feminist blogs

Bonnie Richardson was the only athlete from her high school to go to the state track competition — and she won the team title, alone.

Richardson’s title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0).

On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).

Pretty awesome.

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

The following is a new book review by Richard C. Crepeau, posted at PopPolitics magazine. Those who heard the voice of the late Jim Corder, professor of English at Texas Christian University, will hear it again in these five essays and one poem contained within “The Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture and [...]

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Please...no.

As a skilled instructor guided them, the WNBA's new class of rookies spent part of their orientation weekend learning how to perfect their arcs...It was not Lisa Leslie or another veteran teaching basketball fundamentals but a cosmetics artist brought in by the league last month to teach the rookies how to arc their eyebrows, apply strokes of blush across their cheekbones and put on no-smudge eyeliner to receive the right attention off the court.

As part of the rookies' orientation into life as professional athletes, the WNBA for the first time offered them hour-long courses on makeup and fashion tips.

These courses are part of the WNBA's new effort to market their players more effectively. And, of course, that means focusing on their looks. Marj Snyder of the Women's Sports Foundation, says, "The problem is if only 8 percent of the coverage is on women, and the vast majority of the time we're talking about who they're married to, what clothing they're wearing, what kind of parents they are, there's not much room left to say, 'What a great athlete.' " But instead of fighting back against this superficial focus, the WNBA is embracing it.

Renee Brown, the WNBA's vice president of player personnel, said the league aims to show its players as "mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces and entrepreneurs" and their "womanhood" is important to promote the league.

"You're a woman first," Brown said. "You just happen to play sports. They enjoy dressing up and trying on outfits, where back in the day, everyone just wore sweats.

"Call it what you want. We're just celebrating their womanhood."

So long as "womanhood" means adhering to traditional gender norms. When "womanhood" means being a kick-ass athlete, I guess it's not worth celebrating.

This is about a weightlifter and parent, not necessarily in that order.

The New York Times ran this in sports.

I loved her story, but I didn’t love the story, not the way they covered it. The whole thing starts with a very traditional-role narrative. First, the reporter sets it up:

Melanie Roach is a former gymnast who owns a gymnastics facility. Her husband is a state legislator. At 33, she is the mother of three young children, including 5-year-old Drew, who is autistic. And she can lift 238 pounds over her head.

Then, he (Greg Bishop) spends the first half of the piece talking about her role as the mother of an autistic child:

The problems she encountered in competition were nothing compared with the challenge she confronted with Drew after his autism was diagnosed in 2005. Roach said she was preoccupied with everything he would never be able to do — school dances, church missions, college classes. He did not have bad days; he had bad weeks, bad months, filled with relentless tantrums.

“It was literally in a week my life changed,” Roach said. “I went into depression. I went through a mourning process. Almost like I lost a child.”

She said she would kneel at his bedside every night, praying he would get better.

Not that I didn’t like that part of the story. In fact, it resonated with me quite a bit. I have young children with health problems — though not autism. So I felt a profound empathy with this fellow parent whose parenting challenges can be overwhelming, and I liked that part. But I saw it as positioned in the story in a way that it would not have been with a man.

The piece goes on:

“She learned that no matter how much money and time she put into it, she couldn’t change the outcome,” said her husband, Dan. “That has really helped with lifting. In the end, it’s the same concept.”

Without her experiences as a parent, the rest is a conventional sports narrative. She converted from gymnastics to weightlifting (so did US Olympic weightlifter Tara Nott, BTW; I think that’s a more common conversion than might immediately be apparent as both are dependent on explosive power, flexibility and balance and reward short people). She was an overnight sensation and set a record in 1998, but then injuries took their toll; she had several comeback attempts and a lot of pain and finally back surgery; now she’s the aging vet looking for one last shot at gold. She’s paid her dues and trained through a lot of pain to get here. That’s a conventional narrative, but it’s a good story. I’m totally with her on that. Go Melanie!

But the reporter’s interpretation of the interplay between Melanie Roach, Champion Weightlifter and Melanie Roach, Mother bothered me:

Thrush can tell immediately how well Roach is balancing the complexities of her life. He said he knew Roach was struggling with the pressure at the national championships in March, when she successfully lifted only two of six attempts. To qualify for Beijing, she must finish fourth or better in the 53-kilogram weight class at the Olympic trials in Atlanta on May 17.

“You’ll have an opportunity to be an average, everyday woman after August,” Thrush said he tells Roach when she seems distracted. “You need to be selfish now.”

Team Roach marches on through a life that Dan Roach described as “organized chaos.” Bonnie Kosoff, Melanie’s mother, moved in recently to take care of the children. Summers and Thrush travel to events.

“You know how they say it takes a village to raise a child?” Kosoff said. “Well, it takes a village to get someone to the Olympics, too.”
The changed outlook remains. Had Roach gone to the Olympics in 2000, she said, she would not have three kids or the business. Had there been no Drew, she may never have learned what Thrush tried to teach her all along — the concept of slow and small but steady and incremental progress.

But the biggest change that Drew inspired was in Roach, the athlete. She now enjoys the Olympic quest, 14 years after it started.

(Emphasis supplied.)

I don’t know Melanie Roach and I can’t speak for her. It’s possible that this reporting is completely true to her own interpretation of her experiences. Or it could be the reporter’s positioning. But I think that the reporter is highlighting things that would be true but taken for granted for male athletes.

If a man of 31, an international class athlete, were headed to the Olympic trials after a career of triumph, injuries and comebacks, with three kids and a spouse, it would also be true that it took a village to get him there. But I don’t think it would get much attention. I think everyone would just call it normal. But when a woman has kids, how she negotiates the demands of the rest of her life is The Big Question, the one that prompts several paragraphs in a major newspaper. It’s not just the way the role of mother is presumed to take over a woman’s life; it’s especially that this presumption goes unexamined.

And it wasn’t just the reporter. Her coach’s juxtaposition of “average everyday woman” (clearly a pejorative there) with high-level competition and positioning her ambition as “selfish” is exactly the problem. When men compete, they represent. The village isn’t just supporting them, they are bringing the triumph home for their family and friends, communities, nations, etc. But this guy is telling his lifter that she’s doing it all for herself. Way to motivate, coach!

I don’t have a good line to summarize this. I liked the athlete and I was bothered by the way it was framed.

p.s. there is a lot in the article that I didn’t raise. She’s Mormon, she had three home births, a few other things. It’s an interesting read for several reasons.

On Memorial Day weekend, I will watch the Indianapolis 500. Motorsports can be divided into a lot of types and series; Indy is the senior and signature race of the Indy Racing League series. Indy is an oval, the cars are open-wheel. I love open-wheel racing, but I much prefer road courses. I follow Formula One much more closely. More about that later. So Indy is not my favorite series or kind of racing, but I will watch anyway — because of Indy’s place in history, and because of Danica Patrick’s.

There have been pioneering women at the high levels of many forms of racing, but especially at Indy, I think because of its symbolic importance. First, there was Guthrie. She started out as an aerospace engineer who went racing full-time. She raced around the Sports Car Club of America for a while and turned to Nascar, where she was the first woman to race in their top series, then the Winston Cup. She drove the Daytona 500 and was Rookie of the Year, and she competed in 33 Winston Cup events, finishing as high as sixth. Starting in 1977 she raced in open-wheels at Indy, too. She qualified in 1977, ‘78 and ‘79. The first time, the car had problems and she did poorly. The last time, same thing. But in between, in 1978, she had a really good run, finishing in the top ten: ninth, after starting 15th. With a good car, she could drive with the best in the sport. (Guthrie has a well-regarded autobiography, “A Life at Full Throttle.”)

I have a soft spot for Lyn St. James because, while I was too young to remember Guthrie, I watched St. James’ debut with rapt attention. She was already a road-racing veteran when I first saw her, and in her career she drove twice at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won the 24 Hours of Daytona twice, and won the 12 Hours of Sebring once. I saw her qualify at the back of the pack in 1992 for Indy. The cars were powerful and twitchy and the track was slick that year; the polesitter crashed on the formation lap! Lyn St. James finished a heroic eleventh, keeping the car on the track when thirteen cars crashed and most of the field did not finish, and was Rookie of the Year — the only rookie to even finish a nerve-shattering 500 miles. Lyn made seven trips to the Brickyard (As Indy is called for the three-foot strip of bricks at the start-finish line), but never again had a really competetive car and never managed a top-ten finish. With a lifetime of top-flight racing, she has not retired to catch up on her reading. Instead, she now runs the nonprofit Winner’s Circle Foundation.

Sarah Fisher started at Indy at just nineteen years of age. When she and St. James started together, it was the first Indy with two women racing. The traditional “Gentlemen, Start your Engines!” has been “Lady and Gentlemen …,” at least since St. James (I don’t recall if they acknowledged Guthrie) but that year, for the first time and not the last, it was “Ladies and Gentlemen …” Sarah Fisher has her own team now, but she’s never had a very good ride. In a half-dozen trips, she has crashed several times and never finished better than 18th. However, elsewhere in the series she managed a pole position, the first woman to start an Indy race from the pole.

Everyone who followed racing and some who don’t saw Patrick coming. She moved to Europe at 16, alone, to race in the brutally competetive Formula Ford series there. She was second at the English Formula Ford festival, the best ever finish by an American. Motorsports journalists started reporting on her after that, seeing her move through the Formula Atlantics towards the big show.

Qualifying for the 2005 Indy, her car’s rear slid in the first turn. It was a disastrous moment; most drivers would have been in the wall, and she shocked everyone by keeping it on the track and then, icewater in her veins, staying fast despite the scare to start fourth, the best starting position by a woman. She led nineteen laps (first woman to lead at Indy), overcoming two key mistakes to finish fouth, the highest by a woman, and to be named Rookie of the Year. (Two out of five women to face the Indianapolis 500 have been Rookie of the Year. That’s 40%. Just sayin’.)

She took three poles her rookie season, but did not win a race. Everyone knew she could, everyone waited to see when she would.

In 2006 at Indy, with a less competetive car and still a bit shaken by the death of teammate Paul Dana, she started and finished Eighth — two top ten finishes in two tries.

In 2007, she was in the hunt and ran as high as second, but finished eight when Scotsman of Italian descent (and Ashley Judd’s husband) Dario Franchitti won the rain-shortened race. Three top ten finishes in three consecutive years. In the season as a whole, she had three podium finishes.

As Jill reported, in late April, 2008, she won the Japan 300 at Motegi. She is the first woman to win an Indy race. That should put her head in the right place as she heads into this year’s Indianapolis 500.

There have certainly been women racers of distinction in other series. In drag racing, both dragsters and pro stock bikes have women legends in their history (Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey, respectively). (Bonnie Bedelia, one of the better actors of her generation I think, played Muldowney in a now-dated but very watchable movie, Heart Like a Wheel.)

Michele Mouton very nearly won the World Rally Championship in an Audi Quattro that lacked the reliability to match her skills, and did win both one of the series events and a prestigious non-series event, the Pike’s Peak hill-climb. When the governing body decided that the “killer B” Group B rally cars were too fast and powerful, Mouton retired rather than race in less powerful Group A cars. Ha!

However, there is a lot of room for improvement at the top. NASCAR has not had much in the way of women; Formula One has had only five women drive and only one had what anyone would call a career (Lella Lombardi finished as high as Sixth, the other four women had just a handful of races each and never earned a championship point).

There are some women coming up in sports car racing; Liz Halliday does well in American Le Mans, and I think Milka Duno (the third woman, with Patrick and Fisher, in the 2007 Indy) may be less out of her depth in sports cars than she is in Indy cars. Simone De Silvestro got a win in Atlantics in April, and with Katherine Legge is the only woman to win in Atlantics. Legge also tested an F1 car, though she races the German Touring Car series for Audi now. But the groundswell of women at the lower levels of racing is not yet fairly reflected at the upper levels. There should be women in F1 cars, WRC cars, sports cars at ALMS and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in NASCAR’s top series every year, not just a few times a decade. I hope we’re getting there.

When my daughter is old enough to watch it with me, I hope that as the starter says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines,” eight, ten, twelve women fire the engines and pull out on the formation lap, each hoping to have her name inscribed on the Borg-Warner Trophy, and little girls in karts around the country can root for any woman, not just the woman.

I don’t pretend to have exhautive knowledge of the women in the pipeline for the top series; if anybody knows of women we should keep an eye on, leave them in comments.

This is always a difficult time of year for me. I am never sure which leaves me with a greater numbness of the brain — the NFL draft or grading final exams. This is a question that will have to be resolved by greater minds than mine, particularly in my current mental state. The NFL draft is [...]

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I love me some good news to start the week off with!

Danica Patrick became the first female winner in IndyCar history Sunday, taking the Indy Japan 300 after the top contenders were forced to pit for fuel in the final laps.

Patrick finished 5.8594 seconds ahead of pole-sitter Helio Castroneves on the 1.5-mile Twin Ring Motegi oval after leader Scott Dixon pitted with five laps left and Dan Wheldon and Tony Kanaan came in a lap later.

Patrick said of the win, "It's a long time coming. Finally... knew there was a good reason for coming to Japan...I want to thank my team, the fans and everyone who supported me."

UPDATE: Reader Krista mentions that Patrick also won in spite of a new rule aimed at the women in Indy car, which says that that lighter drivers have to carry ten more pounds on them. (Of course, the three lightest drivers in car racing are all women.) Patrick responded to this rule last month: "There's no weight limit in football...There's no height limit in basketball...And what about the strength aspect? What are they doing to fix that? As a smaller driver, I have to work harder in that area."

She’s the first female race car driver to win a major auto race.

Congrats to her. This is a big victory.

Thanks to Jim for the link.

When dealing with the NCAA, you can be certain that there will never be a shortage of hypocrisy. As March Madness gives way to April Sadness, two wonderful examples came flying out of the NCAA cupboard. The NCAA has, over the years, condemned the practice of scalping tickets at their events. Now the folks at the [...]

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Boxer Laila Ali and BMX racer Kim Hayashi at the Women's Sports Foundation 2007 Annual Salute to Women in Sports.

I love good news. A report by the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport shows that girls are involved in sports in record numbers.

The report outlines research pertaining to the benefits of girls' involvement in sports and physical activity, as well as the barriers that they encounter.

Nicole LaVoi, one of the report's authors, says “The research within the report confirms that many good things are happening when it comes to girls and physical activity. Girls are participating in organized sports more than ever and at all levels -- from organized youth sports, to interscholastic sports and up through Olympic competition."

For more information on women and girls in sports, check out the Women's Sports Foundation.