The case of Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who has been charged with the shooting murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, has shone a dispiriting light on everything from the horrendous rates of violence against women in South Africa to the media handling of Pistorius, a famous athlete, and Steenkamp, who was a model. But while this is a decidedly minor concern, I’ve found myself thinking about the gap between Pistorius’ legend and what appears to have been the reality of his domestic life alongside the decision by the executive board of the International Olympic Committee to recommend that wrestling be dropped from the games starting in 2020.

The official declaration that one of the foundational sports of the Olympic games doesn’t have enough interest from the public to justify its continued inclusion in the competition, and an accusation of murder against an athlete who transcended the loss of his legs to compete against the best runners without disabilities in the world, may not seem to have much in common. But collectively, they’re an illustration of the financial and commercial stake has in burnishing the reputation of someone like Pistorius.

Because the Olympics—and NBC, which owns the broadcast rights to the games in the United States—can’t trust that extremely large audiences follow many of the sports involved, and thus that they’ll develop rooting interests on the merits, they need something else to pull those viewers in, to help them decide which competitors they’ll back if there are multiple candidates on the American national team, and to help them identify which athletes they’ll root for if no Americans are available. Inspirational stories are the primary mechanism of doing this, and to a certain extent, the main product NBC is actually selling. It may be frustrating to some viewers that life stories and interviews with athletes take up so much broadcast time, and make it harder to broadcast competitions live. But without them, it’s hard to imagine that the ratings of the games would be so high, and thus so financially valuable.

The Olympics and its broadcast partners have a direct financial interest in Oscar Pistorius being an extraordinary young man who transcended the loss of his legs below the knee, rather than someone who had had the police visit his house on multiple occasions because of “domestic incidents.” They have an investment in the idea that competitive ice skaters are nice little girls, rather than women with ex-husbands who solicit assaults on their competitors—Olympic athletes have financial interests, rather than simply national honor, at stake, too. Sometimes those interests mean that the Olympics get behind a useful story, championing someone like Gabby Douglas, and as a result, highlighting the whiteness of that sport, and bringing in new audiences for it. And sometimes it means obscuring what it means to live in some place like South Africa, and the extent to which overcoming some of the limitations his disability placed on him doesn’t mean that Pistorius was somehow exempt from participating in or becoming a victim of the violence, particularly the violence against women, that plague South Africa.

The Olympics were initially supposed to bring the world’s countries together. But it’s one thing to get the nations to set their differences aside and observe a truce, and another to use uniformly cheerful stories about adversity overcome to paper over the differences in where athletes come from, and even their own varied humanity. That anyone’s surprised that an Olympic athlete could end up charged in a domestic violence murder is a testament to the success NBC does in creating a uniform product, and to how deeply and easily we buy into it, over and over again.

The major controversy over the 2014 Winter Olympics, which will be held in Sochi, Russia, has so far been about whether there would be enough snow to hold sports that depend on it. But there’s another controversy brewing that involves the sexuality of athletes, as Russia’s government is considering legislation that would outlaw “homosexual propaganda,” meaning public events that promote LGBT rights and public displays of same-sex affection will be illegal.

The legislation has sparked concern among out athletes like New Zealand speedskater Blake Skjellerup, who told USA Today that he was concerned about the legislation. “I don’t want to have to tone myself down about who I am,” Skjellerup said. “That wasn’t very fun and there’s no way I’m going back in the closet. I just want to be myself and I hate to think that being myself would get me in trouble.”

Even if the legislation doesn’t pass (it is expected to), Russia has already taken steps to fight homosexuality in its society and at its Olympics. Last year, a Russian judge banned the national Olympic committee from setting up a Pride House, a feature of the past several Olympics that hosts LGBT athletes. A Pride House, the judge wrote, would “undermine the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation” because it “contradict[s] the basics of public morality and the policy of the state in the area of family motherhood and childhood protection.” Meanwhile, an IOC spokesperson took a bold stand by telling USA Today that it was “too early for the IOC to comment on Russia’s proposed anti-gay legislation because it has not been voted on.”

There were 23 open athletes at the 2012 London Olympics, a sharp rise from the 10 that participated in Beijing in 2008. While they faced an atmosphere of tolerance in Britain, which approved marriage equality this week, their Winter counterparts won’t be greeted similarly.

The fault for that lies with the International Olympic Committee, which has shown little tolerance for racism (even though Russia is no saint in that department either) and sexism but has not fought for protections for gay athletes in the same manner. “We aren’t responsible for the running of or setting up of Houses,” an IOC representative said when the Pride House ruling was made. “So in this case it isn’t a decision of either us, or the organizing committee in Sochi. From our side, the IOC is an open organization and athletes of all orientations will be welcome at the Games.”
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With the Paralympic games on in London, disability is on the world stage, and in a positive framing, for once. Instead of the usual disability-as-tragedy narrative, we’re seeing skilled athletes at the top of their game competing against each other in a range of events, from equestrian (my favourite!) to goalball, a sport designed for blind and low-vision athletes. Inevitably, with increased visibility comes increased discussion and awareness, which is in resulting in some positives, and some negatives, but a conversation that is fascinating overall; the disability community itself is a bit split when it comes to reception of the Paralympics, for example.

The origins of the games lie in the Stoke Mandeville Games of 1948, which ran alongside the Olympic Games. Their organiser, Ludwig Guttmann, was a neurologist who worked with disabled veterans. In the wake of the Second World War, large numbers of men were occupying military hospitals and convalescence centres with spinal cord injuries, amputations, head injuries, and other disabilities acquired in battle. Patients injured in bombings and other events were also changing the landscape of disability in Britain.

Guttman started engaging them in sports as a form of therapy to ‘rescue these men, women and children from the scrapheap.’ His argument, that people with disabilities were often mired in long-term care facilities with little social or medical support, still holds true today. Patients were rotting in their beds then and they still are; so he used sports therapy to get them moving, and he developed the games to showcase the diversity within the disability community, and illustrate that people with disabilities weren’t inherently useless or less capable than the nondisabled community.  Read more

By Chloe Angyal

So, you’ve spent the last two weeks watching Olympic gymnastics coverage, and now, it’s all dried up. You’ve just realized that you’re going to have to wait four more years until you can watch a bunch of freakishly flexible, jaw-droppingly powerful teenagers flip and tumble while wearing leotards that look like a truck full of diamantes veered off the road and crashed into a sparkly lycra factory (on the plus side, it’ll be another four years before you’ll next be reminded that glitter hairspray is thing that exists in the world). Never fear, Stick It is here. It’s not London 2012, but it is gymnastics. And unlike London 2012, it has Nastia Liukin in it.

Hailey (Missy Peregrym) is a former champion gymnast who has quit gym and is now a petty juvenile criminal. Given the choice between sending her to the Texas Military Academy and sending her to an elite gym where girls are more likely to end up in hospital than on national teams, her parents choose the latter. Hailey goes to the Vickerman Gymnastics Academy, but she refuses to train. She’s done with gymnastics, she insists: she’s sick of being judged. She mocks the silly cookie-cutter routines that the other gymnasts do, and accuses them of being gymnastics automatons. And they hate her right back: it comes out the Hailey walked out of the World Championships a few years earlier, destroying Team USA’s chance at a gold medal, and she’s now persona non grata in the gymnastics world. Vickerman (Jeff Bridges) gets her to agree to train with him, and compete for prize money so she can pay the restitution and be on her way. In the process, she befriends some of the gymnasts, and gives them small glimpses of what it might be like to have a life outside of gymnastics. When national championships roll around, Hailey and the other gymnasts stage a protest in response to an unfair judging decision. This time, they insist, they get to decide who wins. By the end, Hailey has made peace with gymnastics and is even considering competing for a collegiate team.

As a former gymnast (level six state beam and floor champion, baby!), there are parts of this movie that I really appreciate. I like that it explores the sport’s demands that gymnasts be feminine and pretty and pert even as they’re performing almost superhuman feats of strength. I like that it pokes fun at what spending your teenage years in a gym will do to your social skills and your ability to interact with members of the opposite sex. And I like that it tackles the darker side of gymnastics: the high injury rate (and not just ankles and wrists, we’re talking heads and necks here) and the grim reality that coaches prefer obedient, unquestioning gymnasts who do what they’re told and don’t think too hard about what might go wrong. This particular dynamic can go horribly wrong, and it’s far too common to see coaches accused of exploiting it in a sexually abusive way. I also like that it capitalizes on the remarkable things that gymnasts do with their bodies, without crossing the line into making it about those bodies. This isn’t about girls in leotards, this is about athletes doing really impressive things:

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Forget the tape delay. Forget the weird cutting of certain events. Forget the obsessive focus on American athletes at the expense of covering the whole games. Forget the substanceless pool- and track-side interviews. From a sheer editorial judgement perspective, the biggest question about NBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympics has got to be how this video, “Bodies in Motion,” (NBC has, perhaps wisely, declined to make it embeddable), which features slow-motion shots of female athletes’ bodies set to music so cheesily porn-like it’s hard to believe that this isn’t a video someone made to parody the focus on female Olympians’ bodies.

The cluelessness of it even extends to the written description for the video: “Check out these bodies in motion during the Olympic Games,” as if the women it’s portraying, none of whom are identified by name, or country, which might have been a petty distraction from ogling, are inanimate objects rather than people. This utterly contentless video, which communicates nothing about the events these women are participating in or what it takes to perform them, might meet the editorial standards at Maxim, though the video quality isn’t even particularly impressive. There is no way it should pass the editorial standards for a news organization.

And yes, it’s a dumb viral video. But it’s a reminder of how much this Olympics, which has been a terrific one for women in so many ways, has brought out the uglier, stupider impulses in a lot of people, whether it’s the athletic official who suggested that British heptathalete and eventual gold medalist Jessica Ennis weighed too much, or Jere Longman’s bizarrely nasty attack on American hurdler Lolo Jones. And the video illustrates the root of many of the complaints about NBC’s coverage of the games: they’re presenting news events as if they’re entertainment. A lot of the time, that’s meant errors of ethics, like having local anchors refer to events that already passes as if they’re upcoming to hype NBC’s primetime coverage. This time, it’s an error of editorial judgement, packaging women doing their jobs, which happen to be entertaining, as if they’re eye candy. As NBC reassesses its coverage in preparation for the next games, “Bodies in Motion” should be a prime example of where the network’s judgement failed.

When the United States Women’s National Team kicks off its gold medal match against Japan tomorrow in London, it will mark the culmination of a year-long journey toward avenging its loss to Japan in last year’s World Cup final. The women’s team captured America’s heart last year before losing in heartbreaking fashion in Germany, and the run to the Olympics has been similarly dramatic — the U.S. defeat of Canada in the semifinal was hailed as one of the premier international matches in the sport’s history, and its systematic dismantling of the rest of its competition has been beautiful to watch.

Whether the U.S. avenges its World Cup defeat or falls short again, though, an uncertain and unfortunate future awaits the top American players. They will return next week to a United States that has no major professional soccer league after Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) folded earlier this year, meaning the game’s biggest stars — Abby Wambach, Hope Solo, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and others — will have no top-level soccer to play.

That’s a major problem, not just for the continuance of the American women’s dominance of soccer, but for the health of women’s soccer around the world. There are more than 337,000 American girls playing soccer on 10,500 high school teams alone; there are another 700 women’s college-level teams and hundreds of thousands more playing at levels below high school. The growth of women’s soccer around the world has followed the United States, where the USWNT remains one of the few fully-funded national teams. Brazilian star Marta played her professional games in the WPS, and even in soccer-mad countries across Europe, women have struggled until late to gain the same access to the game that they enjoy in the United States.

An America without women’s professional soccer, however, puts all of that in jeopardy. And there are plenty of reasons to worry about the future of women’s soccer: excitement about previous World Cup wins and mega-stars wasn’t sustained, and as popular as this rendition of the USWNT has been, there’s little evidence that American sports fans are ready to support a major women’s league. WPS drew just more than 3,500 fans per game in 2011, and its model — which included teams in six cities — proved unsustainable.

But there is good news, too: U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati is committed to growing and sustaining a major women’s league in the U.S., as he told Sports Illustrated columnist Grant Wahl this week. “We’ve talked with club owners and teams that are in the USL and teams in the WPSL,” Gulati told Wahl, referring to two American semiprofessional leagues that still exist. “And we’ll see what we can figure out, not on how we get the right set-up started, but on how we get the right set-up sustainable. That’s more important. Whether that’s an existing set-up or some other set-up or a combination, I don’t know yet.”

There is also precedent for reviving a failed soccer league in America. Major League Soccer got off to a bumbling start in the 1990s, drawing small crowds and expanding to new cities far too fast. After downsizing and reorganizing, the league is now thriving in 19 cities and drawing bigger crowds than ever. And unlike a women’s league, MLS can’t boast that it features the world’s best players.

As Gulati told Wahl, growing a domestic women’s professional league is going to take time and patience. Like MLS, it will have to start small, placing teams in strategic cities where soccer is already popular and facilities already exist, and partnering with well-established MLS teams in Los Angeles, D.C., Seattle, and New York (as some semiprofessional women’s teams already do) could help the league off the ground. MLS was once left for dead, too, and it is now thriving. And regardless of the constraints, starting, sustaining, and growing a major women’s professional league is imperative. The world’s biggest stars need a place to play, and the millions of soccer-playing girls around the world who dream of repeating the heroics of women like Wambach, Morgan, and Rapinoe need proof that their sport doesn’t lead them to a dead end.

There has been an enormous amount of discussion about whether NBC is failing or not in its broadcast of the London Summer Olympics, summed up by Linda Holmes’ excellent post bridging the gap between NBC’s business interests and viewers’ interests, neither of which are mutually exclusive. But beyond the questions of tape delay and streaming, I’ve been thinking about some ways to make the Olympic broadcasts more invigorating, and so have many of you. I took to Twitter to ask for suggestions. Here are the best ones, along with a couple of ideas of my own:

1. If you’re going to tape delay events, make good use of that constraint to provide continuity and momentum. “For commercials, pick up where they leave off rather than skipping stuff (parade of nations),” suggests Elizabeth Rosenzweig. And Mina pointed out that edits should be aimed at genuine slack time in events: “Using the editing options afforded by tape delay to show more events. Eg, Show a score immediately after a routine.”

2. Check the nationalism at the door. “I’d love to see more focus on int’l athletes,” offered Brian Forte. “Olympics are about bringing the world together, but NBC only talks about USA.” NBC has done a decent job of covering non-American Olympians in events where they are clearly preeminent, like Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, or Chinese swimmer Sun Yang, who was the subject of an interesting biographical piece that got at the tensions of his training in Australia. But the coverage is still oriented towards sports where Americans tend to make strong showings. A more interesting primetime broadcast would show more willingness to introduce sports where Americans aren’t dominant and with which American audiences tend not to be familiar, and to focus on athletes whose presence is geopolitically important, whether it’s the Saudi women or the experience of stateless Olympians.

3. More historical and technical pieces, fewer profiles. One of the best profiles of the Olympics broadcasts I’ve watched was of Olga Korbut, the 1972 Soviet gold medalist whose emotional performances both popularized gymnastics and became a Soviet propaganda tool. It was a deft explanation of all the elements of artistic gymnastics and of the ways individual athletes can become symbols, and the rich footage NBC used in the piece were a great way of demonstrating how the sport has evolved. Stepping away from stories of personal struggle might take some of the spotlight off individual American athletes, but it would allow NBC to provide greater perspective on the events and geopolitics of the games, beefing up the news magazine content and providing variation in the broadcast in the process. In addition, NBC would be crazy not to partner with the outlets who have provided some of the most outstanding graphical coverage of the games, including the New York Times, which has provided impeccable, easy-to-comprehend technical breakdowns of individual sports.

4. Give viewers a clear schedule. “Did they use to have a clicker that showed how long until the next event? I miss that. When is track and field? in 18 min,” wrote in Adam. NBC’s primetime coverage is extremely long, and there’s something punitive about pushing marquee events, especially those with strong appeal to younger viewers, like gymnastics, to the absolute end of the broadcast. “More apparatus finals in Gymnastics, plus the men’s 400m final in Track & Field coverage. Also, qualifying in men’s springboard Dviing, a men’s Beach Volleyball quarterfinal, and the men’s sprint final in track Cycling,” isn’t actually a descriptor that lets a family plan their evening viewing. I’m sure that’s how NBC wants it, to get as many people glued to the television as long as possible. But a more comprehensive schedule would make sure fans could be there for the events they care about most, and would help parents make decisions about whether letting a child stay up for fifteen more minutes actually made sense.

5. Eliminate poolside, trackside, courtside, etc. interviews. If fluff is the enemy, the interviews with athletes immediately after they compete are even more egregious than profile pieces. I’ve yet to see one elicit useful perspective on the event or surprising emotion. And they intrude on athletes’ chances to celebrate or grieve, and for us to cheer their victory or share their disappointment. Bob Costas has made his mistakes in these games, but he’s a strong interviewer, and I’d rather save all these snack-sized bites and let him make a meal of one or two athletes each night (and hopefully, to include some non-Americans).