First there was that unfortunate Sports Illustrated cover. Then, this Sunday, The New York Times featured a profile of 25-year-old Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn that essentially portrayed her as a helpless, albeit competitive, pawn caught between a series of domineering men--first her father, then her husband, frequently her beleaguered coaches.
The worst of it was when Lindsey's former coach, Erich Sailer, comments on her strained relationship with her father, Alan:
Alan is suffering with it. He was right in his heart. Lindsey definitely has some of her father's characteristics -- very aggressive -- but she is more of a diplomat because she has some of her mother's disposition. But as a racer, she is like her father. She would rather be dead than not succeed. Someday, after she goes through her racing career, she will have children. It will be like another life. And he'll come back into her life.
Okay, so maybe Lindsey's father and mother--divorced--really do have personalities that align with age-old gender stereotypes. Sometimes it happens (although it's always worth questioning when it comes up in such a polarized framing). But saying that this star athlete will reunite with her father once she regains her maternal instincts and leaves her sport behind, is beyond offensive (never mind, if Lindsey even wants children). It's all speculation and it's all sexist.
This latest wave of blech reminds me that the majority of mainstream media outlets still don't know how to deal with the confluence of women and competitive sports. And this ain't brand new folks; Title IX was passed in 1972. It's like otherwise excellent sports journalists' get mesmerized by the fact that their subject is, gasp, female, and end up focusing on her beauty, family drama, and/or male coaches. Enough already. I'm tired of gagging at every feel-good or poor-girl lady-athlete story.
Bill Pennington, who wrote the NYT profile, redeems himself a bit at the end by letting Lindsey herself have the last word:
So now I know that I've worked harder and prepared myself better than anyone. And I have put things in place. I have a race routine. I have a team of people helping me. I have winning habits. I believe in myself. I have balance in my life. In the end, it's a mental maturity to let your best come out.
Amen sister. Tell that to the journalists covering female athletes this winter Olympics, will ya?
Also read:
AP nominates two horses for "Female Athlete of the Year"
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Pregnant high school athlete faces discrimination
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Sports coverage is an old boy's club. Though we know that there are far fewer women in print journalism than men, the discrepancy in sports must be far higher.
And the women that do end up in sports reporting are often shuttled off to sideline reporter, whereby their only existence seem to be to grab the attention of men, since most of them are clearly valued more for physical beauty than the cogency of their insights.
I don't suppose you'd like to name a few of these women who are "clearly valued more for physical beauty than the cogency of their insights" because I struggle to name a female sports reporter who doesn't measure up. Jus sayin'.
I could be wrong, but I don't think he's saying that female sports reporters don't measure up, but that they aren't given the chance a lot of male sports reporters are. Just like in regular news, most of the anchors and/or commentators and the people who get the most screen time are men. When you're a reporter on the sidelines who gets a 30-sec spot, or has to run around trying to report at the chaos of the Saints' superbowl parade, you just aren't being given the same opportunities to showcase your abilities as a sports reporter that anchors and/or commentators are.
Also, out of the big three that people watch in the US - baseball, basketball and football - I'm struggling to think of any regular commentators who are women, though I have seen lots of competent, enthusiastic blond ladies reporting from the sidelines, especially for football. I know it's regional, and I watch New York sports, so maybe someone has an example of a female commentator that I don't know about.
He's talking about the sideline reporter phenomenon.
If you watch a football or a basketball game on TV, you'll notice that the main reporters up in the booth commenting on the game are almost always men, often older men.
The only woman reporter you will see is the "sideline reporter" - she gets to interview coaches and players, briefly, before the game, at half time and at the end of the game.
These women sideline reporters do not get as much airtime as the men in the booth (they get maybe 4 or 5 minutes while the men in the booth talk for the entire length of the game) and, unlike the men in the booth, they are not given the opportunity to analyze the game or offer their opinion on it.
Also, the sideline reporters tend to be young conventionally attractive women (and they rotate them a lot so they soon get replaced by even younger women) while the men in the booth often stay there for years, and are often older men who are not conventionally attractive.
On the New York Times feature - the quote from her former coach was pretty gross, but I don't think that reflects badly on the New York Times or the author, but rather on coach himself. As for the rest of the article, a lot of attention is payed to the controlling men in her life, but at the end of the day, who is kicking ass on the slopes? Lindsey Vonn. She even said she liked her husband's coaching! If it works for her, great. She didn't seem to be wallowing in her man-despair, but rather completely cool-headed and over it. They even mentioned that she sometimes used men's skiis, which are apparently faster and more dangerous. That's pretty awesome! The article didn't seem that sexist to me.
My only concern was whether Vonn was Ok with all that personal information in the NY Times, but as it was mostly from interviews she gave, I guess she was.
Compared to a lot of other female athletes, Lindsey Vonn has it pretty easy, and hasn't had to endure nearly as much sexism as other women in sports. Everywhere she goes, people wish her well, treat her like a champion, and want to see her succeed. For sexism in recent years, I'd look to the problems of the WNBA, the treatment of Anna Kournikova, or the so-called "female athlete triad," a weirdly unsatisfying description of a triumvirate of eating disorders sometimes affecting female athletes who get caught up in the low-BMI cycle while trying to maintain their weight in certain sports.
In reading the article on Lindsey Vonn in its entirety, it's clear Lindsey's father wasn't upset about her having a boyfriend or marrying someone, but rather for the fact that she chose someone 9 years her senior when she was 19 years old and had just starting the adult phase of her skiing career. As someone who for three years lived with a man 20 years my senior, I can understand their concern. Dating an older man or woman can be a wonderful way of opening up one's life, but it can also be difficult because the two people are in different phases of their lives and may have disparate goals. If you read further (which I'm kind of wondering if the author of the Feministing article did, despite the last paragraph) Lindsey's father says "I was concerned over the fact that a teenage girl was dating a man nine years older than she was, but as time goes on, you have to accept it. When one’s daughter chooses a husband, you need to accept him into the family, and we have.” Despite the remark from her coach, it's obvious her family supports her in everything she does. Her parents uprooted the entire family to move from Minnesota to Vail, CO in support of her career when she was 11 years old because they believed in the talent of their daughter, and that's never changed.
Having kids -- or gaining fame, or being injured, or experiencing any other number of great life changes -- often brings strained family members back together; it's these kinds of things that make people realize how short life really is. In Lindsey's case, she's already a world champion, and it's more likely that her father will warm up when she has some new major life change come into the picture, especially if it's one that reminds him of his own mortality.
I also don't get the sense from reading the whole NYT article that the article writer "essentially portrayed her as a helpless, albeit competitive, pawn caught between a series of domineering men--first her father, then her husband, frequently her beleaguered coaches", but rather that she has the respect and admiration of everyone who has ever met her, even fellow competitors. That the writer first met Lindsey at a skiing event when she was up-and-coming -- rather than at the top of her game -- speaks volumes about his dedication to writing about the sport, no matter the sex of the athlete. Over and over in the article, it's made clear that Lindsey makes her own decisions, and that she's smart, talented, tough, and simply one of the best athletes currently competing today. The only paragraph in the article indicating any different is totally tongue-in-cheek: it's where Thomas (the bf 9 years her senior who is now her husband) comments about being mildly embarrassed by her trying to do push-ups on a crowded airplane. Again, I don't believe it's sexist, but rather the kind of reaction most people have to such things: a mixture of great love and respect and the slightest bit of weariness when you realize you'll end up talking to everyone on the plane instead of getting some sleep because of who you're with.
As far as her husband's coaching of Lindsey's career is concerned, remember that they met when he was coaching her. As someone 9 years her senior, he's got a few miles on her ski experience-wise, and it's not uncommon for a person with more experience to help someone with less to succeed. That they're a husband and wife athlete/coaching team is also rare, and there seems to be good separation between their personal and professional lives. They've worked out their relationship over the years, and Lindsey doesn't pull any punches: "We learned you can hash out a lot in confined spaces. As husband and wife we know that sometimes we have to flip the switch and be a normal couple, not a coach and athlete. We don’t talk about racing as much as you might think." She goes on to say, "“He knows what I need to hear to focus me on how and why I got here. Sometimes it’s hard when you’ve dreamed of something your whole life and then it’s right there in front of you. You feel the weight of your whole life.”
All-in-all, Lindsey comes across as being an incredibly skilled athlete who is surrounded by supportive parents, admiring (and mostly male) coaches, and a husband who will do everything to help his wife succeed. Even the NYT article-writer comes across as someone wowed by his subject's dedication and life story, and the only remark betraying Lindsey is when he says at the end that she's "not naturally introspective," which the rest of the article (where she talks a lot about how she keeps going, her expectations of herself, and how far she's come) proves incorrect. Then again, he knows her personally, and I don't.
So I have to take a little bit of issue with the description of that particular sports-illustrated cover as "unfortunate".
Yeah, I could conceivably see it as sexualized... conceivably. But given that that's a legitimate position to be skiing in, wearing sport-appropriate attire, it feels like complaining about it as sexualized would be like complaining about an SI cover with a tennis player just about to start the service motion and then complain that it's suggestive because the hand holding the racket roughly approximates the position a dude would have his hand in if he were whacking off.
The only thing that strikes me as off about it is that she's smiling rather than wearing a look of grim determination, and that part doesn't look especially sexual to me.
I could of course have totally misunderstood you though. Perhaps you mean it's unfortunate that a professional athlete who happens to be a woman in a photo is perceived to be controversially sexual while wearing sport-appropriate attire and in a sport-appropriate position? ...because I totally agree with that sentiment.
I think the SI cover story is a complete overreaction. She is pictured in a skier's pose in her athletic gear. She herself said she loved the cover photo.
It goes without saying, but there is plenty of sexism out there that actually deserves coverage. This is much ado about nothing.
I think another part of focusing on the beauty of the athlete is that allows them then to be passively great for a great body, not what they can do with their body. It's another issue of the menfolk journalists disempowering women athletes with their words; they are not able to handle that the women are no longer passively cheering the men on, but actively beating them now.