After Atalanta

OK so I have tried several times this past weekend to buy the Body Issue so I can take a (good, more on that in a sec) look at it myself. But I cannot find it. Has my progressive town refused to carry it? More likely that I just haven't been to a big enough bookstore yet. Hopefully in the next few days during one of my layovers I can find it at an airport newsstand. I have seen it though. My gym subscribes to the magazine and the issue was in the magazine rack Friday. I quickly scooped it up and took it into the stretching area with me. Alas, I don't wear my glasses in the gym and saw while I could see the pictures just fine, I could not read much of the text without getting a little dizzy. The text, I think, is important for understanding context. Or at least for understanding what ESPN thinks the context is. Here's what I think so far: I think that Fat Louie at Women's Sport Blog is brilliantly concise in her assessment of the six covers. Also check out One Sport Voic...

Nothing pleases me more than a snarky comment about ESPN's special women's history month programming. (More on the specifics of that in a moment.) After noting the good: a profile of Paralympic swimmer Jessica Long; blogger Ray Frager of the Baltimore Sun says this: Danica Patrick also will be featured, presumably to show how women athletes have been empowered to sprawl across a sports car in a bikini for a magazine photo shoot even after winning an event at their sport's highest level. Love it! So, yes, ESPN is engaging in some special programming for women's history month. We could say, yeah, they're not going to sit back on the fact that they cover women's March Madness. Or we could say--hey--what about the other 11 months of the year, guys? Pick your level of cynicism. I had been tuning into Sports Center in the mornings in an attempt to get some clue about how to fill out my brackets this year. I never saw a story about women in the line-up. (This was befor...

On Saturday I did a 5K that benefited a local organization that helps women and their families who have been victims of domestic violence. And though there was a snazzy mug designed by cartoonist Hilary Price who writes and draws Rhymes with Orange , I was actually pleased that the proceeds (over $55,000 I heard) went to a local charity and was put together largely by donations from local businesses. So many charity runs spend a lot of money on advertising and prizes/gifts that, in the end, take away from the actual charity. In the afternoon I managed to catch all of the NBC special on the Paralympics. I thought it was good. A good mix of stories in terms of sports participated in, type of disability, race, age, and "success" at the Beijing Games. Of course the producers could not have known the outcomes when they chose the athletes--not entirely at least--so this may have been more chance than not. There was a good segment on how China has become more aware and accommodating...

I started this post forever ago because I was looking for a quick post to dash off before I headed to Denver for a conference. But compiling information actually takes longer than one might think. And now I am on pseudo-vacation so I thought I would revisit it. Some of the information is old but I haven't heard much coverage of some of the stories so I don't feel too bad putting them out there now. I have been a fan of Ashley Fiolek's since I first read about the motcross star last summer. I voted for her in the recent WSF Athlete of the Year Awards (she lost to Nastia Liukin, which I am still getting over). But even if WSF voters did not recognize Fiolek's accomplishments and contributions, others have. The editors at TransWorld Motcross magazine have. According to the story at Because I Played Sports , Fiolek will be the first woman to appear on the cover of the magazine. She also has a regular column in the publication called Silence in which she talks about her deaf...

Earlier this week the Women's Sports Foundation held their annual awards dinner in NYC. Nastia Liukin won the 2008 Sportswoman of the Year Award (individual) and Jessica Mendoza won it for a female athlete competing in a team sport. Of course, gymnastics could be considered a team sport as well though there is the individual component of it unlike in softball and other team sports. I was kind of bummed at the choice of recipients. I do like Mendoza and believe she is a good athlete and a good person very much involved in using sport to make change within and outside of sport, but she gets a lot of publicity already. Liukin doesn't really do anything for me and she doesn't appear to have done much outside of gymnastics. The thing most of the articles about the award if touting is Liukin's upcoming guest appearance on Gossip Girl. I myself voted for Ashley Fiolek, the teenager who races motocross (a very male dominated field). And Patty Cisneros for Team Sportswoman of th...

This article/feature highlights the dominant Dutch Paralympic tennis team and provides some very convincing reasons as to why the team is so successful. The long of the short of it: they get a lot of support from the Dutch tennis federation, which does not distinguish between wheelchair tennis and able-bodied tennis. Also a factor: tennis the second biggest sport in the country with most towns have more than one club. (This does seem curious to me given the comparative lack of Dutch able-bodied tennis players.) It also seems that the Netherlands are much better than say, here, getting newly-disabled people into sports. (I do wonder though if that may change here given the high numbers of disabled soldiers returning from war.) But apparently disabled people there are highly encouraged to participate in sports and are given sport wheelchairs. Sounds like the Netherlands could provide a solid model for other countries to emulate.

And it what you know about paralympic sports consists of having watched the documentary Murderball and some awareness of wheelchair basketball and/or wheelchair tennis, then you should (like I did) check out this article in The Telegraph that goes though all the medal sports in the Paralympics providing their history, the events offered, which disabilities are accommodated, and how. What I find impressive is the organization of all the events and how they meet the needs of so many athletes. Too bad we won't get to actually see much of it.

Okay so I didn't realize that the current dearth of coverage of the Paralympic Games was because they haven't actually started yet. I had thought that the Paralympic Games occurred immediately after the Olympic Games and I do believe this has happened in the past (Salt Lake City, for example). But not this time. The Games don't start until September 6. In the meantime, check out this article about the first Jordanian, Maha Barghouti, to win Paralympic gold. She did so in table tennis in Sydney, 2000. She is headed to Beijing to compete. Barghouti was named Arab athlete of the year in 2001 and Jordanian sportsperson of the year in 2002. I think those awards are pretty interesting in lights of a few things. First, we seem to think the (dis)abled athletes need categories of their own. Second, when there are not separate categories (I'm not going to get into the whole separate but equal debate here) sometimes it appears that the inclusion of (dis)abled athletes smacks a li...

Forgot to mention another article USA Today that ran during the month of June. I don't know what inspired the newspaper to write so many stories (ok not that many but in comparison to other national media outlets it seems like a lot) but we'll take it--especially when they're covering sports that don't get a lot of coverage, like wheelchair basketball . Of course the coverage is inspired by the upcoming Paralympic Games in Beijing in September because sports that feature (dis)abled athletes rarely get coverage in non-Paralympic years. And it features a winning team, the US women's national team that will be defending its gold medal. So the tone of the story is upbeat but it does not cross the line to gushing. It isn't condescending. The article focuses on the captain Patty Cisneros who is also a coach of the women's wheelchair bball team at University of Illinois. I wish the article had mentioned how few intercollegiate wheelchair teams there are. The way i...

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 ...

...because that 1) might not be true, 2) seems to be a little too optimistic for a cynic like me, and 3) goes against my extreme suspicion of progress narratives. But no sooner was I discussing in my sport sociology class the dearth of coverage of (dis)abled athletes than I came across three stories about (dis)abled athletes.* The first was in last month's TENNIS which contained a pretty lengthy feature of Canadian quad wheelchair player Sarah Hunter. [The link is actually not to the article which only exists in hard copy in the April issue.] I thought it was a fairly well-done article. It doesn't depict her as some kind of amazing hero or pity her for her injury. It mentioned her female partner and their child to whom Hunter gave birth two years ago without presenting either of these things as somehow unusual for a person in a wheelchair. Then I saw two articles about women's national team wheelchair basketball. There's this one on SI.com--yes, Sports Illustrated is ...

1. The United States Agency for International Development recently gave a fairly large grant ($95,000US) to the Ghana Society of Physically Disabled Sports. The money will go toward the creation of men's and women's wheelchair basketball teams that will compete internationally as well as a tournament that will assist in identifying athletes for these teams. 2. Cricket in the Olympics? Could be. Honestly, I am a little surprised it isn't there already given its international popularity (not in the US but there are certainly enough countries with viable national teams to create a strong field from the outset). Cricket has been recognized by the International Olympic Committee . But recognition is not any kind of guarantee of inclusion in future Olympic Games though the sport's governing, the International Cricket Council (ICC) body seems to want to work toward that goal. Part of convincing the IOC that cricket is Olympic-worthy will be strengthening the women's game. ...

The International Softball Federation has launched a new campaign targeted at reinstating softball in the 2016 Olympics. In response to the concern that softball is not a truly international sport, ISF is encouraging the creation of new national softball federations, hoping to have 150 by 2009. Other goals include increasing television coverage, enhancing and growing opportunities for youths, and providing equipment and coaching to programs in need. I was most impressed, though, by the plan to grow opportunities for people with disabilities. I think this population could have easily been overlooked by the ISF in its attempt to get able-bodied softball back on the Olympic program.

This month's It Takes a Team newsletter contains a short piece on Sheryl Swoopes who provides a little more information on how and when she decided to publicly come out as a lesbian. There is also a good feature on a Canadian wheelchair basketball player who is an out lesbian. Danielle Peers, who has muscular dystrophy but does not always use a wheelchair, has played on both men's and women's team as well as in the only professional wheelchair basketball league. She is also a frequent speaker on issues of disability and queerness and is getting a degree in disability and queer studies.

I thought I had already posted about this article on disabled athletes but apparently I have not. So here it is. It features athletes with varying abilities who participate in all levels of sport from the Paralympics to recreational. Without romanticizing or dismissing the struggles these athletes face, I have to say that many of them challenge the ways we think about sports participation. When the goal of sport is participation, rules and formats that some might see as "creative" or "alternative" become the norm. And I think that "able-bodied" sport could learn a lot from that.

I think there is a general awareness that individuals with physical disabilities play sports. The Paralympics happen in the same venues as the Olympics every four years directly following the Games. A few years ago Murderball about wheelchair rugby was a popular documentary. Though, admittedly, most of us who are able-bodied think very rarely about sport and disability. And because we see it so rarely it seems like an anomaly. And it is not a far stretch to think about access to sport, if one is differently abled, as a privilege, rather than a right. A story such as this one about the availability of varsity sports at the collegiate level for student-athletes with physical disabilities highlights the Othering of disability and sport. Only 11 universities offer varsity sports for disabled athletes. And most of those have to raise money to keep their programs going. Can you imagine the increase in access to sport if persons with disabilities had something similar to Title IX? The legal ...