After Atalanta

What do you get when you stay up late watching Cartoon Network as you try to unwind from a late-night class? You get to see a Red Bull commercial featuring Ashley Fiolek , on her motor bike (i.e. in action--not posing) and signing! Fiolek has garnered attention for being a woman in the historically male world of motocross and for being hearing impaired. I am now impressed by both Fiolek and Red Bull (though I still won't drink the stuff). Glad to have found this commercial because I will soon be blogging about a not-so-good one featuring a female athlete. Stay tuned!

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...

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...