After Atalanta

If we thought the international sports community had learned something about gender and sex, biology, identity and athleticism after the debacle caused by the International Association of Athletics Federations in its process of “gender verification” in the case of South African runner Caster Semenya, an April New York Times op-ed about these issues has shocked the naiveté right out of us. I would have liked to believe that the humiliation Semenya underwent when members of the international track and field community questioned her sex thus triggering physical, medical, and psychological examinations would become an anomaly. Based on the information presented by co-authors Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, it was not. The difference: the process of accusing and testing Semenya was very public; the process of testing and “fixing” the bodies of athletes who do not conform to the IAAF’s new hormone level policies (also adopted by the IOC and FIFA) have been quite hidden. Whil...

Sean at Sportsbabel was kind enough to send along this article entitled "Basketball league for white Americans targets Augusta." But the title confused me. A white basketball team was going to protest Augusta National which still won't allow women as members and has a lovely history of racism? How would that work? So naive. But it so clearly illustrates my thought process! Anyway, no what is happening is that a whites-only basketball league is trying to establish a team in Augusta. The city, not the golf course. I guess, given my initial interpretation of the headline, it wasn't too out of the realm of possibility for me that there would be such an organization. And it isn't. Basketball has always been rife with racial tensions. There have always been the subtle reactions to the prevalence of Black people who play the game professionally and in college. Have I recounted here before the story of sitting at a UIowa women's game against Rutgers when the older whi...

Of course! Of course, Patrick McEnroe and Mary Jo Fernandez and every other Australian Open/ESPN commentator. Gender had nothing to do with Serena Williams's biggest-fine-in-tennis-ever as she claimed in a recent interview at the Australian Open. I mean, really. We're still talking about gender? No--we're all equal now that Wimbledon finally ponied up equal prize money. Oh, and P.S. just in case you were thinking it, race had nothing to do with it either. Because we are soooo lucky to live in a post-race society too. 'Cause, you know, we elected a Black man to be president. [Can you even imagine what would have happened if Serena had mentioned race in that interview? Pam Shriver's head might have exploded. Remind me to tweet Serena and ask her to talk about race!] All these gender is not a factor comments are ringing pretty hollow to me, a Massachusetts resident, this morning. 'Cause another potentially powerful woman in Congress who dared to call out a man'...

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...

This past weekend the NYT published a very good article on the access urban girls have to sport. The Title IX Blog has given some more of the details of the article itself (and provides a link), but I want to, especially in light of Golf Channel commentator Rich Lerner's questions to Lorena Ochoa the other day, comment a little further. Because my worry is that while it is often the case that girls from Latino (and sometimes African-American as well) families bear much of the responsibility for childcare duties and other domestic chores that can impede their access to sports, these realities can engender some misconceptions, some judgment, and some passivity. What do I mean? Well I worry that whenever we talk about trying to involve more urban girls and girls of color in sports we are going to encounter a defeatist attitude. As in, "well, it's just their culture. There's nothing we can do." I have already seen, in discussions of Muslim women's access to sport...

I should probably say, "when overt racism doesn't pay." And then I should probably add, "well of course it shouldn't." But still, it gives me a little bit hope (which one usually needs mid-week, or if one is a Duke fan--how about those Michigan State women last night, eh?) when people in sport realize that things just are not right, even if the consciousness is motivated by money. South Carolina continues to fly the confederate flag--at its state house. And so the NCAA will not choose any SC location for post-season/tourney play. Rightly so, of course. And because of it the state, particularly the city of Columbia where the other USC is located, loses out on lots 'o money. Like millions, according to this columnist who is doing his due diligence in printing what is probably an annual column about the situation. And for his efforts he has been called a "pansy douche bag." I found that lovely phrase in just one of the over 350 comments (at the ti...

Interesting how weeks after the conclusion of the Australian Open the media is only now addressing the very strange 10 Most Beautiful Women of the Open slideshow on the tournament's website. [You have to listen to the accompanying audio--it's pretty bad!] Oh well, I frequently get around to things in a not necessarily timely manner, myself. Anyway, the coverage of Serena's and Venus's absence from the list has engendered some discussion about standards of beauty and racism. Good! Unfortunately some of the articles fail to actually condemn the presence of the list in the first place. This one by Jewel Wood at the Huffington Post is very good but doesn't ask why women's tennis has such a list in the first place. Why do people have such a difficult time understanding the intersections of racism and sexism?? The website The Root did their own slideshow (and accompanying article ) of Venus and Serena, which was intended to exemplify the sisters' beauty. I say int...

Bryan Hollister of the Bleacher Report has a " humor" column this week in which he lists and explains the top 15 sports that are not sports. I'm not going to get super uptight about this list. But I do have some things to say about his choices. First, though, it should be noted that the definition of sport is always up for debate--and this is the way it should be. Because a sport does not always involve "blood, sweat, and tears shed through hours of workouts, practices, scrimmages, successes, and failures." Or at least not all those elements all the time. It's a pretty naive definition of a sport, but it's the only one that Hollister offers. I'm not going to comment on all 15 of Hollister's offerings. Check them out for yourself. Here are just some of my thoughts on some of his. Winter sports seem to be especially heavy hit, curling, bobsled, and luge. And if Hollister really thinks that no one has ever said about luge "that's what I wan...

Last week NPR had some interesting sports stories. On the 16th Fresh Air had a segment in which Dave Davies interviewed former NHLer Willie O'Ree who broke the color barrier in ice hockey about 50 years ago. Also, last week Bill Littlefield of the Boston NPR station, WBUR did a column on the prospects of the WPS. He doesn't seem very hopeful for success for the new league given the current state of the economy. But, like any women's soccer fan, there's a hint of optimism and a strong yearning for a success against all odds story.

...that I meant to post on this weekend but didn't quite get around to. I was buoyed from my usual cynical position by three things that happened Friday evening, which was a very good thing because I had being having a crappy day until then. Anyway, the first thing (only because I am talking about it first--all three happened within about an hour of each other) is that NPR covered the Paralympics. It was a segment on, I believe, All Things Considered. The stars of the games including US swimmer Erin Popovich . The disqualification of an Irish soccer player because he was too able-bodied, and the doping scandals(there were four athletes sent home for steroid abuse). Then I heard on that same NPR station--not sure if it was local or national news--that the Basketball Hall of Fame has formed a committee to look into basketball at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, particularly during segregation. It will review records of teams, players and coaches who have historically b...

The US Open starts its second round today in Edina, MN. A local television station in Minnesota covered the event by doing a story about the trend many female golfers seem to be setting and/or following: self-sexification. Seven of the women who qualified for the Open recently signed contracts with a NY modelling agency. And it has some people--players and fans alike--a little ticked off. Lorena Ochoa, not one to create controversy, said that being feminine helps to draw fans (ick!) and that there are different ways to go about it but that modelling is not for her. She wants to make her mark on the course. Apparently there was an incident during a practice round Wednesday when fans cheered a pretty bad tee shot Natalie Gulbis--who is the oft-cited example of the sexification of golf--just because she's Natalie Gulbis. Another player (who no one seems to be naming) admonished the fans for cheering for, basically, cheering for a face rather than talent. But an issue that I feel is be...

The need for a fitter population is a concern frequently covered by the media. Yesterday I mentioned the WSFF report on the state of women's fitness in Great Britain. There was no mention, though, in the coverage I saw of the report, about disparities in fitness levels across racial and class lines. In the United States that concern is very real and many are trying to address it. When I was in graduate school in Boston I worked on a project funded, in part, through the Women's Sports Foundation where organizations that offered programs aimed at increasing the participation of girls in sports and physical activity--especially girls of color and those from working and lower class backgrounds--received grants to continue (or begin in some cases) their work. In return, some eager researchers came in and observed the process and collected data. Boston was a target city because statistics at the time showed boys in the city had twice as many participation opportunities as girls. Yest...

The Chicago Tribune has a feature on the Chicago Sky* and the WNBA generally, the specific angle being how the Sky exemplifies the uniqueness of the WNBA, as compared to the NBA, of course. I was going to let this article go unexamined even after reading Sky player and WNBA veteran Chasity Melvin's comments that "women are just different than men. We're more sensitive, we're more emotional." But not to fear, Melvin says, they are still very competitive. So much for Nike's ATHLETE campaign that attempts (also problematically) to erase difference between male and female athletes. The athletes themselves are touting the difference--in a classic liberalism, Mary Wollstonecraft kind of way. Even though I found Melvin's comments irksome and essentialist I wasn't sure I was up for blogging about it--until I read rookie Armintie Price's take on promoting the WNBA, which, according the writer of the piece offsets all that competitive mentality and is a ...

This feature about LPGA golfer LaRee Sugg is very good at chronicling her experience on the tour while also highlighting the absence of black women in the game of golf. Oddly (or maybe not) little attention seems to be paid to the lack of black women playing on the LPGA. There are many women of color playing golf given the international composition of the tour. We see women of color playing and winning and contending in every tournament: Se Ri Pak, Lorena Ochoa, Birdie Kim, and many more. There is the appearance of diversity. And to some extent there is diversity on the tour--a certain kind of diversity. Why aren't there more African-American women on the tour? Because class also plays a factor. When we look at socioeconomic factors alongside race and gender we see the black women in the United States have fewer opportunities to even access the means necessary to play the game, let alone be encouraged to play it. (This was actually not the situation Sugg was in as a youngster. Her ...