--well the men's events anyway. The IOC, upon recommendations from the International Cycling Union (so it's difficult to know where exactly to lay blame), has dropped several events for men and added more for women. S...

Hard to believe that once upon a time, the National Organization for Women was considered radical. That a lot of the popular sentiment that said the American women's movement of the late 60s and 70s as man-hating and radical came from the very visible actions of NOW. But today, and even back then to a certain extent, it's just a lot of the same liberal status quo junk; the "you go, girl" empowerment rhetoric that has not a lot of substance behind it. So my disappointment upon reading Patricia Ireland's (former NOW president) opinion piece on Florida State University women's basketball team's new snazzy website was palpable but not surprising. A few weeks ago, there was some chatter on teh internets about said website with people weighing in on the potential homophobia and certainly heteronormativity that underlies this website which features players dressed in evening wear. Blogger and sports writer Jayda Evans wrote about the FSU site as well as the overa...

See, I knew I would be back to critiquing someone this week. And how appropriate that is the anonymous columnist from my alma mater's student newspaper. (In my day, when I wrote for The New Hampshire , they didn't allow anonymous columnists.) Anyway, anonymous Joe (he admits to being male), has a holiday wish list for the University of new Hampshire that includes a few sport-related things. First he wishes for a new football stadium because the current one is "small" and "ugly." I never thought it was that bad. He said that because the team has done so well recently they deserve a less-embarrassing facility. Perhaps. But it clearly has not affected recruiting. After all if you can make it to the second round of the post-season, you must be getting quality players who come in spite of the allegedly crummy stadium. And, of course, it costs a lot of money to build a new stadium. Anonymous Joe said that a new stadium, though, would bring in more revenue. But a...

Since I am usually such a Complainin' Jane when it comes to problematic things lay people say about women's sports, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to actually laud someone. (Don't worry; I'm not going soft. I am sure I will be back with something cynical to say tomorrow--or the next day. I have a busy week ahead of me.) The men's versus women's sports issue is making headline news again thanks for NBA commissioner David Stern's prediction that women could be playing in the league in 10 years. And then there was, of course, the "no ways" from people like Lebron James and Anthony Parker--brother of Candace who thinks that while his sister is just swell, she is not NBA material. Anyway, it seems the Modesto (CA) Bee took up the issue of the lack of popularity in women's sports and did some of that blame-gaming stuff where they attribute the lack of interest on the part of women as the reason for the alleged demise of women's sport...

I was part of an interesting dinner party conversation the other night about the responsibility of being a gym goer, a gym owner, or a gym employee. The talk was about one's responsibility when seeing someone who is doing something dangerous. Though we mentioned things like bad form and lifting too much weight or general overexertion, what the conversation really turned to was eating disorders. As a gym employee (kind of--I teach a couple of classes so I am more of a contracted employee) I was asked what our gym's (many of us go to the same establishment) policy was regarding confronting people with eating disorders. I doubt there is one. I know of other gyms that will discontinue a membership when they feel someone is engaging in disordered behavior. But that doesn't seem very productive either. Some other establishment will be eager to take that person's membership fees--probably my gym. We didn't come to any kind of conclusion. I spoke rather abstractly about try...

Amelie Mauresmo announced her retirement today, shedding tears in the process. I think we need to do some mutual comforting. Was sad I didn't get to see her play in the 2009 French Open when I was there but glad I had the opportunity to see her in both New Haven and New York.

So remember when everyone was all "boo hiss China"? They were about to host the Olympics and a lot of Americans got their retro commie high horses to talk about--well mostly how great the West and free speech and capitalism are. And granted there were a lot of problems worthy of critique like Darfur and the displacement of people and killing of animals and arrests of dissidents, etc. But those critiques, as I recall, were pretty free-flowing. Sure a lot of athletes took their problematic Switzerland stand but there was discourse at all levels really. So here we are, two years later and everything is all rosy for Vancouver in a couple of months, right? Yeah, not so much. Apparently the whole "the West is a bastion of freedom and democracy" is crap when it comes to hosting the Olympic Games. Amy Goodman, author and journalist and current host of Democracy Now was detained at the US/Canadian border when she went to Vancouver to give a talk about US health care and th...

OK so I probably wouldn't get quite the amount of attention as those other party crashers that continue to make headlines (I don't know which is worse all the hoopla over the party crashers or the previous hoopla over the fact that curry was served at the White House!). But I just found out the entire US Women's National Ice Hockey Team from the 1998 Nagano Olympics are being inducted into the US Hockey Hall of Fame tonight--in Boston! The whole team. (Well Cammi Granato isn't coming because she is about to have a baby--but she's already in as an individual; inducted last year.) But this includes some of the veterans that are still training for the upcoming Olympics. And heck, I don't have any plans. If only I could find out where it is happening... Anyway, the group is being honored for their contribution to women's ice hockey, for being pioneers in the sport, etc. Also, the late Frank Zamboni is being inducted, which is kinda cool.