Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sports. Show all posts
August 12, 2012
Spanish-surnamed U.S. medal winners: 5 out of 208
Here's the kind of statistic that nobody else counts: on NBC's list of 208 American Olympic medal winners, I find five Spanish surnames, or 2.4%. That's compared to approaching 20% of the relevant age cohort is Spanish-surnamed.
1. Leo Manzano won the silver in the men's 1500m run, which is traditionally a glamor event
2. Women's water polo veteran Brenda Villa won a gold -- As a loyal California, I've tried hard to like water polo, but it's not much of a TV sport, to say the least.
3. Marlen Esparza won a bronze in women's boxing - no comment
4. Danell Leyva, a Cuban, won a medal in men's gymnastics all-around, which is cool. Men's gymnastics is awesome (here's Epke Zonderland's triple release routine), although it lacks the car-crash fascination of women's gymnastics.
5. Amy Rodriguez, who is a Cameron Diaz-style half Cuban, won a gold with women's soccer.
A bunch of other medal-winners with non-Hispanic surnames are part Hispanic, such as swimmer Ryan Lochte, whose mother is Cuban, and basketball player Carmelo Anthony whose mother is Puerto Rican. But, if you sum up all the fractions, it comes out to about the same thing as just counting surnames.
This is a particularly low percentage because Californians are traditionally so over-represented on the U.S. Olympic team.
Anyway, this points out a theme that I've been bringing up for a decade or more, which is the remarkable lack of high achievers among the Hispanic Tidal Wave.
August 9, 2012
Women's soccer: USA! USA! USA!
It's especially amazing that the American women's soccer team triumphed in its semifinal and final games over two countries with such long histories of soccer excellence, places where kids are dribbling soccer balls all over the favela from the time they can walk: Canada and Japan.
The problem is that there's nobody left for our women to beat. So, they'll just have to start up a women's pro soccer league, just like all the other super successful women's team sport leagues that got launched in the excitement after the USA proved its feminist superiority by crushing disgusting sexist foreigners for gold in women's basketball and women's softball in 1996, women's ice hockey in 1998, and women's soccer in 1999.
Maybe they should form a Republican women's soccer team and a Democratic women's soccer team that would barnstorm around the country playing each other to see who deserves to win the election. It would be like the Blue and Green chariot racing teams in Justinian's Byzantium. That worked out well.
Maybe they should form a Republican women's soccer team and a Democratic women's soccer team that would barnstorm around the country playing each other to see who deserves to win the election. It would be like the Blue and Green chariot racing teams in Justinian's Byzantium. That worked out well.
But seriously, I think we should now spend a quadrillion dollars to send the U.S. women's soccer team to Alpha Centauri so they can win the Galactic Women's Soccer Championship over Epsilon Eridani. Man, I hate those those seven-legged freaks. They are almost as bad as the Canadians.
Hey, how about the American gold medalist in women's boxing! How come Women's MMA isn't in the Olympics yet?
And what about that Aztec game where the losing team captain's heart gets ritually torn out on top of a pyramid? It's sexist that isn't in the Olympics. I can think of a lot of American dad sportswriters who would volunteer at the 2016 Rio Olympics to personally rip the heart out of any foreign upstart who dares challenge the supremacy of our women's ōllamaliztli team. USA! USA! USA!
Olympic medal counts sorted by sportsmanship
The Chinese public has recently begun to question its government's and media's emphasis on winning Olympic gold medals while ignoring or castigating silver and bronze medalists.
Indeed, there's something bullying about the Go Gold or Go Home attitude. So, I've sorted the medal charts by percentage of non-gold medals won as one clue to which countries have a healthy middle-of-the-road attitude toward the Olympics, wanting to be competitive without being obsessive about Winning Is the Only Thing. The top three countries in terms of percent of medals won that are not gold are Canada (only one gold out of 16 total medals), Sweden, and Japan. At the bottom of the list is North Korea (four golds out of five). Who would you rather have as a neighbor: Canada or North Korea?
| Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total | % non-Gold | |
| Canada | 1 | 5 | 10 | 16 | 94% |
| Sweden | 1 | 3 | 3 | 7 | 86% |
| Japan | 5 | 14 | 14 | 33 | 85% |
| Spain | 2 | 7 | 2 | 11 | 82% |
| Brazil | 2 | 2 | 7 | 11 | 82% |
| Australia | 6 | 13 | 10 | 29 | 79% |
| Russia | 12 | 21 | 23 | 56 | 79% |
| Romania | 2 | 5 | 2 | 9 | 78% |
| Denmark | 2 | 4 | 3 | 9 | 78% |
| Poland | 2 | 1 | 6 | 9 | 78% |
| Czech Rep, | 2 | 3 | 3 | 8 | 75% |
| Slovenia | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 75% |
| Germany | 10 | 16 | 11 | 37 | 73% |
| France | 8 | 9 | 12 | 29 | 72% |
| Kenya | 2 | 2 | 3 | 7 | 71% |
| Belarus | 3 | 3 | 4 | 10 | 70% |
| New Zealand | 3 | 2 | 5 | 10 | 70% |
| Ukraine | 3 | 1 | 6 | 10 | 70% |
| Netherlands | 5 | 5 | 6 | 16 | 69% |
| Jamaica | 3 | 3 | 3 | 9 | 67% |
| Georgia | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 67% |
| Norway | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 67% |
| Italy | 7 | 6 | 6 | 19 | 63% |
| Cuba | 3 | 3 | 2 | 8 | 63% |
| USA | 39 | 25 | 26 | 90 | 57% |
| Iran | 4 | 4 | 1 | 9 | 56% |
| China | 37 | 24 | 19 | 80 | 54% |
| Korea | 12 | 7 | 6 | 25 | 52% |
| Great Britain | 25 | 13 | 14 | 52 | 52% |
| Croatia | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 50% |
| Ethiopia | 2 | 2 | 4 | 50% | |
| Hungary | 8 | 4 | 3 | 15 | 47% |
| South Africa | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 40% |
| Kazakhstan | 6 | 3 | 9 | 33% | |
| Switzerland | 2 | 1 | 3 | 33% | |
| DPR Korea | 4 | 1 | 5 | 20% |
August 8, 2012
Athletes marrying athletes
In which sports are men men and women athletes most and least likely to marry each other?
The least likely sport for marrying a fellow professional appears to be professional golf. The only couple I can think of off the top of my head was Gardner Dickinson and Judy Clark-Dickinson. The husband, who was 23 years older, had pretty much retired by the time they married. The PGA and LPGA tours are separate, except maybe for one week per year during golf's silly season, so men and women pros seldom get together. In contrast, male and female tennis players get together at several championships per year. Male pro golfers generally marry women who like being home with the kids and house while they are travelling on tour. '
Similarly, I can't think of any NBA-WNBA couples.
Similarly, I can't think of any NBA-WNBA couples.
In contrast, my impression is that track and field athletes are most likely to marry each other. Blacks don't get married at a particularly high rate, but black women runners often hyphenate their last names after marrying a male track & field athlete. Traditionally, track was an upscale sport among African-Americans, the spring sport at black colleges instead of baseball. Men's and women's track meets are typically held together, and they tend to be hurry-up and wait affairs, kind of like a movie set, another famous locus for romance since there isn't much else to do.
Famous cross-sport couples include soccer player Mia Hamm and shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, golfer Nancy Lopez and baseball manager Ray Knight, and golfer Greg Norman and Chris Evert. That last pair of strong personalities burned brightly but quickly burned out, with complaints from their new step-children of micro-management leading to disputes with their new spouses' long-suffering ex-spouses.
How good looking are women Olympic athletes?
Anecdata time:
About 20 years ago, corporate America started experimenting with video-conferencing to cut down on its huge bills for travel. Face to face contact builds more camaraderie than phone contact, so why not have workers in remote offices communicate face to face via telescreen?
The problem was that, 20 years ago, the people we were used to seeing on television were people who had been hired because they would look good on TV, and then they were costumed, made up, lit, and rehearsed to look even better on TV. Nature and nurture conspiring together, as usual.
In comparison, my fellow marketing researchers on early video-conferences tended to look pretty ghastly. My reaction: My coworkers on this project look like a gang of zombies? We're doomed. (Politely, their opinions of how I looked on video-conferencing screens were never articulated in so many words.)
In comparison, my fellow marketing researchers on early video-conferences tended to look pretty ghastly. My reaction: My coworkers on this project look like a gang of zombies? We're doomed. (Politely, their opinions of how I looked on video-conferencing screens were never articulated in so many words.)
Similarly, women athletes on TV aren't typically as good looking as the high-heel-wearing spokesmodels on TV. But that doesn't mean they aren't good looking on average. To understand this, it helps to see them in person in civilian clothes.
For example, the last Saturday night of the 1984 L.A. Olympics, I was in a frozen yogurt shop in Westwood Village, next to the athlete's dorms, and in walked three couples from the Swedish Olympic team out on a date.
The three girls were probably swimmers, high jumpers, something like that: tall and blonde. Plus, for a night on the town, they were wearing high heels (all about 6'1" in heels), make-up, had their hair done, and had on stylish clothes chosen to flatter their best features (e.g., legs) and understate their features that might be a little too much (no need for those 1980s-style shoulder pads on those young ladies).
There were always a lot of beautiful young women in Westwood in the early 1980s, and while these three athletes might not have been above the 90th percentile in exquisiteness of features, they radiated so much sheer health that they were stunning.
On the other hand, these three were not recognizable stars, nobody was mobbing them for autographs, they were also-rans who didn't give the impression that they Would Do Whatever It Takes for Gold, which often leads to some scary looks. So, that's probably the sweet spot -- Olympic qualifier but non-contender.
On the other hand, these three were not recognizable stars, nobody was mobbing them for autographs, they were also-rans who didn't give the impression that they Would Do Whatever It Takes for Gold, which often leads to some scary looks. So, that's probably the sweet spot -- Olympic qualifier but non-contender.
More unasked Olympic questions answered
Q. What’s the oddest thing about Jamaican 100 meter sprinter Usain Bolt?
A. Although Bolt epitomizes West African-descended sprinting talent, he has the face of an East African distance runner. (Here’s a picture of Bolt with his more conventional-looking Jamaican rival Yohan Blake.) Nobody seems to know why Bolt looks like an immense Kenyan.
Q. How much of the track success of former British colonies like Jamaica and Kenya originates in British Chariots of Fire-style sporting culture?
A. A fair amount. It's taken ex-colonies of other European countries much longer to catch on. For example, the Dominican Republic, which isn't lacking in athletic talent as its baseball success shows, has only recently become an Olympic power in the long sprints and hurdles. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that you can buy PEDs in the Dominican Republic without a prescription.)
On the other hand, ex-colonies tend to take what they like and forget the rest. For instance, although the South Asian countries remain heavily influenced in some ways by the British Raj (for example, India represents one of the world’s leading concentrations of P.G. Wodehouse fans), South Asians are the world’s least interested in sports – except for that most Wodehousian of English games, cricket.
Q. Some black women took to Twitter to criticize gymnast Gabby Douglas for not having expensively processed hair like they do. In contrast, black women sprinters, such as 400m gold medalist Sanya Richards-Ross, often wear extravagant hairdos, jewelry, or nails. (Remember Florence Griffith-Joyner’s and Gail Devers’s jeweled claws?) How come?
A. Compared to gymnasts (or to swimmers or long-distance runners), sprinters have a lot of time on their hands. Endless workouts don’t help much. For example, to get ready to win four gold medals at the 1984 Olympics, Carl Lewis worked out eight hours per week (not per day, but eight per week). Thus, Lewis had time to become a disco star in Japan, and Richards-Ross appears to have had everything imaginable done to her hair, plus that of whichever lady in India grew her weave.
Personally, I am happy that sprinters don’t have to train five hours per day like Michael Phelps did. I like the old tradition of the sportsman, the notion that competing can be part of a non-monastic life.
Q. You say that Southern California's long history of sports success is suspect due to its proximity to Muscle Beach. Hey, America’s sweetheart, 200m runner Allyson Felix, grew up in Southern California!
A. I think it’s fair to say that Felix has, over the years, resisted more temptation than most people could withstand. She’s twice lost the 200m Olympic gold medal to massive Jamaican women. So far, she hasn’t totally Jeterized herself. While Jeter signed up with John Smith, the Dark Side of sprint coaching, Felix recently teamed with Bob Kersee, who has somehow remained the respectable face of muscularity over a long career coaching his wife Jackie Joyner-Kersee, his in-law the late Florence Griffith-Joyner, Gail Devers, and Shawn Crawford.
August 7, 2012
Olympics Q&A
My new Taki's Magazine column consists of the answers to a bunch of made-up questions I asked myself about the Olympics.
Q. An NBC segment showed muscular American 100M silver medalist Carmelita Jeter working out under shadowy veteran coach John Smith on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Is that a reassuring sign?
A. No. The Santa Monica-Venice area has been Muscle Beach since the 1930s and a hotbed of steroid use for a half-century or more. (In general, Southern California’s fabulous athletic history—such as O. J. Simpson’s 1968 Heisman Trophy and world record in a sprint relay—should come with a big asterisk.)
Read the whole thing there.
By the way, Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard has been just about the only journalist interested in researching the pre-history of the Steroids Era. As we all know, there were a lot of dirty rotten cheaters recently, but the sporting heroes of our youths (whenever our youths may have been) were pure as the driven snow But, Karlgaard has repeatedly asked, how do we know that? If you are under 60, how do you know that your favorite athlete of your youth wasn't a pioneer?
A little over the top?
From the New York Times:
Perfectly Captivating for Their Imperfections
By SAM BORDEN
The United States women’s soccer team is not a Dream Team. It can’t be. After all, Dream Teams don’t have “nightmares,” as Abby Wambach grimly described last summer’s shootout loss to Japan in the World Cup final.
It is strange then how many and how widely the Americans continually captivate. Typically, fans in the United States fall in love with the fresh, new face — think the gymnast Gabby Douglas and the swimmer Missy Franklin — or become obsessed with a team based on dominance and power and might. The Olympic men’s basketball teams are made up of N.B.A. mercenaries, yes, but they are almost always effective mercenaries. They throttle. They pummel. They thump.
The women’s soccer team does not, or at least it has not as often over the past few years. An Olympic team of veterans — only one player was not on the World Cup roster — the Americans are neither new blood nor the types who routinely bloody, and yet they are perhaps the most universally embraced group of Americans playing team sports. ... But what is the greatest allure of the Americans? The attraction, it seems, lies in their flaws. Unlike the basketball Dream Teams and unlike their sporting ancestors, the commanding women’s soccer squads of the 1990s, the current incarnation is gloriously imperfect.
Let me guess ... sports reporter Sam Borden has a daughter whom he loves very much.
I wrote about the sociology of why nice white people love the U.S. women's soccer team so much (and would never ever mention its lack of ethnic diversity) last year for VDARE:
Female soccer embodies many of the most deeply-held values of white American upper middle class families: gender equality; parental (especially paternal) investment in their children; organized practice instead of play; ambitions for college scholarships; tacit race and class segregation via spending; and chauffeuring … lots and lots of chauffeuring.
August 2, 2012
Olympic medal predictions
Economist Tyler Cowen has an article in Grantland predicting long-run trends in Summer Olympic medals totals based on population growth rates, age, and income. Cowen explains:
Economists have taken time out of their busy schedules of destroying the world to provide insights into which factors help make countries successful in their bids for Olympic glory.
The first factor is population. If athletic ability is roughly equally distributed around the globe, the more citizens you have, the more great athletes you are likely to have.
"If athletic ability is roughly equally distributed around the globe" then Tyler must be watching different Olympics than I have been watching since the 1960s. (Here's my summary of the impact of human biodiversity on the 2008 Olympics.) There's a less derisible way to phrase the notion that Tyler wants to make: "The more citizens you have, all else being equal, the more great athletes you are likely to have." No need to assert a hypothesis that's obviously sizably untrue, just trot out ceteris paribus, front and center.
It stands to reason, for example, that Australia will likely win more medals than New Zealand, simply because it has five times the population.
And that's why India wins 50 times as many medals as Australia. And then, as jody reminds us, there's always Bangladesh, population 150,000,000. From Wikipedia's striking article "Bangladesh at the Olympics:"
Bangladesh has competed in seven Summer Olympic Games. They have never competed in the Winter Games.
No Bangladeshi competitor has ever qualified for the Olympics; the country sends representatives to the Games thanks to the wildcard process.[1] Bangladesh is the most populous country in the world never to have won an Olympic medal.
Not only no medals, but "No Bangladeshi competitor has ever qualified for the Olympics ..."
It looks to me more like the countries that win a lot of medals are the countries that A) want to win a lot of medals and B) are pretty competent at what they do. The East Germans used to win a lot of medals, for example, but then, they'd almost conquered the world. Compared to invading Poland, systematically doping their women swimmers was child's play.
Moreover, it helps to have a lot of power and tradition to get your favorite sports treated well by the Olympics. You'll notice, for instance, that the Olympics hand out a ton of swimming medals, which benefit the U.S. and Australia in the medal counts. In track, there are medals for running and a couple for walking, but in swimming there are medals for four separate strokes, even though one, the butterfly is obviously inferior to the crawl (freestyle) on all dimensions. It's like if they gave out gold medals in track for a couple of silly walks choreographed by John Cleese.
From Cowen's summary on his blog:
1. Medal totals will become more diversified over time. The market share of the “top 10″ countries will continue to fall (it was 81 percent in 1988) as economic and population growth slows in the rich world. The developing world has greater room for rapid economic growth, and most parts of the developing world also have higher population growth. The Olympic playing field will get more and more level.
That's an easy prediction to make. My guess is that it will be less true than Cowen thinks. My prediction is that there will be a countervailing trend. In some ways, the Summer Olympics will become even more like the Winter Olympics: a refuge for the global upper middle class, who have the resources to pick obscure sports for their scions and then pay for intensive tutoring as a path to get them into American colleges.
In contrast, the burgeoning ranks of the global poor, will obsess over a handful of big money sports, especially soccer in Africa, but also cricket in South Asia, neither one of which is a good way to pile up a lot of Olympic medals. The word "diversity" tends to freeze the brains of people these days, but an obvious global cultural trend is away from diversity in sports toward soccer uber alles.
Most of the major sports in the world today were institutionalized by English-speakers. The Victorian Anglosphere had the right combination of eccentricity, cooperativeness, fair-play, and cultural prestige to impose their favorite games upon the world. There was a second efflorescence centered in post-War California that's now institutionalized in the X Games. Today's global poor are unlikely to have a similar creative impact. They are more likely to be followers rather than innovators in sport.
Many of today's Olympic sports will increasingly become museum pieces that will remain alive because wealthy people like the idea of their kind of people having an opportunity to win an Olympic gold medal.
2. Japan will continue to fade, mostly because of aging and population shrinkage.
Actually, rather than continuing to fade like it did in 1988 through 2000, Japan made a big comeback in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics. After finishing no higher than 14th in total medals from 1988 through 2000, Japan finished 5th and 8th in the last two Olympics. This is continuing today, with Japan having 24 medals already in 2012.
The Japanese will always have the problem that they are rather small in stature, but I have this vague hunch that the particular Japanese problems in the late 20th Century were twofold: the rise of China brought them added competition in events friendly to their racial physiology; second, they once seemed to have a lot psychological with choking, perhaps caused by the growth of suffocating media pressure in Japan. An American friend who has taught college in Japan for decades wrote me in 2000:
When Japanese athletes compete in the Olympics they feel they are representing, not only their country, but also their race and all its members. When a Japanese is leading in a race the announcer's voice becomes flushed with emotion. When interviewed after competition, swimmers and judo-ists say they can't remember what happened, so great was their emotion. In fact in the moments leading up to a competition, Japanese seem almost paralyzed by nervousness. They are not competing for themselves, but for their coach, their team, their family, and everyone. If they win, it was not because of their own effort, but because of everyone's support. Their greatest emotion then is relief from the relentless pressure. If they lose, they have let everyone down. They cannot be good sportsmen and congratulate their opponents with a smile because their minds are elsewhere thinking about how they will apologize to their supporters.
Perhaps the Japanese are learning to deal with this kind of pressure better.
3. Italy will follow Japan for similar demographic reasons, as well as because the Eurozone crisis will continue to cut into budgets, training and otherwise.
Perhaps, but Italy has had low birth rates for awhile, and yet their Olympic medal performance has been better in the last four Summer Olympics than in 1988-1992. I'm not saying that the general mechanism Cowen identifies isn't a factor, just that if you are going to cite two examples -- Japan and Italy -- you ought to bother to go to Wikipedia and find examples that have actually been in decline already. It makes your argument sound more plausible.
4. Since Rio is host to the next Olympics, Brazil should do better than expected due to the “pre-host” bump.
Maybe, but Brazil is close to the ultimate in soccer obsession. We'll see. The home country bump mostly has to do with host countries investing in boring minor sports to pick up easy medals (especially doubly easy women's medals). We'll see if the Brazilians care enough to bother.
5. Many African nations will rise. Currently about half of the approximately 1 billion people in Africa have a cell phone, and the middle class is growing. The chance that an African star will be spotted and trained at the appropriate age is much higher than before. Africa also continues to grow in population, and that means lots of young people. Most of us still think of African nations as very poor, but infant mortality has been falling and per-capita income rising across Africa for the better part of a decade now.
Is there much evidence that African countries are getting better at winning men’s Olympic medals? Sure, it sounds plausible in theory, but where’s the evidence? Ethiopia has been winning distance running medals since 1960 and Kenya since 1964, so this isn’t exactly a hot, late-breaking trend. In the sprints, the African Diaspora continues to do better than African themselves.
Nigeria, for example, started getting better at wining Olympic medals in 1992, but it still only averages three medals per Summer Olympics in this century, which isn't much for a country with 162 million West Africans. In contrast, Cuba has averaged 27 medals per Olympics in this century. Cuba wins a lot of medals because it's a totalitarian state with a sports-crazed dictator who is still waging the Cold War. Plus, it's a country with a lot of West African-descended athletes but the system is mostly run by white people, kind of like the SEC in college football.
My guess is that as more Africans get television in their homes, they’ll become even more obsessed with soccer and the World Cup rather than with the Olympics. Soccer experts have been predicting a major African breakthrough in the World Cup for a long time now, but it hasn’t happened yet.
6. China will level off and then decline as a medal powerhouse. In less than 15 years, the typical person living in China is likely to be older on average than the typical person living in the United States, in part due to the country’s one-child policy.
I think it will depend upon whether the Chinese state keeps pushing Olympic medals for nationalistic reasons. Even if they don't, the Chinese upper middle class might intelligently exploit obscure Olympic events as a way into American colleges. A big question is whether the Chinese will continue to get taller, making them more competitive in tall person's sports like swimming.
I'll make a lame prediction: the easy way to win medals is in women's events. Various countries and cultures will exploit this, although in an unpredictable fashion. In general, rich countries have pushed hard for adding more medals for women to pad their own totals. If the Olympics still had the same distribution of events as in, say, 1952, poor countries would win a larger percentage of medals. Training women for some obscure macho sport is a luxury that only rich countries and dictatorships can do.
One interesting question is what impact demographic trends will have on the U.S. Down through history, U.S. medal totals have been heavily carried by Californians, either natives or students / alumni of UCLA, USC, Stanford, etc. In 2008, Sports Illustrated counted 175 Californians on the U.S. Olympic team, versus 176 from the next seven states combined.
There are lots of reasons for this: California and Australia are similarly outdoorsy. California's culture has always been open to eccentric sports. California was a center of innovation in performance enhancing drugs going back to the 1950s. L.A. hosted summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984.
The new populations in California, however, aren't terribly athletic, however. There are 50,000,000 Latinos in the U.S. but they comprise only a small % of the U.S. Olympic team. Similarly, Mexico is a long term underachiever both in the Olympics and the World Cup, relative to its large population (113,000,000 within the borders of Mexico alone) and moderate income. And this is despite hosting both the 1968 Olympics and the 1986 World Cup.
August 1, 2012
"Women's" gymnastics: The World's Best Pixie Contest
Back in 2005, Michael Blowhard offered the best explanation I've heard in response to the perpetual heterosexual male question about why fashion models look like fashion models (i.e., tall, bony) rather than like strippers. All those 5'10" 120 pound Slovakians in the ads in women's magazines appeal to female readers' fantasies about being more gravity resistant, about being less weighted down by mortal flesh:
My own modest theory is that fashion magazines are to women what magazines about computers (and porno) are to guys -- they're fantasy books. It's just that women's fantasies -- many women's fantasies, anyway -- concern being photographed (ie., desired) and looking glamorous (ie., desirable). Where guys seem to enjoy imagining what they'd do to and with what's in the picture, women seem prone to imagine being what's pictured.
There's an additional fantasy element too, which is autonomy. Part of what women fashion-magazine fans seem to enjoy imagining is the fantasy of being found glamorous purely for its own sake. They seem to want to forget about the pleasing-guys element. There's a little defiance in the fantasy -- and you can see the defiance in many of the kicky poses and attitudes the models strike.
Perhaps something that helps explain the appeal of these images is that not only do many women enjoy imagining looking like these models, they enjoy imagining feeling like them too. I think guys often forget what a weighty and earthbound thing it can be, being a gal. There's so much dreariness to contend with: fatbags, hormones, moods, emotional agonies, etc. Women are weighed down by a lot of burdens, or at least they feel that they are, which is good enough for the purposes of my attempt at an explanation here.
The gals in the pages of fashion magazines and catalogs aren't weighed down by anything, not even flesh. They burst out of cabs, they leap onto sidewalks, they let loose with irrepressible guffaws, they're caught by insistent cameras looking their klutzy-but-charming best; they're tall and slim, and they're feelin' good and they're lookin' ready to dazzle. The girls in the pix get to enjoy the champagne-and-cocaine fun parts of being a grownup woman. They aren't saddled with fat asses and wobbly upper arms, with PMS, with no-good boyfriends and lecherous bosses, with imperfect features, with senseless mood swings, etc.
What the fashion mags are selling is, to some extent, a fantasy of play and freedom.
Which, come to think of it, is (in a general sense) pretty much what men's magazines sell too. Many guys enjoy indulging in fantasies about utopia -- a male utopia full of gadgets and sex-without-consequences. Many gals love indulging in fantasies about utopia too -- a female utopia, where the fantasizer is carefree and irresistably desirable 24/7.
My hunch: perhaps superslim-and-supertall are a visual representation of carefree-and-desirable.
By the way, that suggests an insight into why fashion models almost always say in interviews that they were tomboys who weren't interested in clothes and makeup when they were young. It's because it's sort of true. Females tend to stop growing in height at puberty, so very tall women tend to be the ones who reached puberty later, and thus kept growing for an extra year or two in adolescence, which is the time period they remember.
Gymnastics in the Olympics offers its huge number of female viewers a similar fantasy of weightlessness, but in a more presexual version of Twirling Tweens. It's a contest to identify the World's Best Pixie, just as the Winter Olympics figure skating finds the World's Best Princess.
Indeed, the Olympics had to impose a minimum age limit of 16 to keep the event from being dominated by little girls (Nadia Comaneci, for instance, was 14 in 1976 when she won all those gold medals). Not surprisingly, most of the winning American team this year is 16. Adult women are built more for comfort than speed.
Gymnastics currently seems to select for girls who, like fashion models, go through puberty late, but who, unlike models, stay short.
Gymnastics currently seems to select for girls who, like fashion models, go through puberty late, but who, unlike models, stay short.
July 30, 2012
The Gender Gap in Olympic-style events has been stable since 1983
Here's a 2010 study in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine making the same point about a wide array of Olympic events that I made about track in my 1997 National Review article:
WOMEN AND MEN IN SPORT PERFORMANCE: THE GENDER GAP HAS NOT EVOLVED SINCE 1983
Valérie Thibault, Marion Guillaume, Geoffroy Berthelot, Nour El Helou, Karine Schaal, Laurent Quinquis, Hala Nassif, Muriel Tafflet, Sylvie Escolano, Olivier Hermine and Jean-François. Toussaint
© Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (2010) 9, 214 - 223
ABSTRACT
Sex is a major factor influencing best performances and world records. Here the evolution of the difference between men and women's best performances is characterized through the analysis of 82 quantifiable events since the beginning of the Olympic era. For each event in swimming, athletics, track cycling, weightlifting and speed skating the gender gap is fitted to compare male and female records. It is also studied through the best performance of the top 10 performers in each gender for swimming and athletics. A stabilization of the gender gap in world records is observed after 1983, at a mean difference of 10.0% ± 2.94 between men and women for all events. The gender gap ranges from 5.5% (800-m freestyle, swimming) to 18.8% (long jump). The mean gap is 10.7% for running performances, 17.5% for jumps, 8.9% for swimming races, 7.0% for speed skating and 8.7% in cycling. The top ten performers' analysis reveals a similar gender gap trend with a stabilization in 1982 at 11.7%, despite the large growth in participation of women from eastern and western countries, that coincided with later- published evidence of state-institutionalized or individual doping. These results suggest that women will not run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men.
Signs of Intellectual Progress!
Back in the 1990s, I frequently read that women athletes were Closing the Gap with men; if trends continued, in the 21st Century Olympics, women would be just as fast as men. So, I did a big quantitative study on the size of the gender gap in track in all Olympics for a 1997 article in National Review entitled Track and Battlefield:
Everybody knows that the "gender gap" in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.
This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women, or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure, is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature, as well as to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.
When everybody is so sure of something, it's time to update the numbers.
I discovered, however, that the narrowing was only up through 1988. The fall of the Berlin Wall and better testing for artificial male hormones had caused the Olympic track gender gap to grow from the 1988 Olympics to the 1996 Olympics.
Slowly, my argument has carried the field over the last 15 years. Thus, when a Chinese woman swam the last 50m of her race on Saturday night faster than Ryan Lochte, the men's gold medalist, swam his last 50m of the men's version of the race, the New York Times reporter did not celebrate it as a Breakthrough for Female Equality, but instead treated it as presumptive evidence of something fishy going on:
China Pool Prodigy Churns Wave of Speculation
By JERÉ LONGMAN
At 16, the Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen is one of the youngest competitors in the Olympics and so far the most remarkable. What she has done in the pool is the water-based equivalent of what Usain Bolt did on the track four years ago in Beijing.
On Saturday night, Ye not only shattered the world record in the 400 individual medley, winning gold in 4 minutes 28.43 seconds, she also swam the final 50 meters faster than Ryan Lochte did in winning the men’s race.
It was really a little less amazing than it sounds -- Lochte was apparently taking it easy on the last length after blowing away the field earlier. But still ...
On Monday, Ye returned to the pool and set an Olympic record of 2:08.39 in the semifinals of the 200 individual medley, her best event.
There is nothing to indicate that she is anything more than a great swimmer from a country that holds about a fifth of the world’s population, a teenager who relies on the latest scientific training and the kind of adolescent certainty that makes her unaware of any limitations. The Chinese have pledged to obey the rules. And Ye dismissed any concerns about doping.
Yet women’s swimming does not permit itself naïve and untempered adulation. Not after the systematic East German doping of the 1970s and ’80s. Not after Chinese scandals in the 1990s. Not after Michelle Smith of Ireland won four medals at the Atlanta Games in 1996 under disputed circumstances and was later barred from competition for tampering with a urine sample.
The response to unsurpassed achievement now falls somewhere uncomfortably between amazement and incredulity, that gray area between celebration and suspicion.
“That’s pretty unbelievable,” David Sharpe, a Canadian swimmer, said of Ye’s finishing kick on Saturday, in which she covered her final 50 meters in 28.93, faster than Lochte’s 29.10. “No one really understands how that happened.”
Ye swam her final 100 meters of the 400 I.M. in 58.68 seconds. Lochte was only three-hundredths of a second faster. No one could immediately remember a woman closing faster than 61 seconds.
“Interesting,” said Natalie Coughlin, an American with 12 Olympic medals.
“Insane,” said Stephanie Rice of Australia, the 2008 Olympic champion and former world-record holder in the 400 I.M. “Fifty-eight is out of control.”
Lochte made a cordial joke about being outkicked. On Monday, Michael Phelps, who finished fourth in the men’s 400 I.M., smiled at a question about Ye’s closing speed and said: “She almost outswam me, too. We were all pretty shocked. It’s pretty impressive that she went that fast.”
No swimmers accused Ye, who is 5 feet 8 inches and weighs 141 pounds, of using illicit substances to fuel her kick. Medalists and, at random, other athletes are tested at the Games.
But John Leonard, an American who is executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association and has long voiced suspicions of doping in China, told The Guardian on Monday that he found Ye’s performance “disturbing.”
Caitlin Leverenz, an American who finished third in Ye’s heat in the 200 on Monday, said: “The Chinese have had a history in the past of doping, so I don’t think people are crazy to point fingers, but I don’t think that’s my job to do right now. I’m just trying to do my best.”
Frank Busch, national team director for USA Swimming, was more gracious, calling Ye’s final 100 meters on Saturday “more than remarkable, phenomenal.”
Was he concerned that what Ye had done was not legitimate?
“I would never go there,” Busch said.
Fifteen years ago, this healthy skepticism would have been rare.
July 19, 2012
Nate Silver isn't cynical enough
Nate Silver, a baseball statistics analyst turned electoral analyst, has an article in the NYT Magazine entitled "Let's Play Medalball."
It’s been almost a decade since the publication of “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s famous book-turned-movie about how the small-market Oakland Athletics used statistical artistry to compete against their (much) richer rivals. Billy Beane is still the A’s general manager, but here’s a modest proposal for his next act. He could become the head of another budget-strapped sports organization like, say, the Olympic Committee of Kyrgyzstan — or another small-market country with limited resources. Bishkek is nice this time of year!
How might Beane turn “moneyball” into “medalball”? Channeling him, I’ve identified three measures that, when weighted equally, suggest the sports in which the Kyrgyzstans of the world could direct their energy and resources to maximize their medal count.
The underlying problem with Silver's suggestions is a lack of cynicism. Anybody familiar with Olympic history would realize that lots of countries have tried to maximize medals over the years, often with much success.
The most obvious strategy is one followed by East Germany and China: it's much easier to win medals in women's events. Outside of gymnastics and a few other sports, the number of girls who, deep down inside, really want to do what it takes to win is smaller. So, focus on macho sports for women, such as women's weightlifting.
I recall an interview with a lady shotputter from China at a recent Olympics. She said she'd always wanted to be a veterinarian when she was a child, but a bunch of state athletic experts came to her elementary school, measured all the children in various ways, and then told her she was going to grow up to be a shotputter. She didn't want to be a shotputter, she wanted to be a veterinarian, but nobody cared about her opinion. So, now she was a lady shotputter.
Women's Olympic sports are full of uplifting and empowering stories like that.
Also, as East Germany demonstrated, giving your women lots of male hormones helps more than giving your men lots of male hormones.
For sports, such as "women's" gymnastics that have a minimum age for female competitors, because T&A slows down how fast a girl can spin, lie (as China does).
It also helps to have a totalitarian system. For example, Cuba is a poor country, but it wins lots of Olympic medals. One reason is because the government channels youths into various Olympic sports, instead of letting them all play soccer like in other countries. Cuba is too small to win the soccer World Cup, but it can win gold at less popular sports.
July 18, 2012
The White Jeremy Lin
The Washington Post reports:
Jeremy Lin’s move to Rockets could give team financial windfall from China
By Scott Soshnick, Published: July 17
July 18 (Bloomberg) -- Jeremy Lin’s marketing potential is best cultivated by the Houston Rockets, whose experience with Chinese center Yao Ming has them better positioned and prepared than any other National Basketball Association team to reap a financial windfall from Asia.
There's been much talk that the New York Knicks should have matched the Houston Rockets contract offer for point guard Jeremy Lin just on economic grounds alone. The widespread theory is that it would be easy for the Knicks to continue to profit off Chinese racial pride in Lin. I don't know how true that theory is (here's a post that argues that it's hard for the individual franchise, as opposed to the league, to cash in on overseas racial affinity).
But what strikes me as more interesting is that nobody in the press seems to think that there is anything objectionable about Chinese racial bias in favor of Lin.
Keep in mind that this isn't Chinese nationalism at work. Lin was born in America and his parent are from Taiwan. This is Chinese racialism. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
In contrast, eight years ago the great Larry Bird mentioned in an interview:
"… as we all know, the majority of fans are white America. If you just had a couple of white guys in there [in the NBA], you might get them a little excited."
In response, sportswriters went berserk:
Mike Vaccaro in the New York Post hyperventilated about "logic-challenged hayseeds like Larry Bird espousing his own strange brand of sociology."
Other outlets printed stories entitled "Bird's comments leave us at a loss," "When it comes to race, best to shut up," and "Bird comes off looking like bigot."
One interesting question is whether American whites really would be more interested in the NBA if there were more white stars.
For example, last winter a 21-year-old white rookie had a season fairly similar statistically to the 23-year-old Lin's injury-shortened 2012 season. But, in contrast, it made very little pop culture splash.
Lin played in 35 games, starting 25, while the Spaniard Ricky Rubio of the Minnesota Timberwolves played in 41, starting 31. They are both big (Rubio 6'4", Lin 6'3"), athletic, energetic point guards. Both seemed to greatly improve their teams (the Timberwolves had been an awful 17-65 the previous season), and both went down with season-ending injuries that appeared to badly hurt their teams, perhaps Rubio's even more than Lin's. Moreover, Rubio is a genius at passing (video here).
For each 36 minutes they played, Rubio (who is two years younger than Lin) was a little better than Lin in assists, steals, rebounds, personal fouls, free throw percentage, 3-point percentage, and was a lot better in turnovers. Lin, in contrast, was a lot better at total scoring and 2-point shooting percentage. Rubio is an awful 2-point shooter, while Lin, for a couple of weeks last February, was a lights out 2-point shooter, although he was regressing toward the mean as his season went on. Whether he can keep it up for a career will be an interesting question.
You could argue that the Lin story was just so much more interesting than the Rubio story because Rubio has been famous in European basketball circles since he was 14. (Here's a 2008 highlight video of Rubio's teenage exploits.) On the other hand, a former child prodigy / living legend finally arriving on the big stage ought to be pretty interesting. But outside of hard core NBA fans, nobody in America much cared about Rubio.
I think a couple of things are going on. While nobody has a problem with Chinese rooting for an American-born Taiwanese out of sheer racialism, practically zero American whites will admit even to themselves that they would find it cool to see a foreign white do well in the NBA just because they are white.
On the other hand, white Americans in the Obama Age are slowly, quietly getting a little tired of blacks. So, a Chinese-American "victim of stereotypes" makes an ideal proxy for white fans who are horrified by the thought of themselves being even a little bit racialist (but who, deep down, are). The only thing that could have made Lin more perfect for them is if he were also gay.
July 12, 2012
Sports viewership: Man Smart, Woman Smarter
From Science Codex, a summary of focus groups with 19 women in prime shopping years of 26-43:
Forty years into the Title IX era, female athletes have risen to prominence and populate the sports landscape. Female viewership, however, has not witnessed the same rise. What sports are women watching (or not), and why? Of the many events in this summer's Olympics, which will be favored by women viewers?
A recent study conducted by Erin Whiteside (University of Tennessee) and Marie Hardin (Pennsylvania State University) explores these questions. The results, published in Communication, Culture & Critique, show that women prefer condensed sporting events like the Olympics to sports with longer seasons, and that in selecting which particular Olympic sport to watch, women often select events that are seen as traditionally "feminine," like gymnastics and figure skating.
"Our research provides some insight into why the Olympics remain popular with women," said Hardin. "It's not just about the types of sports that are featured, although that is certainly a big part of it. It's also about the way in which the Olympics is delivered: in bite-sized chunks that may require just a 10-minute commitment to see an exciting sporting event, during a time of day when women feel they can make that commitment."
The study looked at conversations from female focus groups to determine how women consume sports media. The findings show that female spectatorship is often tied to gender roles and related domestic work.
Nearly all women surveyed expressed preference for the Olympics, for patriotic reasons as well as for the fast pace. "Women preferred the condensed style of coverage, something they described as easy to follow," Whiteside explains. The frequency of events during the Olympics, as well as the omnipresent discussion around it —from television to radio to the news—made it preferable for women who otherwise did not identify as avid sports viewers or didn't regularly have the time to devote to watching sports.
Women in the study favored sports that were more traditionally feminine rather than masculine. Participants generally saw little value in following women's sports and were especially uninterested in watching or following women in sports such as basketball, which showcase athletic displays that challenge traditional gender roles. Rather, they expressed a passing interest in sports such as gymnastics, tennis, and figure skating."
You have to admit that this is a more sensible way to consume sports fandom than, say, enrolling in a fantasy league. I certainly feel this way about the Winter Olympics. Every four years, there will be short track speed skating, which always starts out as two minutes of elegance and winds up with 15 seconds of Keystone Kops Kaos, with Apolo Anton Ohno inevitably winning some kind of medal, and the South Koreans fuming over Ohno's perfidious Nippo-American good fortune and threatening to expel the U.S. Army. I look forward to each Winter Olympics for this tradition, but I can't say I follow short track speed skating any other time.
July 9, 2012
Are races racist?
From the L.A. Times:
Is talking about slave eugenics a fireable offense? It depends.
By Dan Turner
When Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder opined about slavery, eugenics and black American athletes, it ended his career as a sports commentator on CBS. When American Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson made similar comments to a British newspaper, it left some wondering whether he'd face the same fate -- Johnson, too, works as a sports commentator, for the BBC.
The answer is, probably not. That's because Johnson, unlike Snyder, is African American and thus can say things about African Americans that whites can't ...
And so forth and so on.
Americans aren't very censorious about sex anymore, so what we get titillated and censorious about now is talking about race. But, that keeps us from actually thinking much about race. Nobody has much investigated the Snyder-Johnson hypothesis.
How much evidence is there for genetic selection of blacks in the New World? Let's look at the simplest relevant database for evaluating the Snyder-Johnson theory: Wikipedia's list of the 83 men who have run 100m in faster than 10 seconds. Of those 83, 81 are of at least partial black African descent, and most top New World sprinters are very African looking (i.e., not very admixed with other races -- e.g, Carl Lewis. So is Michael Johnson, for that matter, although he wasn't a 100m man.) All that's pretty good evidence that black African genes help.
Out of those 81, I count 14 runners born and raised in Africa. That 14 includes 12 running for African countries and two who grew up in West Africa but run as adults for Norway or Qatar.
My basic assumption is that in most complex situations nature and nurture are of roughly similar importance. North America and the West Indies have better nurture than Africa, so it's hardly surprising that a majority of black nine second men are from the Diaspora rather than from Africa. (Of course, in the short run, drugs matter: Jamaica's rise relative to the U.S. from 2004 to 2008 stemmed largely from America finally cracking down on drugs -- e.g., Marion Jones going to prison -- but Jamaica not. But, in the long run, this tends to work out.)
My basic assumption is that in most complex situations nature and nurture are of roughly similar importance. North America and the West Indies have better nurture than Africa, so it's hardly surprising that a majority of black nine second men are from the Diaspora rather than from Africa. (Of course, in the short run, drugs matter: Jamaica's rise relative to the U.S. from 2004 to 2008 stemmed largely from America finally cracking down on drugs -- e.g., Marion Jones going to prison -- but Jamaica not. But, in the long run, this tends to work out.)
The West African figures aren't as impressive as the 38 from the U.S., 11 from Jamaica, and five from Trinidad. Yet, excluding American and West Indian blacks, Nigeria leads the world with eight men under 10 seconds. In other words, Nigeria has four times as many sub 10 second men as the entire 6 billion people who aren't black African by ancestry.
So, from this data I can't reject my null hypothesis that blacks in the English-speaking New World are pretty much the same genetically as their distant cousins in West Africa, but just benefit from an environment more conducive to super-fast sprinting. But I can't confirm it either: the data fall right about where either notion is plausible but not persuasive.
Einstein said that explanations should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. The 100m dash data is congruent with a model with two, possibly three major factors:
- Nature -- On average, blacks tend to be faster runners for , especially men of West African descent in the sprints, the shorter the better.
- Nurture -- On average, the environment (defined broadly to include health, wealth, coaching, shoes, organization, drug test evasion sophistication, etc.) is better for sprinters in North America and the West Indies than in Africa.
What I can't tell is whether we need a third factor, which is differences in nature (genes) between West Africans and their distant cousins in the northern part of the New World. Because I don't see an obvious mechanism for selecting for faster sprinters, and because it's not obvious we need to find one, I'm not enthusiastic about this hypothesized third factor. But I can't totally reject it either.
Einstein said that explanations should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. The 100m dash data is congruent with a model with two, possibly three major factors:
- Nature -- On average, blacks tend to be faster runners for , especially men of West African descent in the sprints, the shorter the better.
- Nurture -- On average, the environment (defined broadly to include health, wealth, coaching, shoes, organization, drug test evasion sophistication, etc.) is better for sprinters in North America and the West Indies than in Africa.
What I can't tell is whether we need a third factor, which is differences in nature (genes) between West Africans and their distant cousins in the northern part of the New World. Because I don't see an obvious mechanism for selecting for faster sprinters, and because it's not obvious we need to find one, I'm not enthusiastic about this hypothesized third factor. But I can't totally reject it either.
June 30, 2012
It's all relative: Racial records in 100m dash
It's hard for humans to evaluate data from two different perspectives at once. For example, let's take another look at my old reliable data source, men's 100 meter sprint records.
Poking around at the Wikipedia page on National Records in Athletics, I come up with these estimates of racial records (I am no doubt missing some):
West African: 9.58 (Jamaica)
Southwest African: 9.86 (Namibia)
South East Africa: 9.89 (Zimbabwe)
European: 9.92 (France)
Australia Aborigine-White Mix: 9.93
East Asian: 10.00 (Japan)
East African: 10.26 (Kenya)
Pacific Islander: 10.26 (Fiji)
South Asian: 10.30 (India)
Papuan: 10.40 (Papua New Guinea)
As of ten days ago (it's currently prime time for track and field, so this probably has changed), 81 men had run under 10.00 seconds in the 100m dash, and all but two were black. So, that's a big difference.
On the other hand, consider the difference between the best time of Usain Bolt of Jamaica (the world record of 9.58 seconds) and the two Indians who have run India's national record time. Now, India is not a very sports-oriented society, but the difference is still only 0.72 seconds, or well under 10%. So, compared to, say, tortoises and hares, human racial groups are pretty similar at sprinting.
On the other other hand, these racial differences really do make a difference in the real world.
It's hard to keep all of that straight in one's head simultaneously, so most people don't. It's easier just to assume that a person who understands things you don't must be evil.
Black Italian soccer star Mario Balotelli: Nature v. nurture
Italy won the World Cup in 2006 with an all white team by playing their traditional miserly Mediterranean peasant style (imagine the mean, cunning farmers in Jean de Florette who outsmart city-slicker Gerard Depardieu -- and, yes, I know that's a French movie). They beat France's much more diverse team in the Final. The media had been in a frenzy promoting the French team as the triumph of diversity, but then France's Berber superstar Zinedine Zidane got suckered into going all Bob Hoskins on an Italian player and was kicked out and Italy won the draw on penalty kicks.
But, the times they are a changing. A reader writes:
You've got to get on top of this. Mario Balotelli (2 goals to upset Germany in the semifinals of the Euro tournament) has biological parents from Ghana, but was born in Italy and raised from an early age by a Jewish family in a wealthy Italian village. Sandra Scarr could only dream of case studies like this. Read the Wikipedia article on him and guess his IQ.
From Wikipedia:
He joined Manchester City in August 2010, where his performances and off-field activities have continued to be enigmatic and unpredictable.
To summarize a long list of tabloid tales, despite his privileged upbringing, Balotelli's not strong on what psychologists call "executive function." A legal name change to something like "Metta World Peace" would seem a distinct possibility.
June 14, 2012
The Fairway Flapper
Nobody ever believes me when I point out that playing golf was considered a hugely fashionable activity for women in the 1920s. How could women have been allowed to even play sports before Title IX, much less to have been encouraged to play by countless magazine covers?
But consider F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The girlfriend of the narrator is Jordan Baker, a prominent lady golfer who is in the sports and society pages a lot. Fitzgerald based her on Edith Cummings, one of the Big Four debutantes in Chicago in 1914. Fitzgerald knew Cummings because he fell in love with another one of the Big Four, Ginevra King, who is the inspiration for Daisy in Gatsby.
But consider F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The girlfriend of the narrator is Jordan Baker, a prominent lady golfer who is in the sports and society pages a lot. Fitzgerald based her on Edith Cummings, one of the Big Four debutantes in Chicago in 1914. Fitzgerald knew Cummings because he fell in love with another one of the Big Four, Ginevra King, who is the inspiration for Daisy in Gatsby.
Cummings won the 1923 Ladies Amateur and made the cover of Time Magazine in 1924. She was known as The Fairway Flapper.
Black women jocks notice Title IX is white plot
From the NYT:
Black and White Women Far From Equal Under Title IX
By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
... But the focus of Title IX has been gender equity, not racial equity in women’s sports. The most glaring outcome of the legislation is that white women — as athletes and administrators — have been the overwhelming beneficiaries.
... In Harlem, there was a sense — among some, although certainly not all — that the gap was in some ways a moat designed to protect white privilege, opportunity and power.
... She said she did not think that the inequities in sports opportunities were an accident. “These white women don’t want us to compete with them,” she said. “They want their kids to get the scholarships. They’re thinking about themselves. They give us all kinds of awards, but when it comes time to distributing the money, it’s a whole other story.”...
Yeah, pretty much. Upper middle class white people are damn good at figuring out what's in their own children's best interests. It gives daughters something to put on college applications and the best get a few college scholarships. Notice how they keep adding women's versions of white sports like water polo. (The Olympics added women's water polo in 2000.) I'm from L.A., I've played water polo in gym class, I had friends in high school who were star water polo players, and I'm still not interested in water polo.
“But in the grand scheme of things, Caucasian girls have benefited disproportionately well, especially suburban girls and wealthy Caucasian girls.”
According to a 2007 report by the United States Department of Education, among high school sophomores, white girls had a 51 percent participation rate in sports, compared with 40 percent for black girls. The percentages were lower for Asian/Pacific Islanders (34 percent) and Hispanics (32 percent).
The lack of access to sports at youth levels becomes manifest at the intercollegiate level, where African-American women are underrepresented in all but two sports: Division I basketball, where black women represent 50.6 percent of athletes, and indoor and outdoor track and field, where they represent 28.2 and 27.5 percent. They are all but missing in lacrosse (2.2 percent), swimming (2.0), soccer (5.3) and softball (8.2). They are an underrepresented rising presence in volleyball (11.6).
And, of course, Hispanic females are far more underrepresented in sports than black females, but my typing fingers are becoming heavy and sleepy as I merely try to grind out a conclusion to this sentence about how virtually nobody is interested in Mexican women athletes, especially Mexican women, and furthermore zzzzzzz ...
Anyway, Title IX's emphasis on women's versions of minor sports has set the clock back a century to a time when most sports mostly consisted of affluent amateurs getting together on Daddy's dime: e.g., back when the annual Harvard v. Yale football game was the 1912 equivalent of the Super Bowl for the small number of people who cared.
And, you know, maybe that's a good thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
