Oh the Irony!: Nike's Gold Diggers

 
Can Nike come up with an Olympic motto worse than "Greatness has been found?" YES!

Of course, this shirt is only sold in women's sizes. Nike explains itself:

“Nike has consistently supported female athletes and the position they enjoy as positive role models. The t-shirt uses a phrase in an ironic way that is relevant given it was released just as the world focused on the success of female athletes.”

Tell me how this is ironic again? Seriously. Oh wait! The joke is on the people who buy it. Nike is lining its coffers at the expense of the women it purports to support. Ha ha! OMG that's so funny. I get it!  Ironic gold digging indeed.

The Gender of Second

Mariya Savinova and Caster Semenya

When Caster Semenya raced from last to second in the final stretch of the women's 800 meters, some wondered is she aimed for silver. She has a turbo drive of a kick - if she'd engaged it sooner she might have taken gold. Maybe.

Second guessing someone who comes in second is a strange thing. This isn't to say that the thought didn't occur to me. It was being fed to us all by BBC commentators who wondered how someone with that much "in the tank" could wait so long to use it.

Semenya looks different from her competitors. When she switches from running really fast to her full sprint, it's hard to miss her singularity. Her strength and her power make her simply magnificent to watch.

Like Semenya, Mo Farah spent much of his last race (10,000m) at the back of the pack. As they fought their way forward, he and his training partner (Galen Rupp) had to work hard to avoid being boxed in. The back of the pack is safe in that regard but dangerous in others. You have to know your kick and everyone else's.

Maybe Semenya was working the same strategy and kicked too late. The 800 is a war of strategy and speed. There isn't time to hide.

The Olympic final was a very fast race. Mariya Savinova won in 1:56.19. The Russian looked amazing from start to finish. She won with nearly a second to spare. She very nearly wept on the podium when they played her country's anthem. She ran 1:55.87 at the 2011 World Championships.

The year Semenya became the object of global scrutiny, the year she was sandbagged into what can best be described as a medical rape, she ran 1:55.45. It was the fastest 800 run by any woman in 2009 and the fifth fastest ever. Just over a half a second faster than Savinova's 2011 race. She moved up early, stayed with the leaders and then kicked coming out of the last turn, as one does.

She won that 2009 race by a huge margin. She stood out. She looked like no one else. It looked easy.

When Usain Bolt runs, it looks like he is from a different planet. Some place in the Jamaican Galaxy. His stride is noticeably longer than that of his competitors. He's freakishly tall for a runner. He's different. A man apart. His exceptionalism makes him into a god. It is not in conflict with his masculinity. In fact, his is a standard. All men who sprint are measured against him. In fact, all people who sprint measure themselves against him. He is the fastest person.

One of my nieces has had a poster of Bolt taped to the wall over her bed since the 2008 Olympics. She's a runner.

When Joan Benoit won the first marathon that women were allowed to run at the Olympics, she broke away from the pack early. She was on her own. She clocked in at 2:24:52. Until 1952, the men's world record was slower than that. If she'd run that time in the 1984 men's Olympic marathon she'd have placed 52nd - about two-thirds of the way back into the pack. But of course, if she'd been running with people faster than her, she'd probably have run faster.

Unlike celebrated world marathons, men and women are forced to run completely separate races at the Olympics. They run in "women-only" and "men-only" races.

Not so long ago, the IAAF created a new rule. No times run by women in races that include men count as a women's record unless women are given such a huge head start that no man could possibly race with them. This new rule would invalidate the world marathon record set by Paula Radcliff. Graciously, the IAAF has let it stand as a record for women running "mixed" marathons.

In "mixed" marathons, officials now see men as illegal pace-setters. In this view, male "pace-setters" (meaning here, simply other runners who are faster than the fastest woman) give women an unnatural advantage. A woman who runs faster when she runs alongside the fastest runners in the world has betrayed her sex.

Women must not run raster than women can run.

Women can't run faster then men.

A woman who breaks from the pack isn't doping. She's a man.

Or she is running with men.

One man can run with longer legs than everyone else. Another can run with prosthetics. But a woman can't run in her own body. 

***

The new IOC gender testing policy mirrors this ideology - defining women by what they must not have or be - by marking testosterone levels as the border it defends against women's exceptional capacities.

Women, now, will be tested for their testosterone levels. Too much (and what that level might be hasn't actually been clearly identified) and she can't compete.

A woman's capacity must be limited. It must be fixed by removing whatever excess officials have latched onto. Men in the race. Maleness in her body. She must be produced as castrated.

In an article for the June 2012 issue of American Journal of Bioethics, scholars condemn the new policy on multiple grounds.

The current scientific evidence...does not support the notion that endogenous testosterone levels confer athletic advantage in any straightforward or predictable way. Even if naturally occurring testosterone levels confer athletic advantage, is that advantage unfair? It bears noting that athletes never begin on a fair playing field; if they were not exceptional in one regard or another, they would not have made it to a prestigious international athletic stage. Athletic excellence is the product of a complex entanglement of biological factors and material resources that have the potential to influence athletic advantage. However, the IAAF and IOC target testosterone as the most important factor in contributing to athletic advantage. The policies seek to do the impossible: isolate androgen from other possible biological factors and material resources to determine that the impact that it alone, in the form of testosterone, has on athletic advantage. ("Out of Bounds: A Critique of the New Policies on Hyperandrogenism in Elite Female Athletes")

They conclude:

Considerations of fairness support an approach that allows all legally recognized females to compete with other females, regardless of their hormonal levels, provided their bodies naturally produce the hormones.

And then proceed to embrace the contradictions that such a policy will bring on. (Different countries define women differently.)

***

When I was a child "women's lib" and the Equal Rights Amendment were much in the news. Shirley Chisolm was running for president. My parents hosted National Organization of Women meetings in our living room. I pinned an "ERA NOW!" button to whatever I wore to school.

This meant that I got into a lot of arguments with my classmates. Almost always with boys who wanted me to admit the men are faster/smarter/stronger than women. That ERA button was a red flag I waved before little bulls.

I was reminded of this schoolyard training for the junior feminist at a public forum on gender testing in sports. A local radio station invited me to join a panel to talk about the case of Caster Semenya and the recent changes in the IOC's gender testing policy.

All three of the panelists came from feminist and anti-homophobic perspectives - in principal and in practice all three of us are opposed to gender policing. But there was a moment when I felt baited by the one man on the panel, when he tried to engage me in an argument about how men are faster/stronger than women - how the fastest man is stronger than the fastest woman and therefore men and women's sports must be absolutely distinct from each other.

Now, he said this after I'd already indicated that I opposed gender policing and gender segregation in sports. If he was goading me I'd certainly offered myself to be goaded.

But when he put that bit of gendered common sense into play ("the fastest man...") I called him out for baiting me. I couldn't respond to the issue lightly.

This post is not about what gender is faster.

This post is about what gender is given to us, over and over again, as second. It is about all the work we do to make sure that women and men can be told apart from each other, to perpetuate the fiction that male and female are "opposites."

I am protesting a system that produces "female" as a debility.

That is what a policy forcing exceptional women to take a hormone suppressant is: The production of the fiction that women are quantitatively and qualitatively less than men.

***

A policy that negates the accomplishments of a woman runner because she ran alongside a man is ludicrous and offensive. It is ludicrous because every runner except the one in front is being paced.

It is offensive to deny women the opportunity to be paced by the fastest runners in the world. It is, plain and simple, discrimination. That kind of rule should be against the law.

Men and women should run the marathon together. They just should. Why not have men and women compete with and against each other, as they do in the best events in the world? Why not embrace the fact that it will make the women run faster?

***

Every elite runner runs against the history of running. It's the difference between a race and a game. A race and a routine.

In their minds, women around the world will run with Usain Bolt and Mo Farah. This takes nothing away from Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Tirunish Dibaba. Surely they run with them too. Surely, as members of an imagined community of athletes, we run with each other.

Caster Semenya reminds me of Usain Bolt.

I want Caster Semenya to lope like him across the finish so far ahead of the pack she makes everyone else look like they are standing still. I want her to avenge the idea that what a woman can do should be limited by some notion of what a man is.

But last night Semenya wasn't our avenging angel. Last night she was Mariya Savinova. She's a ropey figure. More like Farah than Bolt.

As they played her country's anthem Savinova fought back tears of joy. And Caster Semenya looked just as she did when she crossed the finish line. After nearly a year out of the sport and in the headlines, she seemed relaxed - happy to be on the track and pleased as punch with being second.

Greatness Has Been Found: A Close Reading

Doing it themselves. USWNT fans at the 2011 World Cup semi-final.

At the end of yesterday's match, most of the USWNT pulled Nike t-shirts over their uniforms. The kit sponsor must move its merchandise. As long as the swoosh is on the team jersey it doesn't much matter than they throw another Nike product on at the designated moment. Except that this shirt is just so awful. Let me count the ways.

Greatness had been found.

The suggestion is that in the win, the US 'found' a greatness that was absent from not only the team, but from the tournament. This is embarrassing. I love swagger, I really do. But this isn't swagger.

Greatness has been found. In small letters, under the emblem, "United We Stand."

The USWNT has been ranked either number 1 or 2 in the women's game for eons. Even if they don't make the road to victory easy on themselves, they are, in fact, not the underdog. They are the team that everyone wants to beat. Their opponents bring full-on heavy metal GAME. Everyone loves to take them down.

To suggest that this team has had anything but a very long history of "greatness," that this "greatness" (what a shitty word) is anything but their freaking baseline is just ridiculous. Not one fan buys that narrative.

The closest this team came to being an underdog of any kind was last summer and frankly it was only those of us who actually follow the team who were even aware of this. In fact, most of the mainstream US sports media ignored the team during its struggles. Most of us fans could not watch any form of broadcast of the play-off matches with Italy which would determine IF they were going to the World Cup at all.

Greatness has been lost? If only the channel was found upon which we could watch it!

You'll never walk alone? You will in the world of American women's football if you are anything less than freaking invincible.

The Americans feel like they have to win every tournament just to stay in the headlines. Last year was scary. Placing second in the World Cup in the same year that the home league was floundering must have been absolutely harrowing for everyone on the team. This hit home for me as players talked about how hard that loss was. That wasn't just about being bested by Japan. That was about what not being the best might mean.

So it's a bullshit slogan because it implies that people have stood by the sport in its darkest hours and now they have been rewarded by the team suddenly happening upon their own greatness. The US women's soccer program is, instead, a fascinating story of a super-dominant team that has to fight for every single scrap of media real estate. They been doing this for, uhm, twenty years.

Greatness has been found.

The best you can say is that the team was flirting with slight underdog status for a few months last year. There was a chance they might not make it to the finals. A chance. That, my dears, is not an underdog team.  Imagine representing Manchester United or Real Madrid or Spain this way. For, really, that's the level of "greatness" we are talking about, isn't it?

Now, this slogan has a context. Nike has been working this "greatness" theme in an Olympic campaign celebrating the greatness in the ordinary athlete. But the unveiling of this shirt at the moment the US defeated the World Cup champs reveals the grotesque ideology at work in the multi-national apparel corporation's advertising. These ads are deeply manipulative - they show little kids inhabiting the space of big-time sports competition. Adult voices narrate their story as that of the underdog. It's a recitation of all the times girls and boys are told, "no, you can't just do it." And they do it anyway.

If you want a glimpse of how much media manipulation goes into such things, just look at the media's love affair with Lolo Jones and its complete disinterest in the three women who actually won the 100m hurdles. I admire Jones - but USA athletes Dawn Harper and Kellie Wells were favored over Jones and took silver and bronze. New Zealand's Sally Pearson took gold and set an Olympic record. The three of them ran a close race. Photo finish. But at the race's end, the media flocked around Jones.

Meanwhile, Mexican American Leo Manzano stormed through the pack to take a silver medal in the 1500. That's a huge story for all sorts of reasons, too. But it hasn't gotten the same coverage that as Jones's tears.

Greatness has been found.

The media liked the idea of a very beautiful woman who disavows her power. I've always read the media fascination with Jones's virginity as a preference for the self-castrating woman. The pretty, non-threatening underdog. Meaning, if you are woman athlete, please pretend that you don't know the full measure of your power. Please, just be great. But not too great. Not too obvious. Tuck that greatness into the closet. Let someone find it for you. Oh, and please be pretty.

Oh, what a story it would make for that woman to win! This is the media's work not Jones's - she is right to complain that the excoriating she's received is unfair, and it actually makes the whole situation worse.

She lost. Sports media (or, I should just say NBC) was left the fact that it picked an underdog who didn't even medal. AWKWARD. Because then the media was left with the looming question as to why it continued to ignore the two American athletes who did. Even a next-day interview turned focus back to Jones as the interviewer (Michelle Beadle) baited Harper and Wells to trash talk. This they did somewhat gleefully.

Neither Wells nor Harper are self-effacing. They are not prone to apologize for being great. But neither is Usain Bolt. Bolt can boast about being a living legend. He is one. That shirt would make no sense on him. And it makes no sense as a USWNT shirt.

Bolt is with Puma, as it happens. Puma likes Bolt. Puma also understands how to use real-life grammar.

Greatness has been found.

This is not the language of swagger. It is the language of a militarized bureaucracy.

Where was this greatness? Under the couch? In the back of the closet? Did someone leave it on the bus? Someone actually wrote a slogan in passive voice - and then vaporized whatever trace of the subject might have been implied from both the noun and the verb.

How was this greatness found? Did it just roll out from under a seat and then it was noticed, generally - by no one in particular?

Greatness has been found.

American mythology flips its obsession with winners into the delusion that everyone can be a winner.  A winner and an underdog. Everyone always already has won. If this sentence doesn't express the affective miasma of entitlement I don't know what does.

Greatness has been found.

You know, one might want a shirt that said something like "2012 Olympic Champions." OH, wait. Adidas is the official apparel company for the Olympics. Nike can't make a reference to the event on the shirt. (How about "The USWNT went to London in 2012 and won this t-shirt"?)

Finally: The shirt is boring. There is nothing visually interesting about it at all. Not one design element resonates with the game. It could be about anything. Or nothing.

Far, far better are is the "greatness" found by a bunch of teenage girls armed with a pair of scissors and some face paint. They express a guileless enthusiasm for the game that just can't be bottled, and you know it's the only kind of shirt that does real justice to the players.

Happy Together

On July 20th, someone tweeting as Pia Sundhage - and I do think it might actually be Sundhage - wrote the following:

Happy Players have a tendency to make good decisions on the field - together.

Something shifted about 18 months ago. The USWNT looked very shaky. They barely qualified for the World Cup - they lost a game to Mexico (a historic defeat), they had to qualify for the final tournament in a play-off with Italy. In the first round they didn't score a single goal until Alex Morgan struck deep into a complicated injury time extended by the Italian coach's bizarre decision to sub a player (which added at least 30 seconds to match). It should never have come to that.

They squeezed out wins against much less developed teams. Those matches weren't fun to watch. They were stressful, the team appeared stiff and play was stingy. But then last year they played a thriller of a game against Brazil at the World Cup. Then they fought against the run of play and snatched a win from France. Both of those matches were engaging. Even though the team was fighting - they looked so into it. Last summer something broke open. They seemed happy on the field. Joyful.

This past march I spoke with some women in Brazil about soccer. We talked about why it is so hard to get women's soccer off the ground - whether you are organizing a recreational or a professional league.

Instead of talking about sponsorships etc., we started talking about pleasure. About how hard it is for a lot of women to advocate for their own joy. How crazy you can seem when your only reason for doing something is the pleasure it gives you. How often our pleasure is minimized and diminished by others. How we do that to ourselves. Someone hypothesized that the spectacle of women expressing this kind of joy was itself so unsettling in Brazilian culture that this was perhaps one of the game's biggest obstacles. (Which raises the question as to why that joy is so celebrated in other aspects of Brazilian life, but not this one.) I was surprised by that conversation's rapid turn to a certain raw honesty about the thing inside the game. Deep game. Joy, happiness. Happy players play better football.

To extend Sundhage's axiom: A great football team advocates for the happiness of its players. For a profound and communitarian happiness cultivated in the pursuit of a great game. Thus that word "together." One happy player isn't enough. An individual happiness only works in relation to other happinesses.

It's the thing that a lot of people miss from the men's side. And even when we see glimpses of it, our pleasure as spectators has been so ruthlessly exploited I think a lot of us feel alienated even when we, say, watch Spain cruise to another elegant victory. Maybe those men are happy - but that happiness comes at a high price. Maybe we enjoy watching them play - but what is our happiness supporting if not the business of it all. It's long been true for me that the joy I might experience watching the men's game has been compromised. It's the sugar in a Coca-Cola. Tastes good, but toxic.

There were so many matches in this tournament to remind us of the romance that draws fans to the stands. Team GB's win over Brazil was joyful. Brazil has looked distinctly unhappy for a long while now - they've taken on a tragic air. Their game is so obviously rooted in pleasure - without it things just fell apart. Canada's performances across the whole tournament - they have a right to be upset, devestated - this team dialed into each other's game in a way that made them play. Sinclair plays with the dark, slow-burn joy of a great athlete - I want a velvet painting of her post-goal scoring face. At times France seemed more dutiful than joyful in their play. Like they knew what they were supposed to do but couldn't quite feel it.

Japan's had this pleasure vibe for a long while - they are famously not so showy but the affection they feel for each other and for the game itself is evident in every detail. From the moment they walk on the pitch to the moment they take the medal. They might in fact be setting a standard on this front for the world game.

All this was happening in the region that invented the ban against women playing the game - a region that cultivated such a deep hostility to the idea of women playing that it isn't at all unusual to find women who've been mocked - even beaten - for playing when they were girls. Season ticket holders for Arsenal or Tottenham, who were told by school teachers that girls weren't "allowed" to play football - because it was true. The joyful spectacle of an exciting women's game in that context does real, very meaningful political work.

Four years ago I wrote a melancholy, sour post about the final match between Brazil and the US. I'd grown tired of the exchange of trophies between USA and Germany. I'd fallen in love with Brazil's technical skill and attacking game. But then the US shut them down by parking a bus in front of the goal. And Brazil did the same, but not quite as well. Carli Lloyd cracked their defense and scored a goal in the opening minutes of extra time and that was that. 1-0. It wasn't particularly fun to watch. At least not for me. But in the tournament you could see shadows of another world out there - of girls and women growing up with the ball at their feet, playing pick-up soccer just for the hell of it. Of girls who can seriously freestyle. Four years ago there were glimpses of this joy in sides like Brazil, Nigeria and Japan. And more at the 2011 World Cup. France, Equatorial Guinea. Mexico.

This has made the whole game better. So much better. Who would have thought that we'd have tournament finals played to win? Exchanges of leads? Breathtaking attacks and defending by the seat of your pants - or, in Solo's case, by the very tips of your gloves.

It seems like the culture of football cycles from the generous spectacles (full of goals and real drama - bad calls, unlucky breaks) to the miserly (a constipated game producing one lone goal forced out over 90 minutes of a well-executed plan). I'm loving the upswing in this wheel of spectatorial fortune.

I fell in love with Brazil in 2007 (sacrilege to admit!) because (I now see) I fell in love with the game they played. Full of swagger and bravado. Excess. Drama (which could be in fact quite cynical, but they seem to enjoy their own theatrics). When Brazil plays well it's with improvisational genius. For me - in my limited experience - they were the first international women's side to bring that to the broadcast game. More teams are showing the capacity for that kind of game. More teams are putting their signature on it. Entertaining women's football is not an exception, and it is not a surprise. It is, at least right now, the rule.

With that, I offer my deepest thanks to the teams who played for us in London. From South Africa, making it's first appearance in the tournament to the USWNT taking its fourth gold medal.

All In, All Out: a note on the amazing Megan Rapinoe

In two interviews, four years apart, two different USWNT players casually identified themselves as gay to reporters. Neither did so with the solemn declaration, "I'm a lesbian." Both players answered a reporter's question in a way that snuffed out the presumption of heterosexuality maintained by mass sports media on those rare occasions when it addresses women athletes, a presumption it maintains in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

In 2008, Natasha Kai (remember her?) responded to an NBC interviewer's question about her rocky start on the national team squad:

"It was a hard time," remembered Kai, who saw limited action under former coach Greg Ryan as one of the last three players added to the 2007 World Cup roster. "I had missed the first camp [under Sundhage] in early-January because I had bronchitis, and I was going through a nasty break-up with my girlfriend. Then [Coach Sundhage] told me my job was on the line."

The fact that she's gay was not only subordinate to a story about her fitness; it was subordinate to the story of relationship trouble. The "problem" was not that she had a girlfriend, it was that she and her girlfriend broke up. It was gay drama, but it wasn't drama because it was gay. It isn't at all clear from that interview that Kai was coming out to anyone but the reporter, or to the reader who assumed she was straight. Her answer is structured by the assumption that this is just her life, and anyone who knows her would know this.  Which is a coming out - and it's the kind of coming out that has to be staged over and over again within a discursive context that prefers not to notice that there are a lot of gay people in the sports world. Scarcely any of the media discourse asking "when will it be OK for a soccer player to come out" qualifies the question by pointing out that in fact prominent women athletes have come out, and are a part of our sport. And that this hasn't magically banished homophobia from it.*

Megan Rapinoe's coming out was even less direct than Kai's. In May, Jimmy Conrad (former US national team player) interviewed Rapinoe for KickTV. At the end of their conversation (at about 5:20), he observed that she's been supportive of the gay and lesbian community. By even pointing this out, Conrad identified himself with that community as at least an ally. When does Bob Costas take notice of something like that?

 

KickTV isn't like mainstream sports media. The Youtube channel is closer to a fan forum. Conrad is very relaxed and familiar with his interview subjects, and his interviews are conducted with a sense of humor. The whole affect of the video is closer to what soccer culture actually feels like (alternately technical, serious, self-deprecating, goofy, bashful). It is much more familiar to me than is anything I've seen from NBC this summer.

Conrad's question seemed pulled from conversations about the men's game. Things are pretty stark in that world. It is indeed hard to imagine a current EPL player coming out to the media. The question seemed like it was pointing in the direction of the men's game, but this wasn't at all clear.

In the women's game, things aren't so black and white. There are, in fact, quite a few high profile figures in women's soccer who have spoken publicly as lesbian athletes, usually without making the fact that they are doing so into a headline. Pia Sundhage, Nadine Angerer, Hope Powell - in most of these cases, the fact that these women have placed themselves within the lesbian and gay community isn't news, except to LGBT media. (Outsports.com keeps a constant eye out for players who take this step, as does After Ellen.) Mainstream sports media avoids acknowledging the sexuality of out lesbian players, even as it apparently can't stop itself from addressing the romantic lives of straight players. (Thank god for Hope Solo, who forces heterosexist media to wrangle with a loud-mouthed shameless man-eater. HA.)

In any case, when it comes to naming a player as not only lesbian, but "out," in the women's game we are often discerning between shades of gray. In an interview for a program called Abbey Road, for example, Marta was asked about the impact of her international travel on her relationship with her girlfriend (also a soccer player). She said that of her two loves, soccer comes first. Is that a coming out? Can a player be out in Sweden but not in the US? Seems so. So why, in the US, does the air get sucked out of the room when the word lesbian is put in the same sentence as "Marta"? Perhaps while she was under contract with the WPS, the desire was that everyone practice a "don't ask, don't tell" policy? What was the fear,exactly? That lesbians might suddenly start attending soccer matches?

In Strong Women, Deep Closets (1998), Pat Griffin offers a table of escalating categories of "outness" to describe how people manage their identity in sports.

1. Completely Closeted             Concealing lesbian identity from all in athletic context
2. Passing as heterosexual         Intentionally leading selected others in athletic context to see self as heterosexual
3. Covering lesbian identity      Concealing lesbian identity from selected others in athletic context
4. Implicitly out                        Allowing selected others in ahtletic conext to see self as lesbian without naming self
5. Explicitly out                        Intentionally revealing lesbian identity to selected others in athletic context
6. Publicly out                           Revelaing lesbian identity to everyone in athletic context.

It's a helpful scale for at least presenting something other than the "closeted" or "out" binary that usually shapes this conversation. A lot of public figures in sports seem to fall somewhere between 4/implicit and 6/public, but of course these would be the athletes that we are mostly likely to notice. 

Even within the top of that range there seems to be room for nuance and gradations, given the complexity of the media sphere. Today, it isn't like you are coming out to one of three networks. Instead, you talk about your girlfriend within a very specific media context that cares and respects you for the player you are. It's not the same interview you'd give to ESPN - it is unlikely that ESPN would solicit that kind of interview from you. They aren't going to ask you what it's like to have a girlfriend who also plays your sport at the international level. Or if coming out shifted your play at all. Or if there are lesbian athletes who inspired you. (espnW might, someday.) The remarks you do make on these subjects within the micro-media of (e.g.) women's sports blogs may or may not be picked up by larger media networks. Given the paucity of attention given to the women's game in general it isn't likely to be as big a story as, say, a ponytail pull. 

Anyway, Pia Sundhage has said that for her being a lesbian "is no problem," and that she and her partner were welcomed when they came to the US. (See Patricia Nell Warren's recent article on Sundhage.)

But it is a problem for plenty of people. As readers of this blog will know, there's a broad and deep culture of homophobia in and around women's sports. And if players are pressured to be very, very discrete about their homosexuality, you can assume that this pushes a lot of women out of the sport entirely. Gender policing and homophobia push a lot of people out of sports. No news there.

Athletes decide to be discrete about their sexuality for lots of reasons - and I'm not in any place to speak to their experiences. Coming out to the media is a political act and what that means to the person who does it is something only they can tell us. But the ramifications of coming out seem to be more complicated than we want to believe - for women have come out, and that doesn't seem to change how women are represented. If anything it just seems to make the commercial organizations that manage sports anxious.

Conrad's question to Rapinoe:

You've vocally supported the lesbian and gay community. What do you think about the absence of out athletes in sports? Do you think we'll see a high profile soccer player come out soon?

This question replicates a lot of assumptions - assumptions built on years of not remembering or noticing the women athletes who are out. I mean, her coach is out. And she's one of the most famous people in the sport. How can you ask a woman on the USWNT soccer team that question without erasing the lesbians who are a part of it?

There was no way for Rapinoe to address that question with a "Yes/No/Maybe" without replicating its assumptions. And there was no way to respond honestly without "outing" herself. Without promoting herself from perhaps level 5 to level 6. So Rapinoe answered:

Hopefully. I think that obviously we're out there. It's weird. I guess on the female side, not on the men's side. But it's accepted within the teams and within the sport. But it seems sports is that last...institutional homophobia.

Welcome to level 6. I love how in getting stuck with explaining a pretty complicated subject she just sends a cross to "institutional homophobia." For that's the right move: if you haven't noticed that quite a few of the most famous women in the sport are out to the media, then that's a symptom of a big problem.

Rapinoe refused to allow herself to be interpellated as closeted, and she also refused to allow the question to situate her as somehow in the dark about the fact that there are, in fact, quite a few out lesbians in the sports world. Obviously. That is as important as the word "we." Obviously we are out there.

All of this is to say that there are out women in sports. Pia Sundhage, Hope Powell, Nadine Angerer - that's just a few. None of them are shrinking violets, none of them are in hiding. But there are days when it seems like the media is hiding from them.

As we all know, Megan Rapinoe has gone on to have a fantastic tournament. Obviously, there's no hiding from that.

*For bloggers trying to find their way through this thicket, GLAAD offers a media guide for addressing sports and homophobia. You can download it here.

The Weight of History: Great Britain & Brazil play at Wembley

According to the FIFA preview for this event, Team GB's game against Brazil will be the first women's football match ever played at Wembley.*

I'm a big supporter of Team GB. They have great players - just the midfield features Jill Scott, Rachel Yankey, Fara Williams, Anita Asante. There's Kelly Smith, Ellen White, Alex Scott - all fantastic and very experienced players. England (Team GB is England w/ a few players from Scotland) beat Japan 2-0 in the World Cup. They beat the US in a friendly a few months before that. They lost to France in the quarterfinals on penalties. (That left us with a lot to talk about as manager Hope Powell complained to the press that too few of the players wanted to take the penalty shots. The media storm created by that was perhaps even worse than that created recently by Solo. There was talk of Powell's retirement from the England team.)

Team GB is a legacy team. If within the men's game there is a romance to playing for the countries that "invented" football, the women who take the field at Wembley tomorrow honor a far more heroic past. For fifty years of women were banned from football pitches. Where at the end of WWI, people turned out in huge numbers (far exceeding attendance at women's league matches in England and the US) by the 1970s (when the game was decriminalized) it was a nearly universal object for derision.

But off the grid, behind that history of prohibition and hostility women played on. If the FA banned women's football and created a culture in which the idea of women playing the game seemed ridiculous, they also created a football underground. The ban produced a punk-rock oppositional zone for gender non-conforming girls and women to find each other. By this I don't mean that women footballers circa 1970 were gay punks and labor organizers. But rather that the history of women's football is that of a counter-culture - far more powerfully than is true of the men's game, even given its working class roots. How many men are bullied and harassed off of football pitches, for being men? (Histories of women's teams through the 70s and 80s can include stories of women being physically assaulted for taking pitches - telling men to get off the field you've paid for could be dangerous.)

I just love the women of those generations and the legacy they've given us - a legacy of outspoken, pig-headed, delusional figures like Hope Powell - who fought her way through circumspect and hostile boys, proved herself amongst them, played for women's teams through years when doing so was seen as a ridiculous waste of time, then slugged it out with the FA. As she put it in an interview, "I will not be bullied."

And she won't take anything less than that level of determination from her squad.

Brazil

My emotional attachment to this team is complicated. They have contributed some of the most exciting matches to the recent history of the women's game. It has been generally true that you can count on Brazil for entertaining football - technical skill, theatrics, gamesmanship, emotion and drama. The women's team has everything the men's team is famous for. Except money and institutional backing.

It was easy to root for them when they played Germany - when they were the underdog, the talented side proving themselves to an indifferent CBF (the organization managing the sport in Brazil). They have pleaded for help from the CBF for years. In 2007, while at the Women's World Cup, the team's players wrote and signed a letter of complaint to the federation. They complained that not only was the team under-supported, the CBF routinely failed to direct awards money to the team. There was no clarity regarding financial support for players, and no consistency in material support for the team's training.

They thought things would improve when they won a silver medal at the 2004 Olympics. They gave the heavily favored USWNT a run for the money (Abby Wambach who put the game away in its waning minutes). Given their outstanding performance there, the Brazilian thought maybe things would get better for them. But their future success would only highlight the potential that was going to waste. Year after year.

At the 2011 World Cup, the team went into competition wearing the uniform for the men's side. That's as big a symbolic statement as a federation can make - they do not order team kits specific to the women's side (and so their shirts had stars for all the World Cup trophies won by the men). The women complained publicly about these problems in 2007. Little has changed. Lost in reports regarding the profound corruption at the highest levels of Brazilian football is the impact of this lack of professionalism must have on the women's team. It's dire.

Brazil's women ask their federation for support, holding up a banner at the 2007 Women's World Cup award ceremony.

Imagine you compete against the US and Germany, year after year you show that you have the ability to conquer teams with far better training.

The team's semifinal win (4-1) against Germany in the 2008 Olympics remains one of my favorite viewing experiences. In that match they broke Germany's defense. Better teams (including the US) had tried and failed. It was a very physical game, but it was a game that also featured fantastic technical ability and a certain ruthlessness. Both teams tried to knock their opponent out of rhythm. Brazil played like a real team. Their first goal was a telepathic collaboration between three of the game's absolute best: Formiga, Marta and Cristiane. They never connected like that in the final, though. The USWNT took all the wind out of their sails, and took the trophy with one goal scored in extra-time.

Imagine that over and over again you find yourself inches from a trophy. You have not just one of the best players in the world on your squad (Marta), but two (Cristiane) - and a host of others who are absolute all-stars (Formiga - playing in her fifth Olympics). But you never get to the winner's circle - after so many years, maybe you stop thinking that you can. Because the grim reality of it all soaks in: the world is full of talented players. You need more.

Cut to last year's World Cup tournament. The team's performance in the game against the USWNT was heartbreaking. As much as I was rooting for the American women, I was rooting for a great performance from Brazil. Yes, they almost knocked the US out of the tournament. They were so close. But they played angry.

They didn't play with the kind of focused anger Wambach used to avenge herself against Colombia's Lady Andrade. Last year, Brazil played like they were angry at the world - like the USWNT had everything that they have been fighting for and have been denied. Like they were frustrated and like they were very tired of being frustrated. It looks to me like the battle with the CBF is breaking them. I guess they were just playing by the 'by any means necessary' playbook. Infamously, at about 115 minutes Erika plopped herself down on the field and just lay there, faking injury and eating up nearly four minutes of the game. After watching that, I wondered if I could ever want to see them win anything again, ever.

I still can't believe that happened.

In this tournament, Brazil has yet to be tested. Five unanswered goals against Cameroon isn't really a game. To score only one against New Zealand - late in the match, too - it doesn't bode well.

Whatever the outcome, Team GB and Brazil are both heading to the quarterfinals. They are playing to avoid moving on to face the second place finisher in group F: right now, that's likely to be the reigning World Cup champions. If it's not, then it's formidable Sweden Canada. The winner of this match, however, will move on to face Canada or North Korea. That's where both will want to be.


*I never trust this kind of information, as people have a tendency to frame every big women's event as a "first," even when history says otherwise. (The launch for the FA Women's Super League was staged at Wembley, but no matches have been played there.)

Solo thoughtz

If you aren't following Hope Solo's twitter feed, do.

Today's tweets were in response to Brandi Chastain's remarks during the US game against Colombia. At about 18 minutes, Chastain disparaged defender Rachel Buehler's ball control. She said that Buehler gives the ball away too much, and "needs to work on an improve on" her trapping skills. The problem is not exactly what she said. What defender doesn't need to work on, improve on her game? The problem is the way Chastain said it - these remarks were part of a constant stream of negative commentary about the US's game. There was, in fact, so much criticism of the USWNT that there was hardly any real discussion of their opponent. A commentator is supposed to offer criticism of the match - Chastain is not being paid to be a cheerleader for the team (this is where Solo is wrong). But criticism should be even handed. What did we learn today about Colombia? Not nearly enough.

I've been hesitant to criticize Chastain - like a lot of people, I admire what she's done for the game in this country. (She was delightful in an interview I did with her a couple years ago.) I also like having a defender's perspective in the mix. Personally, I always want more attention to the game's dark arts.

For me, the real problem with Chastain's commentary is that it is humorless. That's why the criticism she doles out for 90 minutes can feel so grating. She sounds irritated with the game. She sounds annoyed. It just is not fun to listen to.

Supporting the sport doesn't mean going easy on teams - quite the opposite. Informed, detailed, animated analysis of the game makes everyone watching it smarter. Passionate narration of the action gets everyone more involved in the broadcast. In an interview about his earliest memories of soccer, Zidane recalled not the action, but the commentator's voice - he remembered being pulled to the television by his voice. The sound of a person totally interested in and excited by a game.

The shocking thing here is not that Solo had something to say about how Chastain calls matches. It's that she let loose about an NBC commentator and former US national team player on Twitter, right after a game. Someone wound her up. This leaves us with some interesting questions:

• How did she find out about that segment of the broadcast? (These tweets were sent right after the match finished.)
• Who let her have a phone? (She's infamous for what she's capable of saying right after a match finishes.)
• What was it about that remark about Buehler that got Solo mad, with so many other similar moments to choose from? 

Anyway, I love that we have players who are not totally controlled by the team's handlers.  Or maybe they are. Maybe this is all about stirring the pot, keeping the women in the news, and using the ancient trope of the cat fight to do so.

A Punch in the Face

Colombia played a good game: they have hustle and you can see flashes of real skill in their ball handling. But they were clearly frustrated by the USWNT, which seemed sometimes relaxed and in the groove and sometimes distracted. But they were dominant nevertheless. Those flashes of insouciance would have driven me mad - nothing worse than playing a team that's thinking about the next match while it's dispatching with you.  Colombia had a moment of thinking there was a chance, just a chance - they kept the game scoreless for the first thirty minutes. But then Rapinoe scored.

A few minutes later Rapinoe was flying up the wing with the ball. Lady Andrade struggled to get ahead of Wambach, who was racing up the middle. Incredibly, Andrade reached around Wambach with a hook to the face. Deliberate foul.

Except the referee didn't see it. Wambach was just about in line with Rapinoe - so I'm really stunned that none of the other officials caught it. No whistle for the foul. Wambach took another hard foul almost immediately after - this one less deliberate, though. And then a scrap over a dead a ball. Thankfully, things calmed down in the second half. The USWNT, already up 1-0, put the game away with two more, and qualified for the quarterfinals. Good news but Wambach may have a nice shiner to show for it.

In which the IOC suppresses access to the women's game

International tournaments give fans a chance to see women players from around the world in action. People who only watch the men's game have little idea what this means for us. In the men's game, you can see the best players whenever you want. They are on TV 24/7. They are in advertisements, they get whole sections of some newspapers even when they aren't doing a thing. These men play in leagues that pump their product non-stop. There are also more fan-authored montages using footage of the men's game than any of us can fathom.

Not so for women. We get these tournaments. Or minimal, hard to find broadcasts distinguished by few cameras and little editing. Sometimes these are broadcast on "floating" channels that don't appear in your tv guide. Seriously.

Youtube deactivated the one video I found the other day showing the very cool goal that Portia Modise scored in South Africa's first appearance at the Olympics.

The last time I blogged women's Olympic matches, every single video I initially used was deactivated for infringement. All of those videos were posted to other sites by devoted fans - all did nothing but celebrate the best moment from the day's matches. After the tournament, for most of us this kind of video will be our sole access to especially those sides that are not our home team.

If FIFA and the IOC cared at all about the women's game, they would encourage the circulation of fan-authored video celebrating players. It's free publicity for a sport that badly needs it. Instead, for no reason that I can see, they quash circulation of information about the game - except when that information is blatantly sexist. Google "female goalkeeper" and you'll see what I mean. One of the shittiest anti-women's-soccer videos I know has been on Youtube since 2007 and features nothing but pirated footage from the 2007 World Cup.

Weirdly, the policing of copyright infringement targets footage used by supporters of the game rather than its detractors. The rare exceptions are those stories in women's sports that go viral - for good or bad.

Marta's crazy 2007 World Cup goal against the US, highlights from the USWNT's 2012 defeat of Brazil, the ponytail incident. In those cases, footage circulates so widely it enters the cultural commons - it becomes impossible to control. But in the vast majority of cases, the circulation of footage of women's matches is so limited, it is easy to kill. And so that's what the trolls do. They shut it down. Because whoever these gremlins are, they have their heads so far up their asses they think that an image loses its value if it circulates too freely - when in fact it is absolutely the other way around. The more freely an image circulates, the more valuable it becomes.

Anyway, you can see Modise's golaso here:

2012 Olympics: A Note on Banyana Banyana

South Africa's women's team has a lot to be proud of. Qualifying for the Olympics is a big deal - this is a first for Banyana Banyana. This is also the first time Africa was allowed two teams in the tournament. Relatively little of the money and media attention poured into the country in 2010 flowed in the direction of their game. And scarcely anyone in the international sports media has paid attention to the difficulties faced by the squad since 2010.

Just as the World Cup hangover wore off, South African media reported on the terrible situation within the women's camp. The team's head coach, Nthabiseng Matshaba, had been harassing and abusing the women on the team. Two players came forward with complaints, which were corroborated by others. My understanding is that journalists in South Africa helped take this story public: but without players willing to come forward, nothing would change. It took a few months, but the guy was eventually ousted. That was in January 2011. Not that long ago. (See this old FaLW post about this story.)

Banyana Banyana will not be defined by this awful past, but rather by the strength of character that it took to come forward with the harassment charges and to push for change. And to then qualify for the Olympics. Portia Modise scored a goal against formidable Sweden today. Consider it a strike on behalf of the right for all athletes everywhere to play free from sexual harassment and homophobic abuse.

Portia Modise goes for the goal

2012 Olympics: USWNT says cou cou!

Cou cou is French for "hey girl."

If Les Bleues feel robbed today it's in the way you do after leaving the doors to the house unlocked and the windows wide open. They took the early lead with two quick, confident and gorgeous goals from Gaëtane Thiney and Marie-Laure Delie.

But the Americans kept their cool. Or, rather, they woke up.  Rapinoe replied with a well-placed corner picked up by who else and what else but Abby Wambach and her head. French players shrugged with a "what are you gonna do?"

Alex Morgan's first goal was a delicious example of how smart she is as a player.  Revolving her body around a loose ball as it dropped at her feet, she tapped it into the goal with two defenders on her. At least that's how I remember it.

There was more. Lloyd rocketed a P'noe assist. P'noe was just a great play maker today, setting off a counter attack with Heath and Wambach that had Morgan racing up the right as the ball was moved forward across the field - she took her place at the far post with plenty of time to spare and nicked the ball in as it came across the goal. The US played a fantastic team game today.

France fought the whole way - it wasn't an easy win but it was an assured one. Les Bleues will be back: they looked very strong, very smart. I think that early lead surprised them?

Some of the other games remind us of the teams that aren't here. Also of programs that had a great history but have fallen off the international radar, like China. Cameroon seemed so young, so inexperienced - it just isn't right that a side like Nigeria has become such a shambles they didn't earn a spot here, or that Equatorial Guinea is at home (for a player eligibility violation during the World Cup) while North Korea are here. North Korea just shouldn't be here. The team was disqualified from the 2015 World Cup but allowed to play in the Olympics - adding insult to injury, word is FIFA forgot to run drugs tests on North Korea during qualifying matches.

You have to feel for the North Korean players, though: that can't be easy. Especially when the match organizers slap the South Korean flag next to your face in the team introductions. The team stayed off the field for nearly an hour as that diplomatic nightmare was sorted out.  

Friendly Look: France's 2 goals against Japan

Check out Marie-Laure Delie and Wendy Renard's two sweet goals from a July 19 friendly against Japan:

Shamefully, there were scarcely any French fans at the semi-final at the World Cup - this was in spite of the fact that the match was played very close to the French border. A jump onto the So Foot's Équipe de France forum provides a handy lesson in what ordinary French fans think about the women's squad. For example, I just learned how to say "Hey, the girls aren't horrible" and "Fuck, they don't know how to mark for shit" and - my favorite - "It's not sexist for me to say that a game full of tits and ass sucks." Actually, that's all from the same con. There are fans of foot feminin. I've been in the stands with them in Montpellier, where you can watch women's matches for free just about a mile in from the Mediterranean.

The French women's team is very, very good.

These are more complete highlights, with very enthusiastic commentary:

Find more videos like this on Womens Soccer United

USWNT & France dive into the deep end of the Olympic pool

When the US women square up against France tomorrow (noon EST), they will be facing one of the tournament's toughest opponents. Les Bleues lost the 2011 World Cup semifinal to the Americans and players didn't hold back in expressing their anger at the result. Louisa Necib put it plainly enough to L'Equipe: "The worst is that we were better than them."

As luck would have it, I was in the team's hotel lobby when the more beautiful team (as they dubbed themselves) rolled in after that match. They didn't look defeated at all. They seemed, in fact, defiant.

As it happens, US women were staying in the same hotel and the post-match party was in a hall just off the lobby. They piled out of the bus exhilarated, jubilant, radiating with joy. Abby Wambach had a halo around her head.

Necib, Elodie Thomis and the ascot-wearing FFF entourage glowered at the doors behind which the USWNT celebrated their win. It was clear they felt robbed.

The US won on the strength of their counterattack. They did steal the win. The USWNT have a different kind of skill than that for which the French team is known. It's the classic match up - physical strength and strategy against skill on the ball.

My overall take: France is capable of winning the whole thing. Winning a tournament is the only thing they haven't done, and that's probably their biggest obstacle.

Germany is out thanks to the shitty IOC/FIFA qualification process. Nigeria, which wears down every team it plays until someone finally sends them home (thus doing important work for everyone left) has been set back years by mismanagement. England and Brazil will make it out of their groups. But Brazil has not looked right recently. They could implode. It's not impossible. Something is rotten in São Paulo and if they don't take home a medal the players should freaking strike.

Japan are of course world champions and their group looks not so bad - South Africa is weak and inexperienced. Canada's performance in the World Cup was underwhelming. Japan v Sweden (7/28) is obviously a match to watch - their World Cup face-off was a nail-biter.

France and the US are in a group with the ever mysterious North Koreans - who by all rights should not be at the Olympics, having been banned from the 2015 World Cup for doping and not having been subjected to testing in their qualifying matches. Thanks FIFA!

Columbia are also in this group: they have scrap. But if France and the US don't make it out of this group, it'll be a freaking scandal. Either because one was beaten by a serious underdog (with some exciting young players) or because one was beaten by a squad that's been banned for doping. But events shouldn't play out that way: teams like North Korean, violated and abused by their management, are not usually able to pull out the big win.

tomorrow we will see a little of this (look how relaxed she is - and those eyebrows!)

versus a little of that (see her American hustle!)

I. Can't. Wait.