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.

Winner: Roller Derby as Queer Feminist Sport

Bless The Pet Shop Boys. In advance of their performance at the closing ceremony for the Olympics,  they've released a lovely portrait of the London Rollergirls. This is the version of women's sports that I know & love!

No Justice, No Peace in College Sports: More on Penn State

I'm jumping into the Penn State mosh pit! In this week's column (Why the NCAA Sanctions Are Just Dead Wrong), Dave Zirin takes the NCAA to task for the $60 million dollar fine and post-season ban that it leveled against Penn State. Zirin isn't arguing that the program shouldn't be punished: quite the opposite. His argument is with the role that these sanctions play in the political theater of college sports, supporting the NCAA's self-assigned role as divine authority over the kingdom of amateur athletics.

I can see the point. As a culture, we have a tendency to turn to colleges and universities as if they were Meta-Parents. We wait for the NCAA to step in and punish its children. But the assignation of that kind of authority to almost completely unsupervised structure goes hand-in-hand with the abuse of that power. (Think: FIFA)

The problem is that the NCAA is a meta-version of the Penn State program itself. That organization has had full contact with so many forms of abuse of power and authority in college football especially that its attempt to claim some kind of moral high ground here is nauseating. 

That I would feel queasy about it is something. Penn State football is the Scientology of college sports. Let'em go down. But I have a couple things to add to Zirin's critical look at the NCAA's actions. 

Zirin expresses concern for Penn State as a public institution. He writes, "The punishment levied by Emmert was nothing less than an extra-legal, extra-judicial imposition into the affairs of a publicly funded campus." At least some of Zirin's criticism is directed at this - the idea that Penn State is a public institution, and that the NCAA is here interfering with publicly governed resources. I absolutely agree - but the problem is big, deep and complicated.

Not all public universities are the same. Penn State is so beholden to the financial teats of alumni wealth and the commercial payoff of big time sports that it turned a blind eye to years of sexual abuse. And as the Freeh report makes clear, the whole of the university leadership conspired to keep the story under wraps. Worse, they actually helped Sandusky into his position at a youth outreach program whose relationship with the university would provide the architecture for his access to victims.

Worse, Penn State's cover-up of child abuse was staged while the university was also suppressing complaints about the homophobia of one of its other coaches (Rene Portland, a Paterno protégé). For about two decades athletes were kicked off the team, and staff were silenced. The administration ignored protests of faculty, staff and students. But then an exiled player filed a Title IX complaint: and the campus faced a losing fight against the feds. The settlement produced by that complaint required all supervisors, coaches, staff, administrators to attend educational meetings about reporting harassment and abuse. The university was getting a big lesson in compliance - which it ignored. I heard from very good sources that Paterno attended at least one of these policy sessions, arriving late and plainly showing his irritation.

But back to the defense of Penn State as a public university. Public education is not what it used to be. In 2012, about 14% of Penn State's budget was supported by public funding - this is a reflection of decreased public support for all of the Commonwealth Campuses (Penn State is the flagship campus of a network that stretches from Erie to Scranton). 

That figure goes hand in hand with increases in tuition. Penn State's State College campus has the highest in-state tuition of any public university in the United States ($15,250/year in 2011) and it has held that distinction for quite a few years. (See, for example: "Should Public Universities Behave Like Private Colleges," in Business Week Nov 14 2004 and Penn State's 2011/2012 "budget breakdown.") The fact that Penn State is a public university doesn't mean that it serves the mission we associate with that term "public education."

The NCAA is concerned about the value of the brand and the stability of the organization's power. Penn State officials are worried about the same - they are not thinking about Penn State as a part of the public system. And the state's elected officials aren't thinking about Penn State as a public resource either: they've been working for years to privatize the whole system. 

It has been a long time since the leaders of public universities acted like stewards of the state commons. Just look at what happens when one does: UVA President Teresa Sullivan was ousted by a Board of Trustees for doing just that.

Anyway: I keep returning in my own mind to the public outrage regarding Sandusky. That outrage appears in exact proportion to the fervor of the public's investment in college sports as some sort of Oz where the playing field is leveled by scholarships, where gender inequity was banished by a single legislative act, and where things like rape are aberrations and not in fact part of the same culture that fetishizes paternalistic, macho authority. "Jo-Pa couldn't possibly have known!" becomes "We can't talk about this!" becomes "Nobody needs to know!" We turn to "JoPa," then to the paternalistic structures of the university, then the NCAA - each an exponential replication of the same institutional psychosis in which people imagine that these people actually care about us. 

I take Zirin's anger to be about that - that an independent report and an NCAA sanction might be mistaken by the public as justice, or as change. It is, in fact, neither. Rage on, sister.

Olympians to Watch: Mary Kom

India's Shot at Gold, Rahul Bhattachary profile of the boxer Mary Kom is a terrific introduction to one of the best stories in the the Olympics. My favorite section of Battacharya's article:

FOOTAGE OF HER fights is not easy to track down. The national broadcaster Doordarshan, private sports channels, her own agents, Olympic Gold Quest – nobody can supply it. After a fortnight of hard pursuit, a solitary bout emerges on an unlabelled cd in the boxing federation office from a mass of discs in a paper bag. Another is found on Jimmy’s hard disk in Manipur. They are from Podolsk, Russia, 2005, and Barbados, 2010, both world championships.

The bouts are shot on single hand-held cameras with no commentary. They have the air of an underground activity, like 19th-century prizefighting.

But amateur boxing—or Olympic-style boxing, as it is beginning to be called—is a very different beast from prizefighting, then or now. There is no prize money, no pounding music or showboating mcs, no showbiz bright lights blazing around the ancient glamour of blood. Nobody dies in these bouts; knock-outs are rare.

Especially in the lighter categories, the boxers dance on the dazzling borderline between fisticuffs and fencing. They feint and prance and lunge to find openings off which to score. Scoring is a subjective and contentious affair: at least three of the five judges must instantly concur that a punch is substantial and delivered by the “knuckle part” of a “closed glove” to the legitimate target zone, between the stomach and the head, on the front or sides of the body. Without an electronic scoreboard, the audience would be lost.
Even by the standards of pinweights, Mary is so quick that judges regard her bouts as about the hardest task in the women’s game. At Podolsk, her opponent is a Korean (the difficulty level of this bout she recalls with the Indianism “fifty-fifty”). To watch Mary, 22 years old and 46kg light, is to watch the physical equivalent of a raconteur of irrepressible wit and repartee. It feels like pugilism.

In the breaks, the women’s coach Anoop Kumar rubs down her arms and legs. There is something wonderful in this unselfconscious athletic intimacy among countrymen who might be segregated by gender on public transport; in a country, indeed, where women boxers were initially asked, in the interests of modesty, to wear t-shirts under their vests.
As the clock ticks on in the contest, something raw cracks through the balletic Brownian motion. Grunts can be heard, the odd wild haymaker appears. There is something more existential at stake: boxing, where metaphor is meaningless because here it is what it is. Mary has never felt pain in a ring, or fear; those are areas she forbids her mind to go. What she does sometimes feel is the title of her favourite song, “Lonely”, by the Senegalese pop star Akon. Early in the last round, she throws a strong right off-balance to the head of the Korean, which forces her into a standing eight-count. The vulnerability in her opponent flares like a rage in Mary’s movements; she stalks her nervous prey around the ring, showing the killer instinct that figures in every appraisal of her.  - Rahul Battacharya, "India's Shot at Gold" in Intelligent Life (July/August, 2012)

You can get another great introduction to her here, in this BBC profile of the fighter:

Keelin Godsey, on being a genderqueer athlete

Watch this. Remarkably candid conversation.

Major League Soccer Statement Not So Major

The official apology from the MLS:

During the latest episode of the ExtraTime Radio podcast on MLSsoccer.com, one of the hosts -- Simon Borg -- made inappropriate remarks regarding female fans of Major League Soccer.  These remarks were unacceptable and in no way reflect the values of MLS, its clubs, players, staff, or MLSsoccer.com. We apologize on behalf of our organization for those remarks.  Respect for diversity is a core principle of MLS and we are proud of the diversity of our League and its fans.

Mr. Borg will be suspended from his position at MLSsoccer.com for seven days, effective immediately.  All MLS employees undergo diversity and sensitivity training on an annual basis, and Mr. Borg and the entire MLS Digital group will receive additional sensitivity training promptly. (MLS statement on the league's page)

This is clearly a corporate memo designed to shove the whole problem onto Borg, and hope it goes away. It lets all the other guys off the hook, which doesn't seem entirely fair to me. Doesn't that show have a producer??

There is something about the invocation of "diversity training" here that makes me cringe. What a mood killer. If diversity were so important to the MLS, why does the ExtraTime team look they way it does?

The Sex of the MLS

Masculinity is a complicated thing. This is what we learn from listening to "Losing Proposition," the April 30th installment of Extratime, the MLS's podcast. At the program's conclusion, one of its hosts (Simon Borg) launched into a bizarre rant about how serious female fans are a real turn-off. This is quite rightly causing a stir - and not just because it's offensive.

[The MLS has responded to complaints by replacing the podcast file with an edited version, lopping off the offending segment, described below.]

It's newsworthy because the guys who host this program (Jason Saghini, Nick Firchau, Greg Lalas and Borg) work for the MLS and represent the league. Jezebel's story hits the right note, so I'm going to skip the obvious (it's sexist and diminishing) in order to describe the broader context of the conversation which facilitated Borg's comments. Those remarks didn't come out of nowhere - it was actually the second week that the program featured a conversation about soccer and the bedroom.

At the end of  "Losing Proposition," the hosts respond to emails from listeners. These emails take up the previous week's discussion of a question from a fan who confesses to watching soccer in bed using a Kindle Fire that he bought for his wife as a gift. "Am I a bad husband for this? How much time do you spend watching soccer with your wives, partners, etc.?" It's a question and an answer. Clearly, if he wants sex it's probably a good idea to stop watching soccer in bed. But maybe he doesn't want sex, at least not every night. Maybe he's happy watching soccer, and it's nice to have his wife in bed next to him while he does so. Is that OK? Does that make him less of a man? That's at least one way (my way) of reading the question.

Anyway, at that point the hosts invite listeners to email advice about soccer and love, because clearly the two are at war.

The controversial April 30th discussion revolves around this set of emails from fans. The hosts mostly rehash platitudes about sports bachelors and soccer widows. They talk over one email from a fan whose wife found him asleep in bed, clutching his iPhone, on which was playing a Union/Chivas match. As his wife tried to pry the phone from his fingers, he popped awake and said "Hold on, this game is about to get chippy."

They read an email from a fan who observes that a lot of women go to games - that, in fact, you see a fair number of straight couples at MLS matches, on dates. They all seem taken by this "development."

People should not be surprised by the fact that there are women in the stands, and that people go to soccer matches on dates. Romantic comedies, for example, routinely stage date scenes at sport events - not because it's exotic but because it's typically American. That instrument of social coercion known as 'the kissing cam' exists because sports has been fully integrated into the rituals of heterosexual courtship. One viral video, for example, features kissing couples at an LA Kings game.

Anyway - rather than talk about the fact that a lot of women watch soccer, that women are a part of the MLS fan base, that the whole soccer-or-women choice is a ruse - the Extratime conversation turns back to the guy in bed with his iPhone.

Why, Simon Borg wonders, was this man watching the game in bed? He then describes this guy as forced into the bed not by fatigue, but by his wife. "There's a problem with the relationship already, if you feel forced, or compelled to be in bed." Borg doesn't let this idea go - that men are being forced into bed. "The thing about the guys with the thing in bed...How does it work? Are you ordered 'come to bed'? And so are you trying to sneak a Kindle or an iPhone to watch the game?  [Almost screaming now] Why don't you just get up and go to your TV or go sit at the kitchen table?"

At this point one of the guys tries to turn the table on Borg, and suggests that he seems pretty invested in this notion that these listeners don't want to be in bed with their wives. It's intense.

This takes us into the program's finale. They read an email from a passionate, committed female fan ("Elizabeth from Portland") which affirms that yes, soccer can actually be a part of a person's relationship - and that, yes, there are women out there who are superfans who participate in fan culture. The other participants in this discussion narrate how their soccer-watching fits into their personal lives. It all sounds really normal. They discuss how it can be nice to have a relationship with someone who "gets" your sport. Then Borg says the following:

It's fine if you're a female and you want to be a super-fan. Clearly go for it, that's your choice. But there is something to be said for how appealing that might be to the other sex. Having a woman that's such a fan, like painting your face, tuning in to every podcast. I don't know how many males would be into that.

It's cool for women to be into it. It's great that in Kansas City there are a lot of women in the stands, it's great, but for the guy who wants maybe a serious relationship... If you are following just casually, but if you're such a die-hard, I don't know, it comes a point that it is a bit of a turn-off.

To their credit, his interlocutors try to argue with him - one sounds incredulous. Borg pushes his point and tries to make the other guys confess that, yes, secretly they are turned off by passionate women fans.

They settle into a little talk about whether or not they "have a problem with it" (a woman's passion for the game). One of the hosts confesses he's "never dated a sports girl. Ever, ever, ever." (TMI!)

I'd say Borg should be fired, except I think they all bear some responsibility for that conversation - I'm not sure such scapegoating accomplishes much in the long run. Better to have a feminist on the panel, forever - someone sharp enough to call him out properly and shift the discussion. 

Sure, Borg's a problem: but so is the architecture of that whole conversation in which Borg performs the role of saying what none of the other guys have the "guts" to say. That's his job, and pretty much every sports program seems obliged to have one person play that role.

Extratime is featuring female fans of the MLS on next week's show, which is great. But given the  stupidity of that entire discussion of sex and soccer, I wouldn't be surprised if the MLS apology went something like: "No, really - we think you're pretty!"

My take-away from this story: The men who run MLS harbor a wish. They wish that the MLS was like English soccer was in its heyday. Guys like this long for a time when men were men, and the game was (somewhat) more honest and when fans were hard core. But they also know that's silly. They grew up with the culture of the game as it is here - they grew up fending off the bullshit, xenophobic weirdness of mainstream sports hostility to the beautiful game. Official MLS masculinity is embattled, conflicted.

If Borg felt he needed to assert that a man can't love a woman who loves soccer as much as he does, it was perhaps because he doesn't think the American soccer fan is man enough to love her back.

So the insult here is not only to women soccer fans. It actually an insult to the entire soccer-loving community - as if somehow loving the game means that you aren't actually up for loving itself.

Maria Mutola, footballer

Maria Mutola is one of the world's greatest athletes. The 800 meter champion (2000 Olympic gold medalist, World Champion in 1993, 2001, 2003 etc) competed in 6 Olympic games and is often cited as the best athlete in this event. The 800 is notorious in track and field because it's technically a sprint: requiring speed and endurance, it's a grueling, even cruel, race.

Mutola is now coaching Caster Semenya, who recently qualified to represent South Africa in the 2012 Olympics. Mutola (who is from Mozambique) has lived in Johannesburg since 1999. This 2011 video profiles her as a member of the Mamelodi Sundowns women's team. This is a nice look at Mutola's relationship her two great loves. Mutola started off playing soccer with boys and, like many women athletes, she was recruited to track and field because it is one sport in which there are opportunities for someone with drive and talent. I just love seeing a picture of Maria Mutola with the caption "striker" - as if in her sleep she dreams not of crossing the finish-line first, but of slipping a ball into the back of the net.