After Atalanta

 One of my favorite podcasts, P op Culture Happy Hou r, does a weekly segment on Fridays when all panelists/hosts are asked what is making them happy this week. I find it both enjoyable to listen to and am reminded that this practice that should be more widely undertaken.  So this week, what is making me happy is Elana Meyers Taylor and her gold medal win in monobob at the Milano Cortina Olympics. This win makes her a six-time medalist (with one event to go)--and the most decorated woman bobsledder.  Sidebar: I was slightly disturbed, when looking for stories to link, to find this one from Savannah with the headline Who is Elana Meyers Taylor? Le sigh, Georgia. [Also, it is getting more and more difficult to find media outlets to link to that don't make me ill, and I still feel like I am not doing a great job at this. Still, FU CBS. No clicks for you!] This USA Today piece provides some history on her athletic career--including how she got into bobsled--and her legacy. ...

 It is not at all surprising that the IOC disqualified Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych for refusing to change his helmet. The helmet had pictures of Ukrainian athletes who have died in the conflict with Russia.  As I noted when Kirsty Coventry was made IOC president, she was not about to change the culture of the organization. And this decision--which did not have to be a decision--was in keeping with how I expect she will govern. (For clarification, the IOC issued the warning about the helmet and engaged in "negotiations" over it, but International Bobsleigh and Skeleton made the decision. Heraskevych appealed to the the Court of Arbitration for Sport which turned down his appeal.) Coventry did report that she cried over the decision. #whitewomantears The helmet broke the rules over athlete expression on the playing field, they all said. He was told he could wear a black arm band before and after his runs. But political expressions on the field of play are ...

Last weekish I wrote about my astonishment that there isn't a 4-women bobsled event and how this speaks to the inequality that still remains in the Olympics in spite of visible and highly touted progress (i.e., the much-belated inclusion of women's ski jumping) because of the lack of equality in the events themselves. Even women's ski jumping has only one event while the men have two (two different sized hills). Want to see the inequality? Not in a pie graph or nifty infographic (though those are fun); but here in the medal ceremony for the team luge eve nt. This was a new event this year (I think--I had never seen it before) in which a team comprised of a female sledder, a male sledder, and a doubles team relay down the course. When one entity crosses the line, he/she hits a paddle which releases the gate at the top for the next entity. Each team has 1 woman and three men. Why? Because female lugers only have one event--the singles. Just like the female bobsledders only...

Summer lovin', happened too fast. Christine Brennan has declared the Summer of Women (in sports) over. And, today, she and I are on the same page. Eternal pessimist that I am, I suspected--as it was happening--that the surge of interest in women's sports that was ignited primarily by the Olympics but also by the concurrent news and (mostly) praise of Title IX during its 40th anniversary year, would dissipate. It's a roller coaster ride. Luckily we only have to go down screeching down that big hill of disappointment once every 4 years (and down a smaller hill of disappointment after the winter Olympics end). Brennan was brought back to her reality after hearing UConn women's basketball coach, Geno Auriemma, discuss his stance on lowering the rim in women's basketball to make it a more popular sport that people (i.e. men) want to watch. People who don't like women's sports are not going to watch them. And inferiorizing the sport only provides the haters mo...

I started reading this column with a little hesitation. The end of the Kournikova era? Really? Are not female athletes, including the columnist's celebrated Alex Morgan, still stripping down to promote their bodies, um, er, their sport, um...? Yes, it's still happening. It's still problematic. What's different, as the columnist points out, is that in the Kournikova era there seemed to be no space to which to have a discussion of women's sports. We were polarized. We had to talk about the sexualization of female athletes (or if you were outside of the critical discourse you discussed their hotness factor) and it made it difficult to talk about actual women's sports. But why did the Kournikova era end? What was it about that historical moment that pushed this woman (then girl) to be the most googled, searched for, downloaded entity? What was the sexual tenor of the country (of the western world?) in those years? Or was it just Kournikova? Did she just happen ...

Caster Semenya is on something. Say that about almost any other track and field athlete (or cyclist-- even the now officially retired "I've- never tested positive" Lance Armstrong remains under scrutiny) and you think doping. An athlete seeking an unfair advantage. But not Semenya--and not, according to secret and not-so-secret sources--are numerous other female athletes who apparently are meeting standards of performance, of hormone levels, of muscle mass not associated with the socially acceptable definition of female. Interventions have been made. Drugs administered. Surgeries completed. At least that's the impression given by this article . We all know the controversy over Semenya's performance and appearance. When it was seemingly over, the horror over the whole experience--the invasion of privacy, the (largely undiscussed) racism and colonialism, the general ickiness of it all--was supposed to be a closed chapter. An additional stain, but one that the Th...

Qatar, like Saudi Arabia, has never sent a female athletes to the Olympics. That will change this summer. Two women had been scheduled to go after receiving wild cards from the IOC. A third has just been added . Bahia al-Hamad, who also received a wild card, will participate in women’s air rifle. She was Qatar's most successful athlete at the 2011 Arab Games.

Maureen Dowd has a column, seemingly in honor of Easter, of the connection between the old boys' network, Jesus Christ (i.e. what would Jesus do about Augusta?), the recent decision by Saudi Arabia to not send women to the Olympics--and what the OBN the IOC will do about it. It's a little stream of consciousness and I was not a fan of her line about the Saudis throwing blankets over their women; but she makes some good points nonetheless.

Pretty interesting interview with Kathryn Bertine over at the Huffington Post the other day. Bertine is a senior editor at espnW and is trying to qualify for the Olympic Games and has written a book about her attempt to qualify in 2008. ESPN sponsored her quest to do so, but she didn't make it for those games. So she's at it again looking to be a cyclist in London in 2012. Here's what impressed me: her clear recognition of the skewed treatment of female athletes with sport itself and, of course, the media coverage. She gives the example of the lack of prize money in women's cycling, but notes that so few cyclists will speak up because of fear of alienating sponsors. Because there's nothing worse, we know, than an athlete who speaks her/his mind. And it's especially bad if that athlete is a woman who is complaining. I mean, she could be a feminist. Horrors! So Bertine, being the only cyclist from Saint Kitts and Nevis (she got dual citizenship as part of her qual...

A most excellent piece of writing from Canadian Laura Robinson who details not only the case of the women ski jumpers (ongoing given that the IOC has not deemed them worthy for the 2014 Olympics) but other inequities in the Olympic Games. What we often see/hear is that women are allowed to compete in almost all the same sports as men these days. But the number of events within those sports often vary drastically. Check out her article for the break down.

...the IOC is meeting in Acapulco for the next several days to consider, among other things, which sports it will add to winter games program starting in 2014 when the games will be in Sochi, Russia. One might think that with all the bad press the IOC received for the past two years over not allowed women's ski jumping into the Vancouver games, it would be an automatic in. But apparently not. Early word from IOC officials suggests that women's ski jumping may be added on a conditional basis. The IOC would then review the quality of the 2011 Women's World Championships and decide if it's worthy, I suppose. Talk about pressure to perform! Other sports/events under consideration: ski and snowboard slopestyle, ski halfpipe, Alpine team skiing (head-to-head racing), and a team skating event.

What equality is remains contextual and questionable. I don't know much about economics. And gender continues to present so many interesting issues with which to contend. Hence all the questions in the title of this post. But what I really want to talk about (though I am actually still a little hesitant about talking about it) is the recent news that the organizers of the 2012 London Olympics have priced the tickets for men's and women's events differently. In many cases, tickets for men's events are more expensive--sometimes significantly so. The IOC (though it does not set the ticket prices--the organizers do) is taking most of the flak for this decision. Critics contend that the pricing undervalues women's sports and sends a message that women's sports are just not as good as men's sports. I agree that that message is being sent and that it is not good. But I do not see the pricing differential as entirely bad. First, the difference reinforces prevailing ...

Not my own--most of the time anyway. But all this neoliberal, neo-queer stuff is really confusing. Especially in the context of the Olympics. So according to Pat Griffin , the person I go to for such information, there are only 4 out athletes at these Winter Olympics (all women), plus Johnny Weir who sometimes epitomizes these neoliberal, neo-queer discussions for me. But four! That number is quite low. So we enter the "it's the 21st century and I don't need to be out; I am who I am" kind of discussion countered by the idea that that's just baloney (articulate, eh?) and queer people are making themselves more invisible in this age of increasing visibility and controversy over issues of sexuality. But this latter argument is hard to put on someone like Weir, who will not discuss his sexuality because it's "private" (though he has no problems with privacy when showing his ass on his Sundance Channel show) but is not at all subtle in his behaviors and c...

...from about an Olympic ice rink length away. I missed but definitely heard about Canada's 18-0 win over Slovakia. I saw the US's 12-1 win over China. I watched most of Canada's 10-1 win over Switzerland. And then I saw all the critiques . (And there were indeed more than three.) It is indeed worrisome given that the IOC nixed softball from the Olympic roster because of lack of international worthiness. (Though that seemed to become the official rationale there was all that curious wrangling that is alleged to have happened over whether baseball and softball were the same sport.) And if I were an elite female ski jumper right now seeing these scores, I would be miffed that the IOC hadn't even considered my sport because of alleged international shallowness. But the delve into Olympic hockey's history is important. The men's scores in the early years of the game--even worse. And the women's game needs to overcome even more: namely the sexism and intersecti...

Initially when I read this column at the Huffington Post by Michele Morris about the story of the missing female ski jumpers in Vancouver, I had another one of those where have you been moments. It's a good column that outlines the whole contentious history of the women's exclusion from the Olympic games. It offers those late to the issue, a quick and thoughtful catch-up. But I was still annoyed at the media coverage this late in the game. But then as I was watching jumping events this past weekend and heard nary a word about the lack of women, I kind of softened my stance. If they are not going to talk about it during the actual Olympics on the many stations of NBC maybe we do still need writers like Morris to be bringing up this issue. Then today I got irked again as I read about people so outraged they are boycotting the Olympics because of it. Really? I have been pleased to see a lot of controversy and protesting of these games, but you're picking this issue--NOW--to bo...

...the Olympics are run by boys. Shocker. But if you want some of the details check out Christine Brennan's column about the male-dominated USOC. All the National Governing Board (the groups that govern individual sports such as skating, skiing/snowboarding, luge, etc.) heads are men. The USOC briefly had a female president, but she got run out of town. And this is part of the reason why women are not found in these positions. All these men talk the politically correct game and the NGBs say they want to be diverse but, really, you think they want women in charge--of sports! Similar to the situations faced by female coaches and female administrators in intercollegiate sports (where there is also a dearth , though not nearly so bad, of women), women in Olympic sport administration deal not only with the pressures of their respective jobs but having to deal with the inherent sexism--sometimes overt, sometimes stealth--that honestly makes the job either impossible to succeed in or just...

It's a little late, of course and one has to wonder where all the sympathy from the mainstream, American-based media was when these women were in the midst of their battle with the IOC and, by default, VANOC. The righteous indignation is nice but just two weeks before the start of the games, it's a little less righteous and indignatious. But the SI column does do a good job noting the male-dominated make up of the IOC, the lip service Rogge has played to gender equity, how softball was cut on his watch and continually and problematically compared to baseball, and the admittance of other sports ahead of women's ski jumping. It also makes a good point about the limited growth of a sport that is not in the Olympics (one of the reasons behind the decision was that there was not enough depth) and, I would argue, not an intercollegiate sport. With very limited funding for a national team that is not an Olympic sport, many women have or will quit jumping.

Usually I post about another college or university adding women's wrestling to their roster of varsity sports. Sometimes it is to increase the number of opportunities for women to participate in sport; sometimes it is an attempt to "save" men's wrestling. But this time, it's just to get women involved in the sport and sport more generally. And it's not at a college or university. It's not even in the United States. Apparently wrestling clubs for women are taking off in Iraq. One guy, a former champion wrestler and national coach, came in and started a club for women a year ago and despite some community resistance, women came out to wrestle and more clubs around the country have popped up. And they like it. They really like it. Plans include travelling to tournaments in nearby countries like Syria and Turkey and the women in the founding club have their sites set on the Olympics.

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...

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...