After Atalanta

...against the sexualization of female athletes as epitomized by the Lingerie Football League. It didn;t happen here in the US. But the Australian Minister of Sports had a few choice words for the Lingerie Football League which is trying to expand its brand down under. Those words included: degrading, cheap, and perv(erted). I am sure if the US had a minister of sport, s/he would speak out against the LFL. And the Lingerie Basketball League. And the new inline Bikini Hockey League. Maybe we need a Minister of Sport.

This story crossed my desktop earlier this month: A women's sports club in Darebin, Victoria, Australia has been (it seems) targeted by vandals and thieves for about a year now. The club has been broken into and graffitied. Money has been stolen (along with alcohol). And once, the windows were broken by marbles tossed at the Darebin Women's Sports Club. I couldn't find much info in this article but I was surprised that the tone of the short piece was on the calm side, even as interviewees expressed concern over the repeated attacks. Some were thinking it might be because it is a women's club, but the fact that graffiti has been described as "fairly derogatory to women" (though no examples were shared) makes it more than likely. I do not know that much about the climate for women's sports in Australia. I do know that interest or adeptness in men's sports like rugby and football are nearly essential components of Australian masculinity. But I know there...

The women ski jumpers may have lost their bid to gain entry into the Vancouver Olympics (as recounted in this article which I thought tried too hard to put a positive spin on the sexism) but the 2-women bobsled team from Australia is in! The Court of Arbitration of Sport ruled that the Australians were unfairly denied access as the best team from Oceania based on current bodsled federation rules for qualifying. That means 21 teams will be competing in Vancouver next week instead of the usual 20, which is good news for the Irish team which was the last to qualify.

Wow--I just don't know what to do with this story (kindly sent to me by Sean at Sportsbabel ). Australian track and field star Jana Rawlinson, who specializes in the hurdles, recently had her breast implants removed. Not because she didn't like the way they looked: "I absolutely loved having big boobs" she said. No, it was because she didn't want to "short-change Australia" in the 2012 Olympics. She wanted to be the fittest she could be and I guess that meant ditching the implants. Curious, curious, curious. Why would she add them in the first place? [OK; just found this article about when the news of the implants was publicly revealed.] Olympic-level track athletes usually start running pretty early in their lives. Likely earlier than the decision to have implants would be made. Actually, we can infer that Rawlinson was indeed already an athlete when she chose to have breast augmentation because the reason behind the implants, she says, was that she did...

Good article in the NYT about women's soccer (known there as football, of course) in Turkey. It focuses on the lack of acceptance for women's participation in the sport. Turkey has established a women's soccer league and getting people interested has been a battle because, according to the article, "there is a deep ambivalence in this socially conservative, predominantly Muslim society about women playing the game." This article constantly had me comparing the climate in Turkey to the one here. When a writer invokes Islam in the context of women playing sport, there seems to be an automatic response along the lines of "oh, yes, it's so bad there; they are so oppressed." After all, what are things like here in a arguable socially conservative, predominantly Christian society? This spring marks attempt number two at a women's professional soccer league in the United States. Women's soccer fans are crossing fingers, toes, and engaging in any oth...

I just love NPR. They are all about women's water polo . Today they covered the team's win over Australia that put them into the gold medal round . And it wasn't just a brief score with two sentences of description. There were actually splashing sounds in the background. They were there--well someone was there. They had an interview with a player. They provided history of the team and recounted the team's road to the gold medal game--a little rocky but successful nonetheless. Makes me glad I donated twice this year.* *OK the second time was motivated by the desire to win the $2500 gift certificate to a bike store, still I like to think that that extra donation maybe paid for the extra bag of checked luggage the reporter had to take to Beijing or maybe a few drinks on the plane.

The Hindustan Times has a good article about the utter lack of support for women's sports and female athletes in India. In describing the conditions--lack of quality equipment, poor facilities, no media coverage, and pitiful compensation--I began to think about what state women's sports in the US would be in were it not for Title IX. While Title IX applies only to athletic opportunities within educational institutions and not national teams like those referenced in the article, we all know that colleges and universities provide a training and recruiting ground for national teams in many cases. Of course sometimes the differences are not so exaggerated. Women's sports in the US get very little media coverage and when they are the coverage is often problematic due the sexualiation, infantilization, and general lack of respect for female athletes. And the issue of compensation is also a good one. We all know that athletes on women's professional team sports earn far less ...

There are a lot of stories coming across my Google news alert about the World Cup. Of course none of the ESPN "news" shows that I have seen pay it much attention. I guess they figure just airing the matches for two hours every other morning is enough. But there has been print coverage of the event across the world. And despite the initial trepidations over the poor timing of the event, it has not gone completely unnoticed. Though, again, television coverage has been minimal. The coverage that does exist, however, is pretty good. We're even starting to hear the p-word, parity. Yesterday at SI.com, columnist Mark Bechtel wrote a piece that suggests he is impressed by the teams in this year's tournament. The level of competition has changed for the better. As Bechtel notes only Brazil has gotten out of the first round of play without a loss. Teams are getting better coaching and more attention--in the form of funding--from their national associations and this makes for g...