After Atalanta

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...

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...

...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 ...