After Atalanta

The Saudi female athlete most observers thought would be heading to London next month after Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on female athletes in the Olympics--will not. Equestrian Dalma Rushdi Malhas could not meet the Olympic qualifying standard after losing valuable training time when her horse sustained an injury. A reader pointed me to this article about the situation. There are, apparently, other unnamed female athletes under consideration.

Since it seems to be okay to write about the Olympics now that they're over (note that the Paralympics are currently underway; Fat Louie at Women's Sports Blog is doing the best she can--given the dearth of coverage--to blog about them); or at least that's my rationale for writing more after the fact than during. Besides, this post is about the Olympics generally not specifically Beijing. There's been discussion all along, as I mentioned recently, about the eliminations of baseball and softball and the attempts to reinstate them--focused mostly on softball. But there's also been some discourse on which sports should be in the Olympics generally. This Canadian columnist shares his opinions on the matter. He advocates for the inclusion of rugby and cricket, which I wholeheartedly support, assuming both can get some of their historical problems with gender equity in order. I have written about cricket's campaign previously. I don't know anything about cricket b...