After Atalanta

ESPN.com has a good article on the debut of BMX racing as an official Olympic sport. Apparently it was a fan favorite and appeals to people from all over the world. Winter Olympian Gretchen Bleiler was there watching and believes BMX racing will change the Summer Olympics the way snowboarding changed the Winter Games. Not sure if it will have exactly the same impact given that there are a lot of snowboarding events and only a few BMX racing ones. But I think the addition of an "action sport" into the Summer Games is a good thing. As does this writer from the Vancouver Sun who also offers some good descriptions of what fans of the BMX events were privy to in Beijing.

Did anyone else know that BMX biking (the cross country race course kind; not the tricks and aerials version) had been added to the summer Olympics? Yeah, me neither. And, of course, there will be women participating because new sports have to have a men's and women's event(s) where applicable. And, despite the fact that the United States is a BMX powerhouse, there are other countries that have athletes who will strong gold medal contenders in Beijing. On the women's side there's New Zealand, France, and Great Britain. Great Britain?? Huh, interesting. Especially in light of this article about the need for greater promotion of women's sports in the UK. The BMXers are hoping their Olympic presence will increase the sport's popularity. Who knows, maybe post-Beijing we'll see a cadre of British girls hopping on their BMXes and hitting the dirt.

I was pleased with some recent media coverage. (I know, I know; it happens so infrequently.) USA Today ran some pieces on some non-traditional women's sports a few weeks ago. The first was a feature on one of the leading female motocross riders, 17-year old Ashley Fiolek. Fiolek is heading to the X Games next month where she will participate as one of ten riders in the first women's motocross, which consists of 10 laps around a x-country course set up in the Staples Center in LA. I wasn't too excited about how both the article and Fiolek herself (girls are more hesitant to make an aggressive pass on the track, she said) set up how this is such a masculine sport. But I did like that they mentioned Fiolek's (dis)ability--she's deaf--and how she has had to train to take that into account. They did not posit her as a hero or as someone working against insurmountable odds. One might even be able to argue that her gender was more of an obstacle than her hearing loss. A ...

Girls and women that is--who will be a more obvious segment of the competitors' pool at the X Games. I have never followed the X Games closely but I do remember that in their early days there were female athletes. Then as time went on they seemed to disappear. This article in USA Today explains some of the history, which involved numerous cancelled events and competitions due to lack of participants and fewer events overall than in the men's field which really took off. But the S3 Supergirl Event is starting to change that. This year, the event's second, takes place later this summer in Huntington Beach, CA and has snow, surf, and skate events and will feature Olympic and X Games stars. Supergirl will be creating a line of action clothing and is counting on marketing its product to the up-and-coming actionistas--the term coined to describe female action/extreme sports athletes. As for one of the original action sports events, the X Games is expanding their program this year...