sports


Figure Skating Queen YUNA KIM
The opening ceremony of the Olympics is not short on inspiring imagery for the many millions who tune in around the globe. As the host country provides the spectacle and entertainment, athletes representing their respective countries march one after the other to cheers of the crowd. With such cooperation in the name of athletic competition, the Olympics can’t help but be a large step towards worldwide transparency, peace and equality. Right?

In a recent New York Times editorial, David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University, suggests otherwise. Drawing on analysis of the 1936 Berlin Games, Large explains that there is little evidence that the Olympics works to open up repressive regimes. In fact, the inspiring tales of the Olympics taming Hitler’s Nazi regime are mostly myth.

The Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

While few would argue that the Berlin Olympics transformed Nazi Germany into the ideal international partner, it is commonly said that Hitler did reduce persecution of Jewish people during that time.

But the truth is more nuanced. Although the regime did discourage open anti-Semitism, this directive pertained only to Berlin. Outside the capital, the Nuremberg Laws remained in full effect.

Large explains that through employing deceitful tactics throughout the Olympics the Nazis learned how was easy it was to mislead the global public through superficial changes.

The article continues with Large deconstructing other pervasive myths about the value of the Berlin Games, including the well-told stories about the impact of Jesse Owens’ dominance. According to Large, the black American track-and-field athlete, did not simply force the Germans and people everywhere to rethink negative views towards black people; rather, the victory simply led to the group in power using the success to enforce negative views.

[T]he publicity surrounding black athletes’ success simply taught the Nazis how to refine existing stereotypes. Instead of arguing that those athletes were physically inferior, they disparaged them as freaks who, because of their “jungle inheritance,” were able to jump high and run fast.

Large’s presentation of “the truth behind the 1936 Games” effectively calls into question many of the underlying assumptions about the positive impacts of holding the Olympics and other large international sporting events in countries with questionable governance and a history of mistreating citizens. And, as Large points out,

there is little evidence so far that the 2008 Beijing Olympics did anything but show the Chinese government how to maintain its clamp on freedom while supposedly opening its doors to the world.

Large concludes with a critical but potentially positive suggestion:

This is not to say that the Games should be held only in politically “clean” countries. But instead of blindly celebrating the alleged openness of repressive regimes that host the event, the international community should use it as an opportunity to hold them to the values that the Olympics claim to represent.

 

If anything positive came from the debacle that surrounded the International Association of Athletics
Federation’s attempts to ‘determine’ South African runner Caster Semenya’s sex, it is that it brought to light the crude methods that were being used to enforce the male/female binary in sports (See David Zirin and Sherry Wolf’s article in the Nation for critical coverage of the initial controversy).

Two years later the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federation, the governing body for track and field, have released a new policy to regulate athletes whose sex development is considered unusual to avoid a repeat of the nightmare that Semenya faced.

In a recent editorial in the The New York Times, Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, provides a critical read of the new policy. Dreger explains that initially the policy seems like an improvement because:

The new policy no longer allows any room for a simplistic “I know it when I see it” approach to who counts as a female athlete.

The new system relies on setting the ‘appropriate’ levels of functional testosterone a female athlete should have. However, as Dregger argues, this policy is fundamentally sexist. Both men and women naturally produce testosterone.

Yet despite the fact that testosterone belongs to women, too, the I.O.C. and the I.A.A.F. are basically saying it is really a manly thing: “You can have functional testosterone, but if you make too much, you’re out of the game because you’re not a real woman.”

Dregger explains that men are free of any equivalent biochemical policing and can take full advantage of any ‘mutation’ that gives him an advantage. In efforts to create ‘the mythical level playing field’ the committee has taken another step in a now rich history of controlling and categorizing women’s bodies. For women athletes who have more functional testosterone than is considered appropriate for a female the only option is to “submit to being made sexually ‘normal’ through hormone treatments” or they cannot compete.

While Dregger is sympathetic to the difficulties that I.O.C. and I.A.A.F. face, she finds little progress in the decision

this newly proposed biological reduction of women to a hormonally disadvantaged class of people — one medically made disadvantaged, if necessary — struck many of us as regressive from the standpoint of women’s rights. Indeed, it reminds me of those itty-bitty shorts that college women’s volleyball players must wear. They each sexualize the bodies of female athletes as a requirement of play. They each insist that a woman never be manly.

Perhaps the biggest take away point from Dregger’s article and the debates surrounding how to define and separate male from female in the sporting arena is that:

There is no perfect solution, one that is reasonably objective, universally applicable and universally satisfying.

 

 

 

Wild Card WeekendRecent medical reports on the long-term effects of head injuries have resulted in increased concern about the medical risks of participating in football. While the N.F.L. has increasingly shown concern over the safety of its players, a solution has not been found. The safety issues came to a head this past Sunday when a number of players were injured as a result of highlight reel hits.

Michael Sokolove’s article in the New York Times examines the moral issues surrounding consuming a sport where players place themselves at such a high risk. As medical studies continue to build the link between head injuries in football and depression, suicide, and early death, Sokolove asks the timely question:

Is it morally defensible to watch a sport whose level of violence is demonstrably destructive? (The game, after all, must conform to consumer taste.) And where do we draw the line between sport and grotesque spectacle?

To provide insight into the question Sokolove turns to a series of cultural theorists and philosophers who have interest in the role of violent pursuits in society.

The writer Joyce Carol Oates has written admiringly of boxing, celebrating, among other aspects, the “incalculable and often self-destructive courage” of those who make their living in the ring. I wondered if she thought America’s football fans should have misgivings about sanctioning a game that, like boxing, leaves some of its participants neurologically impaired.

“There is invariably a good deal of hypocrisy in these judgments,” Ms. Oates responded by e-mail. “Supporting a war or even enabling warfare through passivity is clearly much more reprehensible than watching a football game or other dangerous sports like speed-car racing — but it may be that neither is an unambiguously ‘moral’ action of which one might be proud.”

Other ‘experts’ argue that the dangerous activity may serve a communal goal.

“We learn from dangerous activities,” said W. David Solomon, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame and director of its Center for Ethics and Culture. “In life, there are clearly focused goals, with real threats. The best games mirror that. We don’t need to feel bad about not turning away from a game in which serious injuries occur. There are worse things about me than that I enjoy a game that has violence in it. I don’t celebrate injuries or hope for them to happen. That would be a different issue. That’s moral perversion.”

Fellow philosopher Sean D. Kelly, the chairman of Harvard’s philosophy department, shares Solomon’s emphasis on the potential positive value of sports:

“You can experience a kind of spontaneous joy in watching someone perform an extraordinary athletic feat,” he said when we talked last week. “It’s life-affirming. It can expand our sense of what individuals are capable of.”

He believes that it is fine to watch football as long as the gravest injuries are a “side effect” of the game, rather than essential to whatever is good about the game and worth watching.

Sokolove concludes with the difficult question that football fans, as well as organizers and sponsors of the sport at all levels, must now ask themselves:

But what if that’s not the case? What if the brain injuries are so endemic — so resistant to changes in the rules and improvements in equipment — that the more we learn the more menacing the sport will seem?

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

In a recent thought piece titled, “Racing Safely to the Finish Line? Kids, Competitions, and Injuries,” Sociologist Hilary Levey, reflects upon the reaction to the recent death of thirteen-year-old Peter Lenz this past Sunday. Peter was killed in a motorcycle accident at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during a practice session.

Levey explains that it would be an error for the public to be caught up in the type of accident that occurred and we should instead use this tragedy as an impetus to consider the dangers of increasingly competitive youth sport.

Youth racing shouldn’t be alone in getting a closer inspection. This tragedy could have happened to any girl on a balance beam or any boy in a football tackle last Sunday. We should not be distracted by the fact that Peter was in a motorcycle race.

Despite the risk of serious injuries, like concussions, and even death, millions of kids compete in almost any activity you can imagine. Did you know that there are shooting contests for young Davy Crocketts, a racing circuit for aspiring Danica Patricks, and a youth PGA for those pursuing Tiger Woods’ swing? When did American childhood become not just hyper-organized but also hyper-competitive?

Levey shows that youth sport should be examined as the culmination of a century long trajectory of increased competitiveness.

Initially the organized activities served as a way mitigate deviant behavior by reducing the amount of unmonitored idle hours.

In 1903 New York City’s Public School Athletic League for Boys was established and contests between children, organized by adults, emerged as a way to keep the boys coming back to activities and clubs. Settlement houses and ethnic clubs followed suit and the number of these clubs grew rapidly through the 1920s.

However, the level of competitiveness continued to ramp up as the 20th century progressed. National organizations were introduced after World War II and the by the 1970s, for-profit organizations were common.

And, by the turn of the twenty-first century, a variety of year-round competitive circuits, run by paid organizers and coaches, dominated families’ evenings and weekends.

Parents tried to find the activity best suited to turn their children into national champions, even at age seven. As competitive children’s activities became increasingly organized over the twentieth century, injuries increased — especially overuse injuries and concussions. More practice time, an earlier focus on only one sport, and a higher level of intensity in games create the environment for these types of injuries.

Peter Lenz’s death is indicative of an increasingly competitive and organized American childhood. Levey argues that as a society we have the responsibility to make sure the training and safety regulations keep up with the increased pressure and risk of injury. This should include greater monitoring of safety equipment and higher standards for coaches.

While catastrophic accidents like Peter Lenz’s will happen, we can work to better protect all competitive children from more common injuries like concussions and overuse injuries. Kids want to win whatever race they are in and be the champion. Adults should make sure they all safely cross the finish line.

5th Offense 07252009 (22)

In June this year, a mixed martial arts (MMA) competitor died as a result of a head injury sustained during a sanctioned bout in South Carolina.  Sociologist David Mayeda, writing for online sports site BleacherReport.com, uses this tragedy as the impetus to reflect upon the intrinsic competitive nature of sport, MMA’s evolving structure, and how society regulates violence in sport.
Mayeda explains that MMA, a rapidly popularizing sport, is by its nature a violent sport.

MMA is at its core, violent. Injuries, even death, are a risk in all sports. Even in non-contact sports, such as long distance running, deaths occur on occasion (though the absolute number of long distance runners is massive in comparison to MMA). However, in most sports, there is not intent to harm. In combat sports, “the intentional use of physical force…against…another person” is required and formally sanctioned.

Even with the brutal nature of the sport, the larger leagues have been efficient at regulating and protecting fighters.

Within the United States, prominent MMA organizations such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Strikeforce have the resources and existing infrastructure to prevent, or at least minimize, the most serious, tragic levels of violence. Earlier this year UFC welterweight contender, Thiago Alves, was forced to withdraw from competition because of a discovered brain irregularity.

However, it is in the smaller and less visible levels of competition, that lack the money and regulation, where the danger lies.

None of the major MMA organizations provide smaller, regional ones with the financial backing that would allow for a more robust medical infrastructure and help prevent the most serious ramifications of sporting violence. Thus, up and coming fighters must gain experience in smaller organizations, where the risky consequences of more serious violence and injury rise.

Mayeda concludes by arguing that the injuries that occur at the smaller leagues must not be written off as collateral damage or disconnected from the popularity of the large MMA leagues that have dominated pay-per-view and made their way on to network television. It is the success at higher levels that is often at the root of the pressure to risk more for less at the lower levels – a lesson applicable to all types of sport.

Professional and semi-pro mixed martial artists – frequently seduced by the financial gains and popularity that the sport’s biggest stars enjoy – should be treated as human beings, not as collateral damage dismissed in the wake of the sport’s growth. Neither society’s thirst for violence nor a sport’s increasing popularity should be cited to justify or excuse athlete safety.

The New York Times examined what appears to be a rise in violent behavior in women’s sports:

Brittney Griner, Baylor’s 6-foot-8 freshman center, was supposed to deliver her transformative moments by slamming a basketball through the rim, not punching an opponent in the face.

Yet, Griner’s most visible performance came not while displaying her exquisite skills, but by breaking the nose of Texas Tech’s Jordan Barncastle after being slung about the lane this month. Griner received a two-game suspension but is eligible for the N.C.A.A. tournament, which began here Saturday for Baylor.

It was the latest of several highly publicized moments of violent behavior in women’s college basketball this season. A reported tripping incident led to players from Georgetown and Louisville trading punches before a game in January. A male coach and a female player from Trinity Valley Community College in Texas were arrested in a postgame episode in February after a tirade over officiating and a confrontation with the campus police at a rival college.

These incidents followed the infamous soccer confrontation last fall in which Elizabeth Lambert of New Mexico yanked a Brigham Young player down by her ponytail.

The Times turned to sports sociologists to explain whether these incidents are part of larger trend, as well as what may be causing them:

So what is going on? Experts say they cannot be precisely sure. Little research has been done on excessive behavior of elite female athletes. The N.C.A.A. did not respond to a question about whether statistics were kept but called violent acts “isolated” and said they would not be tolerated.

“Only time will tell if this is an aberration, but what I think is a clear trend, as the stakes get higher in women’s sports, you see more pressure to win,” said Mary Jo Kane, the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.

“This could be a natural progression to women entering into big-time college sports. You take the bad with the good; you take sold-out arenas with academic scandals. For us to think that women would enter the big time and have it be pristine and without controversy is naïve.”

Baylor Coach Kim Mulkey said that she did not believe violence had escalated in women’s basketball since her playing days at Louisiana Tech in the early 1980s, but that it was more likely to be exposed during a 24/7 news cycle.

At the same time, overall coverage of women’s sports has declined on network news and on ESPN, said Michael Messner, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Southern California who tracks television coverage.

Messner cautioned that these incidents could be less reflective of a disturbing pattern than an echoing of misbehavior that is blown out of proportion, given that it is reported against a backdrop of “almost no women’s coverage at all.”

Experts also weighed in on the potential consequences for women’s sports:

Still, advocates of women’s sports are concerned that such untoward behavior could spur opponents of Title IX, the gender-equity legislation that facilitated great participation of female athletes after its passage in 1972, to try to roll back gains that women have made.

“Is there going to be a gender backlash, where some people say, ‘We give these opportunities to girls and they’re not deserving of them?’ ” said Kristine Newhall, a doctoral candidate in women’s studies at the University of Iowa and a co-founder of the Title IX Blog.

Sports cannot be divorced from gender roles and stereotypes, Kane said. Women will probably be much more restricted in the type of aggressive behavior permitted by society, she said, noting for instance that checking is not allowed in women’s hockey.

“Physical intimidation and violence is central to the sports experience of males,” Kane said. “That is not yet the case for women. I don’t think it will become that. If it does, I hope I’m not around to see it.

Newhall argues that we shouldn’t limit our concern to violence in women’s sports:

The conversation should move beyond whether women are increasingly behaving like men to a broader examination of a college sports culture that is perhaps fostering an increase in violence and dirty tactics, said Newhall, the doctoral candidate.

“What kind of athletic department environment is being fostered that clearly indicates it’s so important that you have to yell at the refs and get into fights?” Newhall said.

“Why did a Georgetown player trip a Louisville player? That’s third-grade behavior. This is a game.”

100B8130The New York Times recently featured an op-ed by David Brooks on the role of sports in American society.  Commenting on the teachings of sociologist Eugen Rosenstock Huessy:

He used literary and other allusions when he wanted to talk about ethics, community, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it. Then, after a few years, he switched to sports analogies. Suddenly, everything clicked.

“The world in which the American student who comes to me at about twenty years of age really has confidence in is the world of sport,” he would write. “This world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affection and interests; therefore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an American has in athletics and games.”

Brooks summarizes Michael Allen Gillespie’s take on how American sports are organized:

Throughout Western history, Gillespie argues, there have been three major athletic traditions. First, there was the Greek tradition. Greek sports were highly individualistic. There was little interest in teamwork. Instead sports were supposed to inculcate aristocratic virtues like courage and endurance. They gave individuals a way to achieve eternal glory.

Then, there was the Roman tradition. In ancient Rome, free men did not fight in the arena. Roman sports were a spectacle organized by the government. The free Romans watched while the slaves fought and were slaughtered. The entertainment emphasized the awesome power of the state.

Finally, there was the British tradition. In the Victorian era, elite schools used sports to form a hardened ruling class. Unlike the Greeks, the British placed tremendous emphasis on team play and sportsmanship. If a soccer team committed a foul, it would withdraw its goalie to permit the other team to score. The object was to inculcate a sense of group loyalty, honor and rule-abidingness — traits that were important to a class trying to manage a far-flung empire.

Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British, but think like the Greeks, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Brooks also makes the case for the role of collective effervescence that college sports provide:

Several years ago, I arrived in Madison, Wis., for a conference. It was Saturday morning, and as my taxi got close to campus, I noticed people dressed in red walking in the same direction. At first it was a trickle, then thousands. It looked like the gathering of a happy Midwestern cult, though, of course, it was the procession to a football game.

In a segmented society, big-time college sports are one of the few avenues for large-scale communal participation. Mass college sports cross class lines. They induce large numbers of people in a region to stop, at the same time, and share common emotional experiences.

The crowds at big-time college sporting events do not sit passively, the way they do at a movie theater. They roar, suffer and invent chants (especially at Duke basketball games). Mass college sports are the emotional hubs at the center of vast networks of analysis, criticism and conversation. They generate loyalties that are less harmful than ethnic loyalties and emotional morality plays that are at once completely meaningless and totally consuming.

Anna KournikovaThe Vancouver Sun ran a story yesterday about a new study by sociologist Laurel Davis-Delano of Springfield College, which suggests that “female athletes are still apologizing for smashing stereotypes while they pursue their sports.”

The Sun reports:

A newly published study that included college basketball, soccer and softball players found nearly three-quarters of them engage in “apologetic behaviours” — stereotypically feminine conduct such as cultivating a girlie appearance, apologizing for being aggressive and hanging out with men to emphasize their heterosexuality — to deflect prejudice.

“If you break a norm, you apologize. If I burp out loud, I know this offended other people, so I apologize,” says Laurel Davis-Delano, a professor of sociology at Springfield College in Massachusetts, explaining why researchers label these behaviours apologetic. “If you are offending people’s sense of gender ideals . . . people don’t necessarily realize they’re apologizing, but you are catering to other people’s sense of what’s proper.”

Most sports are still associated with masculinity in Western cultures, so female athletes are challenging gender expectations by their very participation, she says.

So what makes this different from female athletes looking pretty just because they want to?

Apologetic behaviours are different from female athletes having long hair or wearing makeup simply because they like to, Davis-Delano says, because they’re performed specifically in response to this gender tension.

While 73 per cent of the study participants said they engaged in at least one apologetic behaviour, from criticizing unfeminine athletes to being seen with a boyfriend, no one shied away from aggression or competing hard against male athletes.

On one hand, apologetic behaviours may help female athletes gain acceptance and be rewarded in their sport, Davis-Delano says. But they do little to challenge gender stereotypes, she says, and Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova is a “classic example” of the result: a female athlete of lesser talent who gets attention and endorsements for her ultrafeminine looks.

Read more.

Cowboys footage 2: 3rd and LongFamous Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman made headlines recently for his academic pursuits. A sociology degree of all things! And according to the Dallas Morning News, one of his remaining courses at UCLA was on race and ethnicity…

The Associated Press reports:

The Hall of Fame quarterback says he’s passed his two final college courses and will graduate in June from UCLA — 20 years after he left for the NFL. The Dallas Morning News reported Tuesday that Aikman is getting a bachelor’s degree in sociology and will participate in UCLA’s graduation ceremonies. The 42-year-old Fox Sports broadcaster says he’s “finally taking care of unfinished business.”

The Dalls Morning News noted:

Aikman had planned to make the walk two decades earlier. But the matter of the April 1989 NFL draft came along. The Cowboys insisted that the first player selected get to Dallas as soon as possible to help rejuvenate their floundering franchise. The two sociology classes he was going to take that spring quarter would have to wait. Aikman never dreamt graduation would be delayed 20 years.

“Finally taking care of unfinished business,” Aikman said Monday, explaining why he took the necessary courses to secure his degree. “It was important to me.”

For this famous sociology major, I can’t help but wonder… why sociology?

IMG_4022Chicago-Tribune reporter Rick Morrissey presented a theory about Michael Phelps’ documented experimentation with marijuana – he did it because he actually wanted to get caught…

In order to see whether or not this theory had any validity, he consulted a sociologist, and writes,

I brought [my theory] to sociologist Jay Coakley, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who has spent much of his career studying the sociology of sport. He agreed Phelps could be trying to escape something but wouldn’t go so far as to say the swimming star might have been making a conscious or subconscious effort to get caught partaking of the pot.

“I would say there was a desperate desire on his part to get out of this tunnel in which he has been living,” he said.

That tunnel is chlorinated. Phelps spends a good number of his waking hours underwater, and he has been doing it for a long, long time. Swimming is not generally a social sport. It’s hard to grow as a person when you’re basically in an isolation tank.

“After living in this training tunnel for eight to 10 years, he would have to at least fantasize about being outside of it,” Coakley said. “I don’t know whether this is a cry for help, ‘Please stop this train, get me out of this tunnel, I never want to go back,’ or whether it’s, ‘Hey, I’ve got to get out of this tunnel for my own sanity for at least awhile before I go back in.’ ”

But you can understand why Phelps might crave some modicum of normalcy. Most 23-year-olds don’t spend a large part of their free time in watery solitude. So as stunning as that photo of Phelps in a British tabloid was, maybe the idea of him partying hearty at the University of South Carolina isn’t.

“You really don’t have time to be normal with the kind of training he did,” Coakley said. “In terms of development, I’d say he’s probably developmentally delayed. He hasn’t had a chance to have the kinds of experiences that lead to normal adulthood.

“We just assume that, if you win a medal for some reason, it builds your character. That’s a crock. So he actually is facing this as a 23-year-old who is probably less mature than any average 23-year-old on the street.”

Read more.