Surely it’s auspicious that the weekend after Double X launched, a filly won the second leg of the Triple Crown—the Preakness Stakes—for the first time since 1924. That’s right: a girl by the name of Rachel Alexandra—a girl’s name if there ever was one—held off all the boys, including Derby winner Mine That Bird, in a stunningly dramatic race. She did so against great odds: Breaking from a bad position (she was 13 in a field of 13) she scrambled to the front of the pack and led from pole to pole—meaning at every point of measurement she was in front. When Mine That Bird made a hard run at her in the stretch (he does have heart, it turns out) she steadily held him off, flicking her ears back at him and at the crowds. Her jockey, Calvin Borel—who rode Mine That Bird in the Derby—said she was the best horse he’d ever been on (see for yourself in the clip below). Take that, gender essentialists.

In her front-running style, Rachel Alexandra reminds me of another great filly, Ruffian, who never let another horse get in front of her, and who became a symbol of 1970s feminism.(I wrote about Ruffian and another Triple Crown-winning filly, Rags to Riches, for Slate.) Ruffian had to be put down after she took a bad step in her first race against a colt, a famous match race with Derby champion Foolish Pleasure. Afterward, Moody Jolley, father of Foolish Pleasure’s trainer, declared, "First time they throw some speed at that bitch, she comes unbuckled." Never mind that she’d been pulling ahead when she broke down. Ruffian must be nickering in her grave; no one can say that about Rachel Alexandra. On Saturday, the girls got their own at last.

Tags: gender, preakness stakes, rachel alexandra

The Preakness Stakes is not a particularly gender-neutral event. The second leg of the Triple Crown is, in fact, one of the last places where men dress like men of a certain era (waistcoats, wingtips, fedoras), and women dress like women as we grew up imagining them: in crisp yet feminine suits, low-cut, brightly colored dresses and high, high heels. I’ve been to the Preakness three years running, and I gave up on the dress-and-heels approach long ago. (Unless you book a limo to and from your box seat, the amount of walking and stair climbing required by Pimlico’s layout demands comfortable footwear.) On Saturday, I noted with empathy the strained expressions on the faces of some of the gorgeously decked-out women as they teetered on the arms of their fast-walking male companions.

In the infield, women usually seem to fare worst, maybe because they’re physically smaller. I usually see them after the races, most in their teens and early 20s, their flip-flopped feet and calves coated in muck as they stumble drunkenly along Baltimore’s not-so-friendly streets in their tiny tank tops and shorts. But this year, there were far fewer of them—the economic downturn and new restrictions on racegoers bringing their own liquor emptied the infield—and as I screamed my head off watching Rachel Alexandra outrun a scrum of male challengers, it seemed that, for whatever reason, much was changing in Pimlico and the world. “We have a black president,” a friend remarked after the race, “and now a girl wins the Preakness.” And what a girl! A gorgeous, eager, big-hearted horse with a princessy name, who seemed to genuinely enjoy her run along the storied track where only five fillies have raced since the last female Preakness winner, the perfectly named-for-her-era Nellie Morse, in 1924.

The next day, I gobbled up news stories about the race, savoring the admiring comments from other jockeys as they gave the winner her due. Then there was her owner, Jess Jackson, comparing Rachel Alexandra in notably human terms to Curlin, who won the Preakness in 2007 and whom Jackson called “a big, strong strapping boy.” Jackson sounded like a proud father when he said of Rachel Alexandra: “She just wants to run. Gender doesn’t matter. A thoroughbred wants to run, and if a filly is as good as the colts, they ought to compete.” I was particularly struck, after reading Meghan’s post on Rachel Alexandra, by the contrast between Jackson's words and the language with which Ruffian, another champion filly, was slighted and dismissed in 1975. Some troubling conventions, like the expectation that female racegoers will stick out a long day in mile-high hot pink heels, are still with us. But watching Rachel Alexandra reminded me what it feels like to take off your shoes and run as fast as you can. It was a great day to be a woman at the races.

Tags: gender, preakness stakes, rachel alexandra, sports

Last weekend, 17-year-old, Marietta, Ga. native Melanie Oudin beat 24-year-old, sixth-seeded Serbian Jelena Jankovic in a surprise upset at Wimbledon. Earlier this year, Jankovic was ranked No. 1 in the world. This is Oudin's first Wimbledon.

After the match, Oudin scored critical praise for her ability to get herself out of scrappy situations. Jankovic begged to differ: "She doesn't have any weapons, from what I've seen."

According to the more experienced tennis player, she lost because she wasn't feeling well. In other words, she blamed it on her period.

"It's not easy being a woman, sometimes," Jankovic said. "All these things happen. What can I do? After the first set, I felt really dizzy, and I thought that I was just going to end up in the hospital. I started to shake. I was losing my—how you say—consciousness. I was really going to lose it, you know, to fall down and just, you know, probably go—call the ambulance and leave the court."

Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors suggests Jankovic was looking for pity from male sportswriters: "Maybe Jankovic had cramps. But unless she takes to her bed each month, a world-class athlete probably has played (well) with cramps before. More likely, Jankovic is making excuses for her poor performance and thought she’d get a 'pass' from the mostly male sportswriters," she writes.

Whatever the case, it seems we'll have to add "woman issues" to sore loser excuses. If all else fails, you can always blame it on the ovaries.

Photograph of Jelena Jankovic by Ian Walton/Getty Images.

Tags: menstruation, wimbledon

Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix makes an interesting connection between ESPN’s prompt response to the creepy nude tape of sportscaster Erin Andrews and its extended silence on the rape allegations against Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. If ESPN truly understood from the Andrews case the abusive relationship between women and the world of pro sports, Reilly argues, it should have known the importance of covering the rape charges. He writes:

The diminishment of women is part of pro sports' DNA. Think of the NFL's cheerleaders and the NBA's "dancers," for example, or Playboy's "Sexiest Sportscaster" contest, or the prolific promiscuity of pro athletes as a group. (As Kevin Elster of the New York Mets once told Sports Illustrated: "You can get sex every night. On the road. At home. It doesn't matter.")

That doesn’t mean Roethlisberger is guilty of rape, he goes on. It just means ESPN has a responsibility to report on the news that he’s been accused of it.

There was a lot of talk following the Erin Andrews incident of how hard it is to be a woman sportscaster, to function and gain respect in a world that so degrades women. These same issues come up for women covering hip-hop, another world frequently accused of “hating women.” In a roundtable discussion years ago about hip-hop journalism, Dream Hampton, who co-wrote Jay-Z’s autobiography, The Black Book, told an upsetting tale of the sort of threats she encountered covering the genre. While she was working on a profile of Dr. Dre, Hampton learned of accusations that he had hit another female reporter. Soon after, the owner of Dr. Dre’s record label told Hampton during an interview that “she shouldn’t say anything stupid in print that might cause her to ‘get her face all fucked up.’”

What is it going to take for sports and hip-hop to be safe beats for women? Will these problems dissipate as more women reporters flood the scene, or does there need to be some more profound shift at the core of these often misogynistic institutions?

Photograph of Erin Andrews by Kevork Djansezian and photograph of Ben Roethlisberger by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Tags: ben roethlisberger, dr. dre, erin andrews, espn, hip hop, journalism, sports

Congressional committee hearings are usually the domain of dark-suited men speaking in carefully-modulated tones. So Gay Culverhouse, who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting in an unapologetically purple suit and spoke with both intelligence and anger, was startling. Culverhouse, a former president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, wasn’t a breath of fresh air; she was a bracing gust of wind as she outlined the ways in which (in her view) the NFL abuses and then abandons its players.

While seated next to a current NFL doctor at the witness table, Culverhouse delivered a withering assessment of the role that team doctors play in keeping their players off the injured list:

One of the things you as a committee need to understand very clearly is the fact that the team doctor is hired by the coaches and paid by the front office. This team doctor is not an advocate for the players. This team doctor’s role is to get that player back on the field, even if that means injecting the player on the field. I have seen a wall of players surround a player and seen his knees injected, seen his hip injected between plays, and him [put] back on the field. This is inexcusable. ... The team doctor dresses as a coach on the sidelines, and he acts in many ways as a coach on the sidelines. He is not an independent advocate for the player. If a player chooses independent medical counsel, he is considered to be not a team player. He becomes a pariah to the team. We’ve got to stop that.

During the question-and-answer portion of the hearing, Culverhouse was asked how it makes her feel to see former Buccaneers suffering the effects of their football careers. Instead of talking about how she feels, Culverhouse described what she does:

This morning as I was coming over here, [an injured former player] said, "Gay, you’ve always been a rebel. But you’re a rebel with a cause. Make them hear that we’re hurt. Make them hear that we can’t fill out all of their forms. We can’t do it. Our mental capacity isn’t there to answer the questions on the phone and fill out the forms. They’re missing those of us that are severely disabled." And so what I’m doing is I’m filling out the forms. I’m going through the networks for them to access the benefits that they may be entitled to ... I’m going to Little Rock, Ark. to find [former Buccaneer] Jerry Eckwood and take him to the doctors myself and fill out the forms and get this man the help he needs. I don’t want to read about another one of my players is dead. I don’t want to tell my children their favorite gentle giant is dead. This isn’t working for me.

Photograph of Gay Culverhouse testifying before House Judiciary Committee by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: football, health, sports

Hanna, your post on Lindsey Vonn’s “Olympic girl drama”—the familiar quadrennial narrative of brave athlete betrayed by her body but triumphing by dint of superhuman persistence and pluck—and especially the question in the title bar, “Is Lindsey Vonn really injured?” strikes me as too cynical. I’m a total sucker for the Olympics, so I prefer another stock story: the athlete who sacrifices normalcy (school, siblings, and a social life) for the crazy dream of Olympic gold. The Games and their spotlight come around just once every four years, and Vonn’s sport, downhill skiing, is one where a bump in the snow or an ill-starred time slot can render all that preparation useless.

I don’t know why Vonn went on the Today Show this morning. (Though in a sport that only gets widespread attention during the Olympiad, who can blame her. She’ll only get on the Wheaties box if she wins gold, but after a few sit-downs with Matt Lauer, we’re more likely to recognize her there.) It could be about lowering expectations, it could be a mind game she's playing with her rivals (given the way she talked about her secret workouts in the New York Times profile, that’s a good possibility), or she might really be injured. I favor the last explanation, and even knowing it might be a ruse or a psychological crutch, it still breaks my heart. She has spent her whole life skiing, training, and skipping dessert, and now a deep muscle bruise might rob her of a chance at gold. That’s harsh.

Photograph of Lindsey Vonn via screenshot of Today Show clip.

Tags: Lindsey Vonn, Lindsey Vonn injury, olympics

For two weeks every two years, women athletes get top billing in prime time during the female-friendly TV coverage of the Olympic Games. Sometimes those athletes are cute pixies showing off their flexibility and fearlessness on ice or gymnastics apparatus, but sometimes they’re big-thighed speed skaters, dominating downhill racers, or steel-kneed moguls skiers. And sometimes they’re team players. Earlier today, a friend in Toronto described her awed surprise at seeing her 7-year-old daughter shed tears of joy when the Canadian women won hockey gold Thursday night.

But on Thursday morning, IOC President Jacques Rogge hinted that future 7-year-olds might have to find their inspiration elsewhere if other national hockey teams don’t improve their skills enough to give the North Americans some competition. Rogge insisted, “I would personally give them more time to grow, but there must be a period of improvement. We cannot continue without improvement."

The Vancouver Sun summarized the challenges to improving women’s hockey in Europe and beyond—they need funding and better coaching, and the players need a reason to devote time, effort, and money to the game. There’d be far less incentive without the Olympics to shoot for. If women’s hockey is dropped from the Olympics, it would be another blow for team sports—remember, softball was dropped from the Summer Games after 2008.

Seeing the Canadian women celebrate their victory last night, I caught a glimpse of Hayley Wickenheiser, the Great One of the DoubleX set. She has four hockey medals, played on the Canadian Olympic softball team in 2000, and she’s also a mom, which came to mind when I read Anna-Liza Kozma's piece on the CBC Web site about the lack of day-care facilities for Olympic athletes who happen to be parents. The organizers didn’t provide any child care in Vancouver, but a motivated woman named Jane Roos set about lining up donations of space and staff. The “athletes' house” she set up became a place for Olympians’ families to hang out. It sounds like a fantastic idea; it’s just too bad it didn’t come from the Vancouver Organizing Committee.

Photograph of Canadian goalkeeper Kim St-Pierre by Cris Bouroncle/AFP.

Tags: childcare, hockey, olympics, team sports

—Court documents detail Phoebe Prince’s last days of bullying. [New York Times]

—Academics introduce “male studies,” a new discipline determined to take down feminism. [Salon]

—Tartuffe in the age of Twitter: Rumors swirl about infidelities between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his model-singer wife Carla Bruni. [New York Times]

—Hecklers taunt Tiger Woods at Masters as he shoots 4 under par. [AP]

—A new generation of comic book artists and writers are creating strong female characters. But will they sell? [The Daily Beast]

Tags: adultery, comic books, cyberbullying, feminism, france, law, nicolas sarkozy, phoebe prince, sports, tiger woods

Last January a group of cheerleading coaches and administrators from eight universities united to form the National Competitive Stunts and Tumbling Association, a centralized governing body whose stated purpose was to elevate competitive college cheer to the level of NCAA-sanctioned varsity sport. Despite the artful rebranding efforts of NCSTA members like Oregon coach Felecia Mulkey—who excised all traces of “cheer” and “spirit” from her squad’s name and now calls the program "team stunts and gymnastics”—a federal judge ruled Wednesday that competitive cheerleading is not an official sport. As such, it cannot be used to satisfy Title IX gender equity requirements for college athletics. The decision came in a case in which Quinnipiac University dropped the women’s volleyball team and promoted its sideline cheerleading squad, whose primary duty had been pompom pumping and audience baiting, to competitive cheer squad in order to comply with federal law.

While the decision has some cheer partisans crying foul, Judge Stefan Underhill’s ruling is an unequivocal victory for gender equality and serves as a powerful warning to universities who try to cut funds for established women’s sports. The judge’s reasoning was fairly straightforward: To be deemed a sport under Title IX, activities must have coaches, practices, and seasonal competitions, with competition, not support of other teams, as their raisons d’être. Not so with cheer. As Underhill noted, there is no intercollegiate playoff system, and the new governing body doesn’t have a board of directors or voting system for its members.

With the rapid growth and evolution of the NCSTA, cheerleaders and coaches see an “inevitable march toward acceptance,” possibly within the next six months. But even if cheer were to get its act together and meet the baseline criteria for Title IX protection, is it really a sport, one worthy of inclusion in our country’s landmark provision against gender discrimination? Probably not.

No one disputes that excelling in competitive cheerleading requires dedication, physical stamina, technical skill, and other traditional hallmarks of athleticism. But so do most forms of dance. And that’s the problem with cheerleading. Like dance, it’s primarily about putting on a show, an aesthetic performance meant to tantalize and entertain a rapt audience. Judge Underhill was right to repudiate Quinnipiac’s bait-and-switch. Title IX aims to root out gender discrimination, not protect and elevate activities that rely on subjective appraisal of high-kicks and crowd appeal.

Photograph of pompoms by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images.

Tags: cheer, cheerleading, college, connecticut, discrimination, law, sports, title IX

Last week, USA Gymnastics, the national governing body for gymnastics, announced that it will begin sanctioning events for the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association. The association is a new organization itself, composed of just six schools with competitive cheerleading teams. But this move may be the impetus for better organization, and safety, for competitive cheerleading.

“Cheerleading—not basketball, not softball, not even field hockey or ice hockey—is by far the most dangerous sport for girls,” MSNBC.com reported in May; more than half of the injuries were related to stunting, when cheerleaders hurl one another into the air. Cheerleading, the wisdom goes, took the place of gymnastics as high schools began to eliminate the sport, fearful of insurance rates and catastrophic injuries, only to find themselves saddled with more teenage girls with broken bones and worse. But because cheerleading isn’t officially a sport, the schools, and governing bodies, have laxer safety standards and less money to pay for trainers, well-trained coaches, and other support staff. If cheerleading becomes a sanctioned sport within colleges, perhaps higher standards will trickle down to feeder high schools, middle schools, and “all-star” gyms, where cheerleaders don’t support a football or basketball team but just compete, Bring It On-style, in tournaments.

If cheerleading becomes an official, NCAA sport, the acrobatic pastime may see improvement in areas beyond its injury rates. In 2008’s Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, Kate Torgovnick chronicled a season with three cheerleading teams: an all-girl squad from the University of Memphis, a co-ed team from the underfunded, historically black Southern University; and the cheer powerhouse of Stephen F. Austin University. It is the chapters on Stephen F. Austin University, a perennial winner, that demonstrate how badly cheerleading could use some limits and oversight: The school offers multiple scholarships that draw hard-core cheerleaders, many of whom admit that they would never be in college without the sport and frequently transfer schools to chase better teams. With no limits on eligibility, one male cheerleader is going on his eighth year of collegiate cheerleading; performance-enhancing drugs are such an open secret that one guy gives another a hypodermic-needle pen as a gag gift. (Perhaps the two examples together explain why, in photographs of the team, there are several men clearly suffering from the early stages of male-pattern baldness.) A girl suffers from a raging cocaine problem and then introduces it to her roommate; others have bulimia and anorexia, spurred on by their stunting partners complaining about their weight. And the coaches are young former cheerleaders themselves who don’t fully grasp the responsibility of their positions: When one girl falls and hurts herself severely, they delay taking her to the hospital—where she’s diagnosed with a fractured skull and seizures.

Maybe Stephen F. Austin University’s Lumberjacks won’t join the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association in the immediate future. But perhaps USA Gymnastics’ foray into cheerleading will eventually help the sport eliminate some of its more unsavory characteristics.

Tags: cheerleading, gymnastics, sports