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Opinion | So You Want to 'Save Women's Sports'? - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.
  • The quest to block trans girls from competition has some prominent supporters.Former President Donald Trump embraced female athletes in February, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”
  • The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).
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  • what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports and invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?
  • The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s.
  • Women’s sports get attention when there’s an egregious slight against us, such as when the world champion women’s national soccer team sued for pay equal to the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the World Cup.
  • That means we get less coverage of us simply playing sports. When the journalist Brenna Greene looked for photos from the women’s basketball tournament this week, she found the N.C.A.A. hadn’t posted any.
  • Male players’ generous March Madness accommodations do not make news, because they are expected. That is because the men’s tournament gets extensive coverage, with the N.C.A.A. earning more than 20 times as much from the television rights for the men’s tournament as from its separate contract that includes rights to the women’s event. The system is set up this way. Investment follows, and inequality grows.
  • The only time I remember seeing an elite women’s track race on a front page in recent years is when one of the women in the race was framed as a threat.
  • It was not a coincidence that the athlete — Caster Semenya, a champion intersex sprinter from South Africa — is Black. Images of her competing incubated the American campaign against trans participation in sport, which is also racist.
  • If things were fair, any time we raved about LeBron James or Usain Bolt, we would also be watching Candace Parker pirouette with a basketball and Allyson Felix sprinting toward an unfathomable fifth Olympics.
  • At the last Olympics — where resources are equally divided among men’s and women’s teams — women earned more than half of American medals. You could argue that we deserve more resources, not less. And yet many Americans wring their hands over transgender inclusion. They are missing the point.
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Income Inequality Explains the Decline of Youth Sports - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it’s trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.
  • This isn’t a story about American childhood; it’s about American inequality.
  • “Kids’ sports has seen an explosion of travel-team culture, where rich parents are writing a $3,000 check to get their kids on super teams from two counties, or two states, away,”
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  • Expensive travel leagues siphon off talented young athletes from well-off families, leaving behind desiccated local leagues with fewer players, fewer involved parents, and fewer resources. “When these kids move to the travel team, you pull bodies out of the local town’s recreation league, and it sends a message [to those] who didn’t get onto that track that they don’t really have a future in the sport.” The result is a classist system: the travel-team talents and the local leftovers.
  • In short, the American system of youth sports—serving the talented, and often rich, individual at the expense of the collective—has taken a metal bat to the values of participation and universal development. Youth sports has become a pay-to-play machine.
  • As a general rule, rich parents in the United States don’t just spend more money on their kids; they spend a larger share of their income on their kid
  • If you divide American households into five quintiles by income, the richest group earns about five times as much as the poorest, but spends about seven times as much on kids—about $9,300 to $1,300 per child
  • Income inequality, vast at the household level, is even vaster at the child-investment leve
  • In his 2017 book, Dream Hoarders, the economist Richard Reeves wrote that economic mobility in the U.S. has been declining in the past few decades in part because of “opportunity hoarding.” For example, rich parents may pull special levers to get their kids into hyper-select schools, or elite internships, or exclusive entry-level jobs. In so doing, they—in effect— snatch precious opportunities away from the less fortunate.
  • those in the nation’s upper-middle class have “taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls”—physical walls and social barriers—that make it harder for any child not born into privilege to reach the same level of success.
  • “Many of the parents are not doing it with the intention to harm anyone, since they’re just trying to help their child,” Farrey said. “But they don’t think about the kids they’re leaving behind. They’re not thinking about what makes sense for the whole community.”
  • Well-off parents dedicate so much time and money to kids’ sports partly because of the college system, which dangles tantalizing rewards for the most gifted teenage athletes. In the 1990s, Division 1 and Division 2 colleges distributed about $250 million a year in full and partial scholarships to student athletes. Today that figure has grown to more than $3 billion.
  • Sports matter. As soon as some children enter second or third grade, their parents scramble to place them on youth travel teams, which will set them up for middle-school travel teams, which will set them up for high-school athletic excellence, which will make them more competitive for admissions and scholarships at select colleges
  • one might argue, even though super teams for gifted and sufficiently wealthy young people might leave disadvantaged kids behind, this is simply the price that society must pay for excellence. It’s a version of a familiar conservative economic argument about the general economy: The U.S. has the world’s smartest people, because we celebrate success and punish indolence; so we should cut taxes on the rich and unwind collectivist welfare programs, which only dampen the nation’s competitive mojo.
  • Norway’s youth-sports policies are deliberately egalitarian. The national lottery, which is run by a government-owned company called Norsk Tipping, spends most of its profit on national sports and funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to youth athletic clubs every year. Parents don’t need to shell out thousands to make sure their kids get to play. And play is an operative word: Norwegian leagues value participation over competition so much that clubs with athletes below the age of 13 cannot even publish game scores.
  • Norway is an athletic juggernaut. In the last Winter Olympics, the country won 39 medals—the most of any country in the history of the Games and nearly twice as many as the United States. It did so with a smaller population than Minnesota’s.
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Sports Are Returning to Normal. So Is Their Role in Political Fights. - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • American society is redrawing cultural norms and protections for citizens’ rights. It shouldn’t be a shock that sports is the most visible battleground.
  • But as we dream of a return to normalcy, what will we now expect from the games we love? A return to the mythical notion that sports should operate at arm’s length remove from the important issues of the day?
  • Then he zeroed in. We both did. We agreed that sports have become society’s prime cultural battleground for every hot-button social and political issue. No matter the subject — race, religion, sexuality, patriotism, the role of the police — the sports world is more powerful than ever as a venue for the often harsh hashing out of opposing views.
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  • Trump provided a powerful accelerant. He stoked the flames amid his ardent supporters who view sports as a last bastion for the good old days and their gauzy myths. The pandemic forced us inside and limited our lives — and also helped give activist athletes and their supporters more time to think and organize. (Hence the walkouts led by the N.B.A. and W.N.B.A. last summer.) All the while, the ubiquitous, hyperbolic power of the internet and social media continued to grow at breakneck speed.
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High School Football Inc. - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.
  • convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.
  • Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.
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  • IMG is at the forefront. It is trying to enhance its academy brand with football, perhaps the most visible sport. And it is applying a business model to the gridiron that has long been profitable for tennis and has expanded to golf, soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track and field. The academy has nearly 1,000 students from more than 80 countries enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade and postgraduation. About half the students are international.
  • Although it is private, IMG Academy has received more than $7 million from the Florida state budget over the past two years, according to news accounts. An additional $2 million was pledged by lawmakers in June but was then vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott.
  • The full cost of tuition and boarding for a year of football at IMG Academy is $70,800, although need-based financial assistance is available. School officials would not provide specific figures, but they said that payments by families could range from tens of thousands of dollars to a competition fee (between $3,750 and $4,500) to nothing.
  • IMG bought the academy in 1987, and it now covers more than 500 acres. Football began in 2013 as part of a $197 million campus expansion. Games are played in a 5,000-seat stadium outfitted with suites and a jumbo video screen. Digital screens depict each player’s name and face on his locker. Some N.F.L. players train there in the off-season, as do college players preparing for the pro draft.
  • The school, 45 miles south of Tampa, recruits football players from around the country, offering high-performance training, college preparatory courses, coaches with N.F.L. playing experience, facilities that resemble a small college more than a high school, and a chance to play a national schedule and on national television on ESPN against some of the country’s highest-rated teams.
  • “We run a business,” said Chip McCarthy, a co-managing director of IMG Academy. “We call it sales and marketing. Some people call it recruiting. We’re promoting our program. If you look at any private school that emphasizes sports, they’re typically doing it to promote their school. A lot are trying to survive. You’re not going to curtail that.”
  • Many high school football coaches and officials are closely following IMG Academy, wondering whether it portends the growth of similar academies or superleagues featuring top teams.
  • “I’m 50-50 split,” said John Wilkinson, the coach at Cocoa High School, who faced IMG Academy last week and said he would do it again. “They’re high school kids, just like us. We’re playing a football game. The other 50 percent thinks the competitive advantage they have is kind of alarming, if they’re allowed to recruit. But it is what it is.”
  • Other officials express fear that football might follow the path of high school basketball, which many feel has been corrupted by so-called diploma mills and the heavy influence of club teams and recruiting middlemen.
  • Mickey McCarty, who has coached three state championship teams at Neville High School in Monroe, La., and who lost a senior receiver to IMG Academy days before fall practice began, said the academy seemed less a traditional football team than a showcase for individual talent.
  • “It sounds to me like they’re playing for self, to be promoted and recruited, which takes away everything we stand for,” McCarty said.
  • Academy officials said that 186 athletes from IMG’s 2015 graduating class were playing various college sports, including six at Ivy League universities and four at service academies. Academics and athletics are intended to simulate the college experience with dormitory living, alternate-day classes, block scheduling and a focus on time management.
  • “I came here assuming it was going to be easy, it’s just going to be a football school, but I learned within the first week I was completely wrong,” said Kjetil Cline, 17, a senior receiver from Minnesota who plans to play football at the United States Military Academy. “That really opened my eyes about what college would be like, and I think it’s really prepared me for going to West Point and being able to handle that.”
  • “Academy teams, while they may be good teams and give great educations, it’s not something that we really believe in or would promote or espouse in any way. We think the high school experience is best served by the student-athlete who lives at home with his family and is part of his school, family and community.”
  • The players at IMG and their families consider that approach to be antiquated. For Patterson, a quarterback who won state championships the previous two seasons at a high school in Louisiana, IMG Academy is serving as a finishing school.
  • Patterson said he transferred to IMG in June to work on his speed, strength and conditioning. He plans to graduate in December, enroll for the spring semester at the University of Mississippi and challenge for the starting quarterback position there next fall as a freshman.“It’s definitely a professional decision,” he said.
  • teve Walsh, IMG Academy’s director of football, and Rich Bartel, the offensive coordinator, both played quarterback in the N.F.L. There are also sports psychologists, strength coaches and speed coaches to assist Patterson. He has at his disposal a 10,000-square-foot weight room; a sports science center to aid with hydration and nutrition; a biomechanics center; a vision lab, or “mind gym,” to enhance perceptual and cognitive skills; and a hospital for special surgery and sports rehabilitation should he be injured.
  • When IMG Academy played in Texas this month, it trained at Texas Christian University, and Wright, the Ascenders’ coach, said, “We’re thinking, ‘Hey, our practice fields are maybe a little bit better.’ ”
  • At the top levels of high school football, some teams routinely travel to play teams in other states. Games are frequently broadcast on regional or national cable channels. Some players are offered college scholarships as early as eighth grade.
  • “It’s all driven by money, and you can’t beat money,” said John Bachman Sr., who coached Patterson to state titles the past two seasons at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La. As a freshman, Patterson played at a high school in Texas.
  • Even so, he added, “I don’t think anything’s ever going to take the place of the local public high school or private school that pours itself into the kid, and it’s a family atmosphere and it’s about the team and sacrifice and so on.”
  • Sean Patterson Sr., Shea’s father, said, “If your son’s a great musician, you want to send him to Juilliard,” adding that for Shea, IMG Academy “is the spot” for polishing his football skills for college.
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Daily fantasy sports halted in New York, AG declares practice illegal gambling - Market... - 0 views

www.marketwatch.com/...ce-illegal-gambling-2015-11-10 fantasy sports new york gambling ban attorney general football illegal
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  • New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has ordered fantasy-sports operators Fan Duel Inc. and DraftKings Inc. to shut down in the state, saying that the games constitute illegal gambling and are subject to criminal penalties.
  • A handful of other states have previously said fantasy sports amounts to gambling and isn’t allowed. But Tuesday’s cease-and-desist order from New York is the first time fantasy-sports operators have been formally accused of criminal activity. It is the latest blow for the daily fantasy industry, dominated by FanDuel and DraftKings, which faces a federal criminal probe and scrutiny of state legislatures over the legality of their business model and the oversight of their operations.
  • “Daily fantasy sports is neither victimless nor harmless,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “And it is clear that DraftKings and FanDuel are the leaders of a massive, multibillion-dollar scheme intended to evade the law and fleece sports fans across the country.” FanDuel responded in a statement: “This is a politician telling hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers they are not allowed to play a game they love…. The game has been played — legally — in New York for years and years, but after the attorney general realized he could now get himself some press coverage, he decided a game that has been around for a long, long time is suddenly now not legal.”
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Tragedy Forges Alliance for Change - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Tragedy ForgesAlliance for Change After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family anda brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines in Britain.
  • As a heartbroken Mr. Robinson and his family left the Old Townhall Courthouse in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that day in September 2013, they were told they could slip out the back to avoid the news media. But Mr. Robinson was determined that his son should not die in vain, so he, along with his ex-wife, Karen Walton, and their families, exited through the front, spoke to a scrum of reporters and instantly landed among the most vocal advocates for concussion safety standards in Britain.
  • Within months, Mr. Robinson was meeting with politicians, sports executives, professional athletes and, most important, Dr. Willie Stewart, the foremost scientist on the subject in Britain who formed a bond with Mr. Robinson that has helped produce some of the most comprehensive concussion guidelines in the world.
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  • “It took something high profile to get people to understand, and it needed something in the media to make people aware,” Dr. Stewart said, referring to Benjamin’s death. “Even if it just means we’re preventing another Ben Robinson and not addressing dementia, that’s still very important. We’ve got to get things to change.”
  • Much of what Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart have accomplished is second nature in the United States, where concussions have been a growing part of the public dialogue for several years. Coaches and players in many sports are now taught that concussions, brain injuries resulting from a blow to the head or whiplash, can lead to headaches, memory loss, dizziness, sensitivity to light and other problems.
  • After an outcry from scientists, retired players and family members of injured and deceased athletes, the N.F.L. and other leagues have adopted protocols during games to detect concussions, pull players from the field, administer on-the-spot tests and detail when they can return to play.
  • hris Nowinski, a co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, an American nonprofit group that pushes for safe sports, said that concussion management in Britain lags five to six years behind the United States. Photo
  • “Scotland is a great example of a team of passionate advocates creating change in their community,” he said. “It’s a template that I hope others follow.”
  • Concussions were far from Mr. Robinson’s mind when his son joined his teammates from Carrickfergus Grammar School to play their rivals from Dalriada that day.
  • Soccer was Benjamin’s first love, but when he was 11, he took up rugby, which was mandatory at his new school. Initially, he did not enjoy the sport. But he warmed to it after winning the award for most improved player. He did strength and conditioning drills to add muscle, and arm wrestled with his father.
  • The night before the game, his son watched “Invictus,” the film about South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. He slept that night in his uniform. When his mother dropped him off at the field the next day, Benjamin flashed a thumbs-up sign.
  • But just minutes into the second half, Benjamin collided with another player, whose shoulder hit him in the chest, according to Mr. Robinson, who obtained a DVD of the match from the police. His son’s head whipped back, and he fell. The coach came to look at Benjamin, who was on the ground for about 90 seconds, and helped him to his feet. A doctor who was watching his son play for Dalriada briefly walked onto the field but then turned back.
  • As time ran down, Benjamin made a tackle and then collapsed. The game was stopped. Ms. Walton ran onto the field, where Benjamin’s teammate told her that he was out cold. He was rushed to Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.
  • When Mr. Robinson and his wife, Carol, arrived at the hospital, he knew the situation was dire from the faces of the staff. His son was on life support. The doctors said that his brain injury looked like it was sustained in a car accident and that he had a slim chance of surviving.
  • Initially, though, a police investigator deferred to the schools when it came to gathering comments from Benjamin’s teammates and opponents. Officials at Carrickfergus declined to discuss the case.
  • Ms. Walton and Mr. Robinson, though, had to piece together much of what happened on their own. One break came while Ms. Walton was visiting her son’s grave — which she said she did every day — and met one of his teammates, who was out jogging. He told her that Benjamin had been knocked out during the match, not just hit at the end, as had been contended.
  • The big break came when a police officer gave Mr. Robinson a copy of a video taken of the match by a student. Mr. Robinson watched the shaky footage repeatedly and confirmed that his son suffered not one big blow, but at least three, and that the coach attended to him several times.
  • Yet she effectively absolved the coach and referee, who were not “made aware of Benjamin’s neurological complaints,” even though the coach can be seen on the video checking on him after a hit during the match. She implied that Benjamin could have let them know about his condition, even though experts say concussion victims often cannot adequately communicate what they are experiencing.
  • Soon after, Mr. and Ms. Robinson, Dr. Stewart and James Robson, the chief medical officer of Scottish Rugby, met with Scotland’s sport and education officials to lobby for change. A concussion-awareness leaflet was produced at the beginning of 2014.
  • It has been an unlikely road for Mr. Robinson and Dr. Stewart, an avid bike rider with no experience as a sideline doctor. But about five years ago, even before Benjamin’s death, Dr. Stewart began to get calls from former professional players and had conversations with Scottish Rugby as it tried to address brain trauma and degenerative brain disease.
  • Still, some sports executives have anonymously challenged Dr. Stewart. In one match in April in London, Oscar, the Brazilian star player on Chelsea who is known by one name, collided violently with the goalkeeper yet was not immediately taken out of the game. There are no concussion spotters at Premier League matches, but team and league officials could watch a replay of the game later. That is why Dr. Stewart — an adviser to the Football Association — was dismayed that Oscar was in uniform three days later, violating the league’s return-to-play guidelines that require at least six days of rest.
  • “I don’t need to stand up in front of a conference of sports medicine and be personally criticized,” he said. “But then I’ll get a call from Peter, who is enthused about something we’ve done with the leaflets, or some research collaborators who are keen to move forward, and I say, ‘Ah, for all the small minds that are critical and obviously trying to deny the inevitable signs, there are a whole bunch of people who are having a positive effect on it.’
  • On a chilly evening in late October, with teenagers practicing on a nearby field, Lianne Brunton, the club’s physical therapist, showed off the test on a tablet computer. At the start of the season, hundreds of youth and adult players are timed as they read aloud a series of numbers on several screens. If a player is suspected of having a concussion during a match, he or she is taken off and asked to read the numbers again. Players who take longer are evaluated further.
  • The test, which is widely used in the United States, is another example of how the grass-roots campaign to improve safety standards after Benjamin’s death has changed attitudes.
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Supreme Court To Hear Arguments On NCAA Limits On College Athlete Pay : NPR - 0 views

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  • The U.S. Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it would review a case testing whether the NCAA's limits on compensation for student athletes violate the nation's antitrust laws.
  • The court's unusual expedition into sports law comes amid an increasing national battle between athletes and the schools they play for over player compensation. On one side, the NCAA says it is just trying to protect amateurism, and to maintain a basic competitive equality between schools that play each other. On the other side, players argue that the top athletic teams are operating a system that acts as a classic restraint of trade in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
  • And at the heart of the case, says sports law expert Gary Roberts, is this question: Are these young men and women "employees or are they students?"
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  • Those students, he says, "ought to be benefited. And by the way, a majority of those students are African American, and that's an issue that can't be ignored in this discussion either."
  • Popular sports bring in money for other athletic programs But at the same time, Roberts notes the NCAA system has benefited students who have scholarships to play other sports
  • The case before the Supreme Court involves 126 teams that play big-time football and men's and women's basketball. But for all of college sports, Roberts and other sports law experts say, the lower courts have left these issues in a legal mess.
  • California, for instance, passed a law last year effectively requiring schools to allow athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses. After the law was enacted, the NCAA abruptly reversed its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early next year.
  • its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early nex
  • images
  • A Supreme Court decision siding with the NCAA would likely fortify the NCAA's effort to maintain tighter restrictions on benefits for big-time college and basketball players. A decision holding that the NCAA has gone too far would likely lead to more benefits for players whose hard work and frequent injuries allow the schools they play for to reap billions in TV and other revenue.
  • While that revenue sometimes benefits lesser-known sports and players at those schools, many experts say it more often benefits coaches and assistant coaches who are paid tens of millions of dollars, and allows schools to spend millions on mammoth stadiums and lavish locker rooms.
  • Last week 60 minutes reported that "at least 30 universities have cut almost 100 programs: soccer, squash, golf, gymnastics. Football powerhouse Clemson cut men's track and field. Stanford eliminated 11 sports. Schools are honoring existing scholarships, but more than 1,500 student-athletes, both men and women, will no longer have a team to compete for."
  • Zig-zagging through this legal minefield will be difficult for the Supreme Court, to say the least. And it may well issue a narrow opinion that still leaves most of these questions unresolved. But the fact that the justices decided to take on the this case, when it has dodged similar ones in the past, indicates they are at least serious about the issues.
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Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history' | World news | T... - 0 views

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  • google_ad_client = 'ca-guardian_js'; google_ad_channel = 'worldnews'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; // Comments Click here to join the discussion. We can't load the discussion on theguardian.com because you don't have JavaScript enabled. if (!!window.postMessage) { jQuery.getScript('http://discussion.theguardian.com/embed.js') } else { jQuery('#d2-root').removeClass('hd').html( '' + 'Comments' + 'Click here to join the discussion.We can\'t load the ' + 'discussion on theguardian.com ' + 'because your web browser does not support all the features that we ' + 'need. If you cannot upgrade your browser to a newer version, you can ' + 'access the discussion ' + 'here.' ); } comp
  • Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".
  • Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,
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  • "Even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a pretty massive challenge on its hands trying to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms. Given the resources that Britain had available in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when Britain could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability."
  • "Creating an army more or less from scratch and then sending it into combat against the Germans was a recipe for disastrous losses. And if one asks whether this was the best way for Britain to deal with the challenge posed by imperial Germany, my answer is no.
  • He continued: "The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain's military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war.
  • He concedes that if Britain had stood back in 1914, it would have reneged on commitments to uphold Belgian neutrality. "But guess what? Realism in foreign policy has a long and distinguished tradition, not least in Britain – otherwise the French would never complain about 'perfidious Albion'. For Britain it would ultimately have been far better to have thought in terms of the national interest rather than in terms of a dated treaty."
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Republicans And Democrats Largely Oppose Transgender Sports Legislation, Poll Shows : NPR - 0 views

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  • In at least 30 states nationwide, lawmakers have introduced bills aiming to keep transgender girls and women from participating on girls' and women's sports teams. These type of restrictions have become a major culture war battle, with Republican lawmakers being the loudest proponents of such bills, while Democrats often oppose them.
  • Republican voters aren't that enthusiastic about those proposed laws, even while they do have reservations about transgender sports participation.
  • Just 29% of Republicans said they "support a bill that prohibits transgender student athletes from joining sports teams that match their gender identity." Moreover, there was no significant party divide: Similar shares of Republicans, Democrats and independents also said they oppose the bills.
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  • While there is no apparent partisan divide on legislating the issue, there is a pronounced partisan divide on transgender sports participation itself
  • This suggests that while many Republicans and some independents may feel strongly about keeping transgender girls off girls' teams, they have a much smaller appetite for states being involved in that issue.
  • Political party isn't the only major dividing line when it comes to opinions on LGBTQ issues; age also seems to play a significant role. Fully 78% of millennials and people in Generation Z support the Equality Act; progressively smaller shares of Generation X (61%), baby boomers (54%) and people in the silent and greatest generations (46%) support it.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/sports/sports-coronavirus-impact.html - 0 views

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shared by agrubb5 on 28 May 20 - No Cached
  • “Sports has always been the arm around the shoulder at the end of major trauma,” said Andy Dolich, who ran business operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors, Oakland A’s and the San Francisco 49ers. “Now sports is right in the middle of it.”
  • agrubb5 on 28 May 20
     
    The Financial Impact of the Pandemic on Sports
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6 Scandals That Rocked the Winter Olympics - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...s-controversy-harding-kerrigan winter olympics history
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  • The Winter Olympics have been marked by controversy and scandal since the first Games in 1924. From cheating by East German lugers to the sordid Tonya Harding figure skating fiasco, here are six events that made headlines:
  • At the Games in Chamonix, France, Norwegians contended the 500-meter speedskating final had been mistimed in favor of American Charles Jewtraw, a heavy underdog who won the gold.
  • Jewtraw's win, by 1/5 of a second, stunned him. too. In a 1983 interview with Sports Illustrated, Jewtraw said he had never competed in the 500 prior to the gold-medal race and hadn't even trained for the Games.
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  • Schranz’s supporters contended the mystery man had been a French policeman or soldier who had purposely interfered with the run to ensure Killy’s victory. The French hinted Schranz had made up the story."I was descending and I saw a dark shadow ahead of me," Schranz said at a news conference. "I wanted to avoid it, and I stopped. It was apparently a ski policeman."
  • The women's luge competition at the Grenoble Games was all but a lock for East Germany. Defending champ and gold-medal favorite Ortrun Enderlein stood in first; teammates Anna-Maria Müller and Angela Knösel were second and fourth. 
  • “A jury member acted immediately,” International Luge Federation president Bert Isatitsch said, according to UPI. "He went to the starting line and put his hands on the runners. They were warm."Isatitsch said East German officials used "foul language" when notified of the disqualification. “One waved his arms around, shouting and screaming," he told UPI. 
  • A month before the 1994 Winter Games, a man wielding a metal baton attacked gold- medal favorite Kerrigan during a practice at the U.S. Nationals, paving the way for Harding to win the event and to qualify for the Olympics. Soon afterward, however, it was discovered that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, had planned the attack. With Kerrigan recovered—and Harding allowed to compete despite her not-yet-confirmed connection to the crime—the women’s figure skating competition became the hottest event at the Olympics. TV ratings soared.
  • Ice dancing got a dose of spy games in Nagano, Japan, when a Canadian judge secretly taped a conversation with another judge about picking winners before the competition.After her complaints to officials had been brushed aside, Jean Senft recorded Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov discussing skater placements as proof of her accusations. During the call, Balkov said he would vote for Canadians if Senft voted for a Ukrainian pair."The athletes are not competing on a fair playing field," Senft later told CBC News. "This isn't sport. Somebody had to get proof."
  • were made. (Ice dancing was not removed from Olympic competition.) "If [cheating] happens at the world championships in some small town, nobody notices," Pound said, according to The New York Times. "But in the Olympics, hundreds of millions of people are watching."
  • The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze edged Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier for the gold medal. But Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French judge, came forward, saying she was pressured by the French ice sports federation to put the Russians first. “I knew very well who would vote in favor of the Russians and who would vote in favor of the Canadians," she told Reuters. "I was almost certain that I was the one who would award the Olympic title. What I feared would happen really did.”
  • Le Gougne was suspended from judging for three years and banned from the 2006 Winter Games. The scandal led to sweeping judging reforms in the sport. 
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Colleges Increasing Spending on Sports Faster Than on Academics, Report Finds - NYTimes... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-academics-report-finds.html university sports spending academics
shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Even as their spending on instruction, research and public service declined or stayed flat, most colleges and universities rapidly increased their spending on sports, according to a report being released Monday by the American Association of University Professors.
  • “Increasingly, institutions of higher education have lost their focus on the academic activities at the core of their mission,” the association said in its report. “The spending priority accorded to competitive athletics too easily diverts the focus of our institutions from teaching and learning to scandal and excess.”
  • this report suggests that our worst fears are coming to pass,”
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  • “The American culture is so in love with athletics that even though many people know the right thing to do, they can’t do it.”
  • the growth in educational spending trails far behind that of athletic spending — especially at community colleges and Division II and III institutions.
  • Inflation-adjusted athletic spending also increased, by 24.8 percent, at public four-year colleges in all divisions in those years, while spending on instruction and academic support remained nearly flat, and public service and research expenditures declined
  • The fastest growth in athletic spending was at Division III schools without football programs, where median inflation-adjusted spending for each student-athlete more than doubled from 2004 to 2012.
  • Even colleges without powerhouse sports programs, she said, are racing to build their athletic programs as a recruitment tool.
  • “My hypothesis, and it’s not yet fully proven, is that these are mostly schools that are very tuition-dependent, and they’re spending more on sports to recruit more students,” Ms. Thornton said. “But I think it’s ludicrous.”
  • Faculty salaries increased 2.4 percent last year, on average, while top administrators received large raises.
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A Son of Football Calls His Mother - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...football-calls-his-mother.html football sports injuries brain injjury culture
shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • These articles are important, & I'm glad the Times is bringing this issue to awareness. However, the hyper focus on football alone creates a misperception that only football is dangerous & risky. That is simply not true. Parents here who pat themselves on the back for not enrolling their child in football - or in leveling charges of child abuse on those who do - are the same parents who enroll their child in: lacrosse, ice hockey, cheerleading, competitive soccer, skiing, ice skating, wrestling, & many other sports that have very high risks of brain injury as well. I realize some of the spotlight is on football because of all the money involved, but I have to wonder if it's also because football is filled with African American & lower income parents.It's definitely disgusting how college football uses their players like meat, risking players' health & reaping millions. By the time they're at NFL level, it can be egregious. But let's not lose sight of the risks in so many competitive sports. My friend's daughter actually broke her neck because of the style of dance where you whip your head all over (most competitive hip hop). When I taught high school, the worst concussions I saw were girls basketball & wrestling. Wrestling had the highest concussion rate, far over football. And they were treated less.The bigger issue is our culture, which awards so much $ in scholarships & extracts so more $ for those who risk nothing. And all for sports. Not learning. Sports.
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'Mr. Kraft' and the Sports Owner God Complex - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-owner-god-complex-11551018156 celebrity rich status culture us sports
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  • They are the owner. Or, rather The Owner. In professional sports culture, we have elevated ownership above all else. The owner may be a “good” owner or a “bad” owner, they may be hands-off, or muck around on draft day, but on the food chain of sports, they are at the apex.
  • Owning a sports team turns an ordinary rich person into a celebrity.
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Sports Direct's Mike Ashley apologises for poor Covid-19 actions | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ises-for-poor-covid-19-actions crisis us culture
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  • Mike Ashley has issued a public apology after his spat with the government about trying to keep his Sports Direct chain open when non-essential businesses were ordered to close.
  • “I am deeply apologetic about the misunderstandings of the last few days,” Ashley said in an open letter. “Given what has taken place over the last few days, I thought it was necessary to address and apologise for much of what has been reported across various media outlets regarding my personal actions and those of the Frasers Group business.”
  • Ashley said on Friday: “Our intentions were only to seek clarity from the government as to whether we should keep some of our stores open. We would never have acted against their advice. In hindsight, our emails to the government were ill-judged and poorly timed, when they clearly had much greater pressures than ours to deal with. On top of this our communications to our employees and the public on this was poor.”
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  • Ashley also praised his workers, some of whom were made to come in on Tuesday for tasks such as stocktaking.
  • The government subsequently added bike shops to the list of essential businesses that can stay open. Ashley’s Evans Cycles is considering reopening its doors as a result.
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Transgender athlete bills put trans girls at center of America?s culture wars, again - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-afbe-9a11a127d146_story.html transgender athlete culture trans sports
shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.
  • “What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”
  • But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender
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  • The Montana youth athlete bill passed the state House on a 61-to-38 vote and is moving to the Senate.
  • Democratic opponents of these bills and some political experts charge that the legislative efforts amount to a political power play to rally the conservative base around an issue they see as threatening traditional gender roles.
  • The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group for socially conservative causes, published a blog post this week that charges transgender athletes with hijacking competitive opportunities and calls Biden’s executive order a threat to “gut legal protections for women and girls.”
  • “It’s an easy way for them to show that Democrats have just gone over the edge, that there is no limit to how far they will push these radical ideas.”
  • For generations, anti-trans messaging in the United States has largely focused on transgender women rather than transgender men,
  • Trantham said one of the first people she notified when she decided to file the bill was the head of the LGBTQ advocacy group South Carolina Equality.“I want to make sure you guys understand this is not me trying to hurt the transgender community,” Trantham said she told him. “This is me trying to protect girls in women’s sports.”
  • School athletics are “an extremely competitive environment,” said Trantham, whose daughter was a high school basketball player. “If it was my daughter and she needed that scholarship to go to college, it would be very important to me that she was playing on an even playing field.”
  • “I’ve seen arguments that this will be the end of women’s sports,” said Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and bioethicist. “If so, it should have ended already.”
  • “Values always matter and there’s a divide in our country over values,” Deutsch said in a phone interview Thursday. “I stood up and said this is not a hate bill. It’s about biology. It’s science. You can’t change your sex. You can look like a boy, you can take hormones and sex operations but it doesn’t make you a boy. Your gender can be a boy, but you can never change your sex.”
  • while public opinion polls across the board show support for transgender military service and other transgender rights, support softens when it comes to public accommodations and sports, Haider-Markel said.
  • LGBTQ activists and many pediatricians say that the medical treatments transgender youth receive to align their bodies with their gender identity mitigate the physical disparities in athletics.
  • Serano argues that the disparity is rooted in sexism and misogyny, and the idea that “there’s a certain amount of societal respect for wanting to be a man.” Even when it comes to cisgender children, she said, “people are a lot more disturbed, concerned by feminine boys than they are by masculine girls.”
  • bills about transgender athletes trigger the idea that “this is wrong; this male person is in this space that is supposed to be segregated to protect girls and women,
  • “None of these bills are based on real-life problems,
  • Transgender cross-country runner Juniper Eastwood started competing for the women’s track team at the University of Montana after she began presenting as female and taking testosterone suppression medication. She said running improved her mental health. At one point, Eastwood said, she had contemplated suicide so she wouldn’t have to deal with knowing she was transgender.
  • Eastwood said she’s hopeful that a new generation of conservatives will learn to understand who transgender people are, just as many conservatives have come to accept the gay community.“It’s just going to take a long time,” she said. “It won’t happen this year.”
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How to predict winners at the winter Olympics | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...winners-at-the-winter-olympics culture policy
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  • The strongest countries have arrived with ambitious medal targets and will be keeping track of their chances of matching those tallies throughout the games. Until recently working out who was likely to win an Olympic event was a guessing game based on hunches and limited data.
  • Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.
  • The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.
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  • A handful of financial institutions produced them when Rio de Janeiro hosted in 2016, using a mixture of macroeconomic indicators and performances at previous Olympics to forecast total medal hauls for each country.
  • Gracenote’s distinguishing feature is the ability to produce quantitative analysis for each event.
  • The company has created a performance index that tracks around 500 events across the various sports in the summer and winter Olympic programmes.
  • Gracenote still uses the old system to produce its public medal table, which also deals in absolute forecasts, rather than fractional ones. If a French athlete, say, is the most likely to win an event, France gets awarded one gold medal in the table, even though the true probability of the athlete winning gold is less than 100% and his chances of claiming silver and bronze are greater than 0%.
  • the Elo rating system, which was developed for chess by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian physicist. The formula exchanges ranking points from the loser to the winner, with greater rewards for beating stronger opponents. The difference in ratings points between two rivals can be easily used to calculate the probability that one will beat the other.
  • Yet only two events on the winter Olympics programme, curling and ice hockey, involve head-to-head contests.
  • Gracenote devised an Elo-style mechanism with modifications. Rather than simply measuring whether an athlete wins or loses a competition, the system predicts the share of opponents that he beats. If he finishes higher than expected, based on his previous rating and the strength of the field for the competition in question, his rating improves.
  • Those that compete in teams have their scores blended with their compatriots. And for those that participate in a number of events, such as Ms Dahlmeier, results in related disciplines affect multiple ratings. A strong performance in the biathlon sprint, a group race, would boost her ranking in the pursuit, a staggered race, for example.
  • The best way to answer that question is to take every previous contest in the sport and analyse how past results correlate with future success.
  • The bans have benefited Norway most, as the country will likely gain of the five of the 12 foregone medals—enough to nudge it ahead of Germany into first place in terms of total medals won.
  • Mr Gleave notes that the favourite only wins about 30% of the time, a lower share than in any other winter sport. Ms Dahlmeier’s rating has dwindled a little, but not by enough to suggest that last year’s record breaker has become this year’s flop.
  • Gracenote’s research into age curves for each sport shows that the best biathletes can maintain their peak performance into their early 30s (see chart). Expect to see more event-by-event forecasting at future Olympics, too.
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DeSantis courts further controversy by honoring swimmer who finished second to Lia Thom... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...athlete-debate-florida-swimmer controversy swimmer us politics
shared by lilyrashkind on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The Republican governor, already embroiled in a fight with Disney over the state's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill, claimed that the NCAA is "perpetuating a fraud" and declared University of Virginia freshman and Florida native Emma Weyant the "rightful winner" of the race.Weyant had finished about 1.75 seconds behind Thomas, who has come to personify the ongoing discourse on trans women's participation in sports and the balance between inclusion and fair play."The NCAA is basically taking efforts to destroy women's athletics," the Republican governor said in a news conference. "They're trying to undermine the integrity of the competition and crown someone else."
  • field.Read MoreTuesday's proclamation comes against the backdrop of DeSantis' showdown with Disney over the controversial Florida bill that would ban classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity before fourth grade. A day after Disney CEO Bob Chapek publicly condemned the legislation -- which DeSantis has said he will sign into law -- the Florida governor ripped Disney as a "woke corporation" to a room of supporters.
  • "In Florida, we reject these lies and recognize Sarasota's Emma Weyant as the best women's swimmer in the 500y freestyle," he said in a tweet.
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  • While sex is a category that refers broadly to physiology, a person's gender is an innate sense of identity. The factors that go into determining the sex listed on a birth certificate may include anatomy, genetics and hormones, and there is broad natural variation in each of these categories. For this reason, critics have said the language of "biological sex," as used in DeSantis' proclamation, is overly simplistic and misleading.A 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine that reviewed several related studies found "no direct or consistent research" on trans people having an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers, at any state of their transition, and critics say postures like DeSantis' will only add to the discrimination that trans people face, particularly trans youth.
  • So far this year, Iowa and South Dakota have approved legislation banning transgender women and girls from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender at accredited schools and colleges. And last year, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia enacted similar sports bans, infuriating LGBTQ advocates, who argue conservatives are creating an issue where there isn't one.
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Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation - The New ... - 0 views

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  • Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation
  • Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
  • The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.
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  • Mr. Baranov has not been charged with any crimes, and he has in the past been depicted as a whistle-blower who exposed cheating and corruption in track and field.
  • The investigation is part of the Department of Justice’s broader inquiry into doping schemes that have already led to penalties against scores of Russian athletes and officials.
  • Grigory Rodchenkov, the former longtime head of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, had told The Times that the Russian government ran an elaborate program to help the country’s athletes use banned, performance-enhancing drugs and go undetected.
  • three dozen Eastern Europeans disciplined in recent months, after retests of their urine samples from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games.
  • United States law enforcement officials have focused on the agents behind those athletes, and the money they may have routed through American banks
  • Mr. Baranov told sports ethics investigators in 2014 that Ms. Shobukhova had been subjected to extortion and paid half a million dollars to top track and field officials to conceal her doping violations, enabling her to compete in the 2012 Olympics
  • The New York City Marathon spokesman said that no Russian athletes were registered to run on Sunday, in keeping with guidelines from global officials who have barred Russian athletes from competition.
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Will 7-1 Traumatize Brazilians? -- Science of Us - 0 views

nymag.com/...-cup-implosion-brazilians.html brazil football
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  • The problem is that soccer dominance is an important part of Brazil's sports identity, and this loss cut to the core of it. As Eric Simons, author of The Secret Lives of Sports Fans, explained in an email, "If you're Brazilian, your identity is based on self-concept that you're always the best soccer team in the world, and you know that everyone else knows it, so you're proud." So the pain of losing isn't, in this case, that of an underdog happy to be there, and for the Brazilians to lose in this manner is to collide violently against all sorts of national expectations and self-conceptions.
  • "What happens when your pride, self-concept, and identity are suddenly obliterated in front of the entire world?" said Simons. "I don't know. I don't know if anyone does; this is, in sports, something of an unprecedented self-esteem catastrophe. Has anyone that good, with that much expectation, every lost that badly before, with so many people watching?" The answer to that question may be no, which would mean we're in somewhat uncharted sports-trauma territory.
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