NYT Obliterates Lolo Jones

and the stop watches. and someone had to start and stop them.

 

It's a crap shoot. Remember Dan and Dave from Barcelona?

She has a compelling story, as da man noted above. She has a great name. She's pretty. And you know what? Those are 3 solid reasons to build a marketing campaign around an athlete. And, oh yeah, she earned a spot on the US Olympic team.

 

Is she still seeing Tebow? That's four. But, yeah, waste of dead trees.

 

She's not actually dating Tebow. Just wants to be.

 

Don't we all.

 

Maybe the answer lies in this essay I found in goggling Longman:

Jere Longman on The Girls of Summer

The Beauty of Women's Sports

In my job covering international sport as chief Olympics correspondent for The New York Times, I would estimate that at least half of the stories I write are about women. From Babe Didrikson to Wilma Rudolph to Jackie Joyner-Kersee to Marion Jones to Mia Hamm, women often provide the most compelling stories on my beat. Women obviously have to overcome more cultural hurdles than men, which lends resonance to their stories. Women are also often eager to speak about themselves and their accomplishments because the mainstream media has traditionally ignored them. As a reporter, I am always seeking out fresh, untold stories, and these often are the stories of female athletes.

As the father of a young daughter who plays soccer and softball and runs track, I am also intrigued by the gender issues that attend female sports — especially evident during the 1999 Women's World Cup — and the troubling idea that women still have to prove their femininity when they sweat, whereas male athletes are appreciated simply for playing the game.

The pioneering aspect of women's sports also is especially appealing to me, the determination to succeed in the face of predicted failure by others. The Girls of Summer were long ignored, and often told that no one would pay to watch them play, that they could never fill up giant football stadiums, that they would not attract a significant television audience. Yet the players remained convinced that they had something worthwhile to offer and, given the chance, would attract a wide following. And they were right. I have seen the same determination in the Chinese soccer players in a country where women are considered the wrong sex, and in female distance runners from Africa, who are expected to live subservient lives but who forge their own personal and financial independence through sports.

—Jere Longman

 

Nope. This was ill-advised and poorly conceived. But Jere is hardly a mediocre writer. He's usually very good and often brilliant.

This was just a mess though.

 

Came in first in her qualifier, FWIW.

 

Yeah, but are women's sports a fresh, untold story in the U.S. in 2012?

I'm not referring to places around the world, like in Saudi Arabia, where clearly, it's a major story. I'm referring to this whole, "You've come a long way, baby!" storyline that's been done endlessly for the past 13 years in the U.S. It's not 1978 anymore, and it's not a shock to see a girl on a Little League team, or a female wrestler on the boys team. Heck, the big fight now is when a boy wants to compete on a girls team, only to be rejected because he's too dominant.

Women's sports have a niche in U.S. society. I think nearly everyone gets that by now. The "cultural hurdle" is done. Now it becomes a matter of whether Americans want to be entertained by women's sports. And so far, it's been proven that they are only on the biggest stages, which is why soccer leagues come and go and the WNBA is staying afloat only as an NBA marketing gimmick.

 

Longman makes it sound like Jones made the Olympic team based on name recognition instead of qualifying at the Olympic trials.

 

The most self-righteous feminists are the old white men.