Tag: media

For women's sports to thrive, look beyond the World Cup

So far, the women’s 2015 World Cup has been a great success. Sure, it’s had its sore spots: the cringe-inducing spectacle of people playing soccer on artificial turf that literally melts their cleats and burns their feet; the lackluster performance of the United States team so far; the mostly empty stadiums for some Round of 16 games; but overall, it’s been a great time for soccer and women’s sports in general. The games have been fast, exciting, and as a whole, quite competitive. There have been viewing parties all over the country, from bars and living rooms to town squares and outside city halls. Even President Obama got into the act, showing support for the U.S. team.

One way that you can tell that women’s sports has hit the jackpot of popular support with this World Cup is by noting how quickly and vociferously opponents of equality in sport get shouted down in the media. Early this week, Sports Illustrated’s Andy Benoit provided an example when he tweeted his belief that women’s sports in general are not worth watching. As you might expect, Benoit was roundly condemned for his tweet. He was mocked by former Saturday Night Live actors Amy Poehler and Seth Myers (who themselves were good-naturedly mocked by Fox Sports 1’s Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole). His contention that women’s sports are not worth watching was debunked by innumerable columnists around the country, my favorite of which was Will Leitch in Sports on Earth who argued that anyone who thinks women’s sports are boring, are in fact, boring themselves:

People like Benoit toss out these justifications for not watching women’s sports out of some sort of faux sports purity, like he’s really just out to watch the pinnacle of athletic achievement every night, like anything less than the “best” and the “fastest” and the “strongest” is somehow a waste of one’s time. But this isn’t why we watch sports at all; we watch because every game we watch, we have a chance to see something we’ve never seen before. Dismissing that out of hand isn’t a way of demanding the highest quality performance every game (as if that’s something that could be done anyway); it’s a way of confirming your preexisting biases. It also devalues the actual athleticism on display, and the amount of work it required of everyone to get there.

Although the reaction against Benoit’s comment suggests that he was voicing a fringe, minority opinion, he was not. His attitude towards women’s sports is quite mainstream. Benoit simply made the mistake of speaking out against women’s sports during the World Cup, one of women’s sports two or three most popular events at a time when it’s never been more popular. If you think anything he said was new, you should watch this bitingly ironic video the Norwegian national team made before the World Cup began:

Negative attitudes like the ones the Norwegian team mocked in their video are all too common in the sports world and are relatively safe to voice during the 45 months out of every 48 when a World Cup or Olympics is not going on. This is bad for elite female athletes, it’s bad for people who love watching sports, it’s bad for girls who aspire to be athletes and their parents. I actually can’t think of anyone it is good for. It’s bad for everyone. Unfortunately, as popular as events like the World Cup and Olympics are, they can’t solve the problem because they only come around once every four years. To solve the gender inequalities in sports, a more consistent, permanent force is needed.

Tanya Wheeless, a former executive of the professional basketball teams, the Phoenix Mercury and Suns, wrote recently about the challenge of sustaining interest in women’s sports beyond the World Cup in Time magazine. She suggests that the critical variable in equalizing the opportunities and rewards provided by sports to women is investment:

What if the likes of Nike, Adidas, Coke, and Gatorade spent as much promoting female athletes as they did men? What if women’s leagues had the same marketing budget as men’s leagues? What if the National Women’s Soccer League got as much airtime in the U.S. as the English Premier League?

Naysayers will say all of that would happen if the interest were there. I say, increase promotion and the interest will follow. It’s the difference between having a market and creating one.

Wheeless could not be more right. The future of women’s sports must be bolstered by strong professional leagues. Professional leagues provide opportunities for athletes to get the training and experience they need to become world class. Without strong professional leagues, athletes are left making gut-wrenching decisions, like that of Noora Raty, perhaps the best women’s hockey goalie in the world, who retired at 24 for financial reasons, or Monica Quinteros, the 26 year-old Ecuadorian soccer player who left her job as a gym teacher to play in this year’s World Cup. You think they might have stuck with their sports if they could have made a living doing so? Yeah, so do I.

We don’t need to leave it to “Nike, Adidas, Coke, and Gatorade.” We can do something about this ourselves. We can contribute to equality and the success of women’s sports by becoming a fan of an existing women’s professional team. That’s exactly what I aim to do with the local professional women’s soccer team, the Boston Breakers. I’ve been to one game so far this year and it was a lot of fun. Held in a Harvard University complex convenient to most of the greater Boston area, Breakers games provide high-quality soccer in a thoroughly enjoyable atmosphere. I’m going again this Sunday when the Breakers take on the Western New York Flash at 5 p.m. Tickets are available and affordable. Join me!

There’s really no excuse to continue watching only male sports. There are successful women’s basketball and soccer leagues: the WNBA and NWSL, and later this year, a brand new professional women’s ice hockey league, the NWHL will begin. The WNBA is carried on television by the ESPN family of channels and you can buy streaming access to all the games for only $15. The NWSL goes a step further and puts all of its games on Youtube for free! If you’re reading this post now, you can watch those games. So join me, over the next year and more, in supporting women’s sports by putting our eyes and our wallets were our mouths are!

Why don't hockey teams announce injuries like football?

Dear Sports Fan,

Have you been watching the Stanley Cup Finals this year? I’m curious about the Tampa Bay Lightning goalie. He’s obviously injured but no one will say how. All they say is that he has a “lower body injury.” Why don’t hockey teams announce injuries like football?

Thanks,
Meredith

Dear Meredith,

I have seen some of the Stanley Cup Finals this year. They’ve been exciting! Among the most suspenseful parts of the series has been watching Ben Bishop try to play through whatever injury he has. During Game Two, he was forced out of the game twice. He made it through Game Three despite seemingly struggling to move side to side or get back up to his feet from the ground. He sat out Game Four completely and watched his backup, Andrei Vasilevskiy, play only moderately well in a loss. At the time of writing this post, his status for Game Five, tonight, is still unknown. Equally unknown is what, exactly, is wrong with him.

Information about injuries to hockey players is usually hard to come by. That’s never more true than during the playoffs. Since 2008, teams have not been required to give the media or the league any information about player injures although they are required not to release misleading information. Most of the time, teams do give out some information. The “lower body injury” language that you referred to in your question is a hockey classic. “Lower body” or “upper body”  is all we normally get. Sometimes, as is the case with Bishop, teams don’t even specify the hemisphere of the injury. The only thing the Tampa Bay Lightning have officially said about Bishop is that he has an “unspecified injury.”

Theoretically, the reason for this stonewalling is to protect the injured player. It’s commonly thought that if an opposing team knows that Player A’s left knee is hurt or her right arm, they will target that specific spot for extra abuse in the form of legal checks or illegally thrown elbows or slashing sticks. There could also be tactical considerations. Some injuries limit what a player can do on the ice — maybe a player with in injured wrist will have trouble lifting the puck on shots. If that news gets out there, the opposing goalie will know to concentrate on covering the bottom of the net.

Of course, with the availability and malleability of video these days, every play of every game can be dissected from any number of angles. If a player gets hurt in a game, it’s usually going to be obvious what limb or joint is the injured body part. Even when that is the case, most teams continue the upper body/lower body charade. I’ve seen obvious injures, like when a player blocks a shot with his left foot and then limps off the ice. What then, could be the point of classifying that injury as a “lower body injury” instead of a “left foot injury.”

In cases where the injury is obvious, the obfuscation can only be for one of three reasons:

  • As security theater. I don’t think players are dumb enough to believe that if their coach doesn’t tell the media the nature of an obvious injury, no one will know what it is, but it probably still makes them happier than hearing their coach talk about it.
  • It’s a way to create and maintain a team identity. Taking a stand against the media is a classic page in every coach’s book for creating a sense of team.
  • It’s easier. Instead of talking about the obvious injuries and going mute when a non-obvious injury happens, it’s just easier to say nothing about everything all the time.

The only reason we expect teams to go public with the nature of injuries is that the National Football League requires their teams to do so. Why? Is it for the enjoyment of fans? Not really. It’s all about gambling. Sports books cannot and will not set lines if they don’t know whether an important player will play in an upcoming game. Forcing teams to release injury information facilitates sports betting which always has been and continues to be one of the big drivers of attention to sports. Even though the NFL refuses to endorse gambling on their sport, their policy on injury information suggests otherwise. Betting on hockey is big business but it’s not nearly as big as football betting is, and perhaps the NHL doesn’t feel quite the same pressure to pander to the gambling industry.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Six Months Later the False Sochi Media Narratives Continue

I had the great luck of being able to attend the Winter Olympics games in Russia this past year. I blogged about it extensively which you can see here if you care to browse. In one of my final posts on the subject, after I had returned to the United States, I wrote about how I felt the media had done a disservice to the Olympics and to Russia by pushing the narrative of how messed up things were way too far. Here’s what I wrote:

I’m disappointed in how the Western media portrayed Sochi in the lead up to the games. Before I went, I was concerned and scared from what I had been reading. The hotels were unfinished, radioactive shitholes. There were suicide bombers on every block and even if the Russian Army were somehow able to deter or demolish them, the people living in the area would be overwhelmingly resentful because of having been forced to live under martial law for months before the Olympics even began. Oh, and any food in the area would have been in storage for at least three months because that was the last time any shipments of anything were allowed into the area.

With the possible exception of terrorism, this simply wasn’t true. None of it.

Six months after the Olympics, the disappointing narrative continues. Gizmodo.com reblogged a photo essay by Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy under the headline, “Just Six Months After the Olympics, Sochi Looks Like a Ghost Town.” This is misleading at best and intentionally, journalistically yellow at worst. Now, I will admit to not speaking Russian. So, when I look at Belenkiy’s photo essay, I have to rely on a combination of just the photos, my memories of the Olympics, and Google translate. Google translate does its best, but… well, lemme just quote the opening paragraph accompanying the photos:

Just six months ago, at the Olympic stadium cried chubby teddy bear. He did not fall, as his ancestor from the eighties, but also among us can not see it. Hiding in the woods?

Setting humor aside for a minute, here’s what angers me about this coverage. All those photos are of Krasnaya Polyana not Sochi. Krasnaya Polyana was where the alpine and cross country skiing events and the sliding events were held. The Russians ambitiously developed an almost completely brand ski resort town up in the mountains to host these events. Their hope was that, in time, this resort would become a national and international ski destination, pulling some of the business away from Europe’s alp resorts. Whether or not that comes to pass, I can’t say I’m surprised to see it virtually abandoned in August! Compare the mountains in Belenkiy’s photos with what the mountains looked like in February. Here’s one of my photos from the Olympic games:

Olympic Mountains
When the snows return, my guess is that the people will too.

Send some photographers to Jersey shore towns in January and see what they look like or even Colorado mountain towns in Summer. Meanwhile, back to Sochi. Sochi is a coastal city that, although it was the city name used as the host of the Olympics, didn’t actually have any events in it. None of these photos are of Sochi at all! Sochi is a bustling small city of over 300,000 people. I promise it’s not abandoned today!