JRLC Midterm

"I was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot" Article

"Hello. My name is Chris Kluwe, and for eight years I was the punter for the Minnesota Vikings. In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team. At the time, quite a few people asked me if I thought it was because of my recent activism for same-sex marriage rights, and I was very careful in how I answered the question. My answer, verbatim, was always, "I honestly don't know, because I'm not in those meetings with the coaches and administrative people." This is a true answer. I honestly don't know if my activism was the reason I got fired. However, I'm pretty confident it was. Allow myself to tell you a story about ... myself. The following is a record of what happened to me during my 2012 season with the Minnesota Vikings, written down immediately after the 2013 draft in April, when I realized what was happening, and revised recently only for clarity. I tried to keep things as objective as possible, and anything you see in quotes are words that I directly recall being said to me. This is a story about how actions have consequences, no matter how just or moral you think your cause happens to be, and it's a story about the price people all too often pay for speaking out. Today, April 30, 2013, I am writing an account of events that transpired during my time with the Minnesota Vikings during the 2012 NFL season and leading into the 2013 season (so I don't forget them in case it is necessary to recall what happened). During the summer of 2012, I was approached by a group called Minnesotans for Marriage Equality, which asked if I would be interested in helping defeat what was known as the Minnesota Gay Marriage Amendment. The proposed amendment would have defined marriage as "only a union of one man and one woman." (It was voted down, and same-sex marriage is now legal in Minnesota.) I said yes, but that I would have to clear it with the team first. After talking to the Vikings legal department, I was given the go-ahead to speak on the issue as long as I made it clear I was acting as a private citizen, not as a spokesman for the Vikings, which I felt was fair and complied with. I did several radio advertisements and a dinner appearance for Minnesotans for Marriage Equality. No one from the Vikings' legal department told me I was doing anything wrong or that I had to stop. On Sept. 7, 2012, this website published a letter I had written to Maryland delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. chastising him for trampling the free-speech rights of Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo. The letter also detailed why I supported the rights of same-sex couples to get married. It quickly went viral. On Sept. 8, the head coach of the Vikings, Leslie Frazier, called me into his office after our morning special-teams meeting. I anticipated it would be about the letter (punters aren't generally called into the principal's office). Once inside, Coach Frazier immediately told me that I "needed to be quiet, and stop speaking out on this stuff" (referring to my support for same-sex marriage rights). I told Coach Frazier that I felt it was the right thing to do (what with supporting equality and all), and I also told him that one of his main coaching points to us was to be "good men" and to "do the right thing." He reiterated his fervent desire for me to cease speaking on the subject, stating that "a wise coach once told me there are two things you don't talk about in the NFL, politics and religion." I repeated my stance that this was the right thing to do, that equality is not something to be denied anyone, and that I would not promise to cease speaking out. At that point, Coach Frazier told me in a flat voice, "If that's what you feel you have to do," and the meeting ended. The atmosphere was tense as I left the room. On Sept. 9, before our game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, the owner of the team, Zygi Wilf, came up to me, shook my hand, and told me: "Chris, I'm proud of what you've done. Please feel free to keep speaking out. I just came from my son's best friend's wedding to his partner in New York, and it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen." On Sept. 10, I was once again called into Leslie Frazier's office. Coach Frazier asked me if I was going to keep speaking out on the matter of same-sex marriage and equality. I responded that I was, and I related what Zygi Wilf had said to me at the game the day before. Coach Frazier looked stunned and put his hand across his face. He then told me: "Well, he writes the checks. It looks like I've been overruled." At that point, he got his personal public relations assistant on a conference call to ask her what to do. She outlined some strategies, mainly centered around talking only with large national media groups and ignoring the smaller market stations (radio, television, print). I said that I would be sure not to say anything to denigrate the team, but that I would like to talk with anyone who was interested. Both Coach Frazier and his PR person attempted to dissuade me from this course of action, saying that the message would be more effective if presented properly. I suspected this was another attempt to keep me from speaking out. I did not agree to any course of action they suggested, and I left the meeting once it concluded. On or around Sept. 17 (could have possibly been Sept. 19), I approached our head of public relations, Bob Hagan. It had come to my attention via Twitter that multiple news sources were attempting to contact me through the Vikings and had been unable to reach me (I learned this via those same agencies asking me on Twitter if I was available for interviews, to which I responded affirmatively). I told Bob Hagan that from this point on, any media requests he received were to be forwarded immediately to me. I would take care of them. He told me that he was trying to protect me from being overwhelmed. I repeated my request that he forward all media requests to me, as I could handle them. He assented, and later that day I found three media requests in my locker (to which I had already responded via Twitter), two of which were dated from four to six days earlier. Throughout the months of September, October, and November, Minnesota Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer would use homophobic language in my presence. He had not done so during minicamps or fall camp that year, nor had he done so during the 2011 season. He would ask me if I had written any letters defending "the gays" recently and denounce as disgusting the idea that two men would kiss, and he would constantly belittle or demean any idea of acceptance or tolerance. I tried to laugh these off while also responding with the notion that perhaps they were human beings who deserved to be treated as human beings. Mike Priefer also said on multiple occasions that I would wind up burning in hell with the gays, and that the only truth was Jesus Christ and the Bible. He said all this in a semi-joking tone, and I responded in kind, as I felt a yelling match with my coach over human rights would greatly diminish my chances of remaining employed. I felt uncomfortable each time Mike Priefer said these things. After all, he was directly responsible for reviewing my job performance, but I hoped that after the vote concluded in Minnesota his behavior would taper off and eventually stop. On Oct. 25, I had a poor game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the Vikings brought in several punters for a workout to potentially replace me. I do not believe this was motivated by my speaking out on same-sex equality, though I do not know for sure. During the special-teams meeting the following day, Mike Priefer berated me in an incredibly harsh tone the likes of which I've never heard a coach use about my abilities as a punter (and I have been berated before). The room went silent after he finished speaking, in a way that normally does not happen during meetings when someone is being called out. The Vikings kept me on as their punter. Near the end of November, several teammates and I were walking into a specialist meeting with Coach Priefer. We were laughing over one of the recent articles I had written supporting same-sex marriage rights, and one of my teammates made a joking remark about me leading the Pride parade. As we sat down in our chairs, Mike Priefer, in one of the meanest voices I can ever recall hearing, said: "We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows." The room grew intensely quiet, and none of the players said a word for the rest of the meeting. The atmosphere was decidedly tense. I had never had an interaction that hostile with any of my teammates on this issue—some didn't agree with me, but our conversations were always civil and respectful. Afterward, several told me that what Mike Priefer had said was "messed up." After this point, Mike Priefer began saying less and less to me, and our interactions were stilted. I grew increasingly concerned that my job would be in jeopardy. I had seen the same pattern of behavior directed at our former placekicker, Ryan Longwell, whom Mike Priefer began to ignore during the 2011 season and who was cut after rookie minicamps in early May 2012. On Dec. 9, I wore on my jersey a small patch made out of athletic tape on which I'd written, "Vote Ray Guy"—a small protest against punter Ray Guy's exclusion from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. At no point in the game did Coach Priefer instruct me to take off the patch, nor did he appear even to notice it. The only person who talked to me about it was Les Pico, our executive director of player development, who told me that the league office would fine me if I didn't take it off. I told him it was worth it, and we both laughed. On Dec. 13, during his weekly media session, Mike Priefer was asked about the patch in a joking manner. He responded tersely: "I don't even want to talk about it. Those distractions are getting old for me, to be honest with you." When asked if he had talked to me about the distractions, he said: "No. He won't listen." At no time during the season had Coach Priefer ever approached me about my actions, nor had he ever made any intimation that I was a distraction to the team. He also said: "To me, it's getting old. He's got to focus on punting and holding." Up to that point I had not dropped a single hold on field goals, and despite a shaky game against Tampa Bay and several substandard punts against other teams, both my net- and gross-punting marks were nearly in line with my career averages, which remain the best in Vikings history. I had also been repeatedly instructed by Mike Priefer to dial back the distance of my kicks to give our coverage team a better chance at getting down the field, a request I did my best to follow despite knowing it would mean sacrificing my own averages and allowing people to fashion an argument against me based on those numbers. His exact words were: "Chris, we need you to kick it higher and shorter, because our coverage team sucks. We need to force fair catches as much as possible." I complied, as I had always been taught to put the team before myself. In November and December, I was frequently marked for negative scores by Mike Priefer on our "Production Point" sheet for punts that earlier had been marked positive, despite the numbers being almost exactly the same in terms of hangtime and distance. I do not know if these "Production Point" sheets were ever shown to our general manager or head coach, nor do I know if they were used to evaluate my job performance, though I suspect they were. I often laughed with other players about how the points seemed to be arbitrarily assigned, and we all agreed that there was no way to succeed as far as the "Production Point" charts were concerned. The vast majority of special-teams players already had negative point totals for the year. After the season concluded in early January 2013, I had my end-of-year meeting with Coach Priefer. It was brief, and he told me that the team would probably be exploring options for competition. Several days later, the team signed T.J. Conley to a futures contract, which I saw as legitimate competition or a backup plan in case my knee surgery did not go well. I had been playing the past five years on a torn meniscus in my left knee, and the discomfort had gotten to the point where surgery was a necessity. Recovery time was anticipated to be two to four weeks, and my surgery was scheduled for Jan. 31. The surgery went smoothly, as did rehab, and I began kicking again in late February. At no point did Mike Priefer, Leslie Frazier, or Vikings general manager Rick Spielman contact me, nor did they ever ask how the surgery had gone, nor did they ever ask how my return to kicking was progressing. On Feb. 11, I received a message saying, "Please fly under radar please," from a phone number I would later learn belonged to Rick Spielman. The text message presumably concerned several things I had tweeted that day regarding Pope Benedict XVI's decision to step down. Spielman later called me and asked me to stop tweeting about the pope because angry people were ringing up team headquarters in Winter Park, Minn. It should be noted that my tweets concerned the lack of transparency and endemic institutional corruption of the Catholic Church, which among other things allowed child abuse to flourish. I also pointed out how that applied equally to financial and government institutions, and reiterated that I had nothing against anyone's religion, only against the abuses of power that institutions allow. Nonetheless, I complied with Spielman's request and did not tweet anything else about the pope that day, or in the future. In March and early April, I spent three to four days a week kicking at the local sports complex near my house in Huntington Beach, Calif., where I lived with my family during the offseason. I felt that I had returned to my in-season form and was quite pleased with my progress. I was confident that in a fair competition with T.J. Conley I would prevail. On April 21, I arrived back in Minnesota for the start of Organized Team Activities (OTAs), which commenced the following day. When I arrived at the facility, I went through my normal workouts and then went upstairs to talk to Mike Priefer. He hadn't contacted me since our year-end meeting in early January. We had a brief talk, and he mentioned that I would only have to attend the punt-special-team meetings. In previous years, I had attended all the special-teams meetings, as was expected of me. At no point was the draft mentioned. On April 27, I spent an hour at the Metrodome signing autographs for the Vikings draft party, an event for which the team requested my attendance, and then left to record some music with my band. My phone rang, and a local reporter from the Star Tribune asked me, "Chris, what are your thoughts on the Vikings taking a punter in the fifth round of the draft?" At this point I knew for certain the Vikings were replacing me. I hadn't been informed that drafting a punter was a possibility, and historically punters do not get drafted unless the team figures he'll be a starter. Multiple pundits questioned the Vikings' decision to draft a punter in the fifth round, as there were still several positions of need, and several players at those positions still available to be drafted. No one from the team called me on April 27 or 28. On April 29, my first day back in the facility after the draft, I met with Rick Spielman after Mike Priefer had told me Rick wanted to see me. Rick told me that this was solely about competition and had nothing to do with my views. I do not believe he was telling the truth. I had not been approached about reducing my contract for cap-space purposes, nor was my punting average poor enough to justify spending a fifth-round pick on a punter for competition. (My gross average in 2012 was almost exactly my career average, and I had a career-best net average. Statistically speaking, I am also the best punter in Vikings history, despite seven years of coaches asking me to deliberately sacrifice my own numbers to help the team, a request with which I always complied.) Rick said he would speak with me again after the rookie minicamp from May 3-5. I then spoke with Coach Priefer. He reiterated that this was about competition, which I suspect was also a lie, and then he started talking about me in the past tense, about how professional I had been, and how it had been a pleasure working with me. The meeting concluded several minutes later. I also learned that T.J. Conley had been cut that day. At no point from the end of the season, on Jan. 9, 2013, to my arrival at OTAs, on April 21, was I contacted by Leslie Frazier or by any of the other coaches. Rick Spielman called me once, as stated earlier, to insist I stop tweeting about the pope. On May 6, I had a meeting with Rick Spielman. He told me that the team was releasing me, and he thanked me for the great work I had done for the Vikings, and also said he would tell other teams how professionally and competently I had executed my duties over the years. I then had a meeting with Leslie Frazier, who repeated that I had been "a fantastic player for this organization" and who also told me, "Don't close any doors behind you—you never know when things will come full circle." He thanked me for my services as well, and said I was a great football player. Then I was escorted from the premises and was no longer a Viking. So there you have it. It's my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of 2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn't agree with the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike Priefer on a touchy subject matter. (Frazier was fired on Monday, at the conclusion of a 5-10-1 season.) One of the main coaching points I've heard throughout my entire life is, "How you respond to difficult situations defines your character," and I think it's a good saying. I also think it applies to more than just the players. If there's one thing I hope to achieve from sharing this story, it's to make sure that Mike Priefer never holds a coaching position again in the NFL, and ideally never coaches at any level. (According to the Pioneer Press, he is "the only in-house candidate with a chance" at the head-coaching job.) It's inexcusable that someone would use his status as a teacher and a role model to proselytize on behalf of his own doctrine of intolerance, and I hope he never gets another opportunity to pass his example along to anyone else. I also hope that Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are the people they truly profess themselves to be. Some will ask why I waited so long to tell this story. It's a fair question, and I have two answers. The first is that I still have friends on the Vikings, and opening up something like this during the season would not help them focus on their jobs. By doing it now, I hope they don't have to answer questions about an issue that concerns only four people, and I hope the issue will have died down before next season starts. The second is that I wanted to prove I still had the physical ability to compete in the NFL. I can still hit the ball 45 yards outside the numbers with good hangtime, and at the tryouts I've had this year I've gotten praise from the scouts and personnel people on hand, but for whatever reason I cannot find a job. (Side note: My numbers from last year would put me right in the middle of the pack for this year, and I've traditionally been in the middle to top third of punters each year). However, it's clear to me that no matter how much I want to prove I can play, I will no longer punt in the NFL, especially now that I've written this account. Whether it's my age, my minimum veteran salary, my habit of speaking my mind, or (most likely) a combination of all three, my time as a football player is done. Punters are always replaceable, at least in the minds of those in charge, and I realize that in advocating noisily for social change I only made it easier for them to justify not having me around. So it goes. Some will ask if the NFL has a problem with institutionalized homophobia. I don't think it does. I think there are homophobic people in the NFL, in all positions, but that's true for society as well, and those people eventually get replaced. All we can do is try to expose their behavior when we see it and call them to account for their actions. Thank you for taking the time to read my story. Never be afraid to do what's right. If no one ever says anything, nothing ever changes. —Chris Kluwe, former NFL player It's been a fun eight years; sometimes people do crappy things to each other." -by Chris Kluwe

"In Praise of Doris Burke, Basketball's Best TV Analyst" Article

"It is 2019 and cheerleaders are still a thing in the National Basketball Association. The Chicago Luvabulls. The Memphis Grizz Girls. The Charlotte Honey Bees. And this is the N.B.A., the most progressive league in professional sports, with the most enlightened commissioner. The good news is that the best broadcaster in the game is Doris Burke. This has been the case now for years. There is no one remotely close. As a basketball analyst for ESPN and ABC, Burke is the smartest, best prepared, most original on-air voice that the game possesses. She is as insightful about the stratagems taking shape on the court as she is about the emotional currents in the locker room. The question, then, is: Why is Burke relegated to being a role player, doing hurried sideline and post-buzzer interviews during the Finals while the announcers Mike Breen, Mark Jackson, and Jeff Van Gundy are left to dominate the airwaves at courtside? You can be sure that when Game 6 of the Finals begins, Burke will know more than anyone about the murkiest subplot so far in the series between the Toronto Raptors and the Golden State Warriors: What's the story with Kevin Durant? Why did he play hurt in Game 5, and who, if anyone, should take the blame for his ruptured Achilles, an injury that could put him on the sidelines for a year and cost him untold millions of dollars as a free agent? Van Gundy has called Burke "the LeBron James of sportscasters." A former high-school and college point guard, Burke, who is fifty-three, has been studying the intricacies and evolution of basketball for decades. It was once said of Ginger Rogers that she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels. Ditto for Doris Burke. My favorite video clip of her shows her walking along a waxed N.B.A. court in high heels, carrying papers and a notebook in her left hand while dribbling a basketball with her right. Suddenly, she swings the ball around her back and picks up the dribble with the same right hand. Steph Curry could not have done it much better—and let him try it in heels. James, Durant, Curry—everyone in the league seems to respect Burke and to await her inquiries about the game or the state of their spirits (elated or crushed) with genuine esteem. Real fans do, too. Burke's interviews are passed around online as treasured memes. In 2016, at a game in Toronto, Drake, a crazed courtside Raptors supporter, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Burke's picture and the phrase "WOMAN CRUSH EVERYDAY." Deadspin has pronounced Burke "the best damn basketball broadcaster there is." Burke's style is hardly flamboyant. She doesn't have a memorable or eccentric voice like Johnny Most or Marv Albert, and she doesn't do shtick. Burke is earnest, prepped, serious. She goes at the work the way that Elizabeth Warren has been going at the Democratic primary campaign. She is determined to succeed on the basis of substance, agree with her or not. There are many (depending on your definition of "many") women working now as play-by-play and color commentators in the N.C.A.A., N.B.A., N.F.L., and M.L.B., but it has not been even remotely easy for women in the business to get past the old prejudices. Bill Simmons, a gifted basketball writer and sports podcaster, and hardly a dinosaur of the Dick Young era, wrote about Burke on ESPN.com, in 2008, with a condescension he'd grow to regret: "She's doing a fine job, but does it make me a sexist that I can't listen to Doris Burke analyze NBA playoff games without thinking, 'Woman talking woman talking woman talking woman talking . . . ' the entire time?" A decade later, Simmons answered his own question, saying that Burke was, in fact, a "fantastic analyst" and that it was "embarrassing" that she was working the sidelines during the playoffs. There is a long history to all of this. For half of forever, women had a nearly impossible time breaking into sportswriting and broadcasting, suffering endless indignities and worse. In 1978, Melissa Ludtke, of Sports Illustrated, brought a lawsuit against the M.L.B., which was resisting her right to report the baseball beat with equal access to locker rooms, clubhouses, and other malodorous sacred places. Leigh Montville, a sports columnist for the Boston Globe, interrogated Ludtke's right to be in baseball clubhouses. "I have only a few questions for the lady," Montville wrote. "I don't care about all the wink and leer jokes about a grown woman going into a room where grown men are undressing. I just want to know if the lady is doing this job because she really wants to do this job.... Is she for real? Is she serious?" And then came a long litany of qualifying questions: "Did she ever spit in a baseball glove? Was her life absolutely dominated by sports when she was a kid?" And on and on he went. Ludtke said at the time that most people understood her case as "girls wanting to go into a locker room and see men naked" rather than one of equal access. She won in court. But even after that decision, Jerome Holtzman, of the Chicago Sun-Times, who was one of the best-known baseball writers of his era, was resistant to the change. "I suppose the fact that this was an all-male world was what made it so exciting to me at first," he told Roger Angell, of The New Yorker, for a piece from 1979 called "Sharing the Beat." "And now that it's being invaded and eroded it's much less attractive. Maybe I'm a chauvinist—I don't know. The press box used to be a male preserve—that was its charm. I'd rather not have a woman as a seatmate at a World Series game. It wouldn't be as much fun. I've never met a woman who knew as much baseball as a man." But things changed all the same. Not long after, in the mid-eighties, I was a rookie on the sports staff of the Washington Post, a department run by George Solomon and featuring Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell, Michael Wilbon, and Dave Kindred—and Jane Leavy, Christine Brennan, and Sally Jenkins. Jenkins, a rigorous reporter and a witty writer who still does a regular column for the Post, told me that as recently as last year the beat writers for all four of the pro sports teams in D.C. were women. "The thing is that in sportswriting the breakthroughs came at least twenty years ago and more," Jenkins said. "But television sports has far more trip wires than sports journalism. Sports TV is still Wall Street. And there is no real change unless there is mandate from a guy on high. All the breakthroughs—and here you can name whatever women behind microphones—are decisions made by a single man at the top who wants to be Branch Rickey." On sports television, the early breakthroughs included Mary Carillo, Lesley Visser, and Robin Roberts. But women are all too often still judged by their looks. "Are they attractive enough? But if they're too attractive, then maybe you're a Twinkie," Jenkins said. And their voices, too. Are they "shrill" or "squeaky" or do they sound like "your first wife in divorce court"? Which sounds awfully familiar to anyone who followed the Clinton campaigns, in 2008 and 2016, or those of the many women running now. "Thankfully, Doris knows how to deal with all of that," Jenkins said. "She's sure-footed. She's confident. She's not trying to appeal to anybody on any other basis other than knowledge. She's a basketball junkie and she's an athlete. She comes from that pure place. She's not trying to be an entertainer. She's just trying to be observant and tell the truth." YouTube is filled with examples of Burke's unshowy, revealing interviews, including her moment with LeBron James after he brought the N.B.A. title to Cleveland, in 2016—the greatest individual performance of the era. Burke has absorbed her share of retro nastiness, even on the air. During the 2013 playoffs, Gregg Popovich, an otherwise masterly coach of the San Antonio Spurs, was having a rough game and decided it was fine to treat Burke to some mumbly disdain. When she asked him to elaborate on the troubles his team had been facing in the first half, he would answer only with one word, "Turnovers." He just let her hang there. But when Popovich tried to pull the same stunt four years later, Burke was having none of it and cut short the interview, saying, "Happy Mother's Day to me. I'm taking the reprieve, sir." Doris Burke was born Doris Sable. She comes from a family of modest means. When she was seven, the Sables moved from Long Island to Manasquan, a shore town in New Jersey. The previous homeowners had left behind a basketball. Doris picked it up and didn't often put it down. At the local high school, she led her team to a 71-10 record over three seasons. She was such a deft point guard and such a consistent scorer that she won a full scholarship to study and play ball at Providence College. She was All-Big East. After graduation, her coach, Bob Foley, asked her to stay on the coaching staff, according to a profile on NJ.com. She then started broadcasting locally, first doing women's games, then men's, and made her way up the ladder, eventually to the W.N.B.A. and the N.B.A. Last year, Burke signed a five-year contract with ESPN, but she radiates the sense that her time is not unlimited. "We still have a long way to go," she told Sports Illustrated last season. "Because the reality is that I'm fifty-two years old. And how many fifty-five to sixty-year-old women do you see in sports broadcasting? How many? I see a lot of sixty-year-old men broadcasting." "Listen, I want to be considered attractive," she went on. "Am I going to undergo surgery to make myself younger? No. So the wrinkles you see on my face and the signs of age that I have, they're going to be there, period, and it's up to the networks to decide." The decision seems easy. Come next year, Doris Burke ought to be the lead analyst straight through to the last game of the N.B.A. Finals." -By David Remnick

"Martina Navratilova on Megan Rapinoe and the Trajectory of Gay Women in Sports" Article

"Megan Rapinoe, the co-captain of the champion U.S. women's soccer team, is confidently and casually everyone's current favorite athlete, leader, and lesbian. As I watched her take the podium at the ticker-tape parade in New York on Wednesday, her gestures and posture unapologetically what some of us watching would classify as dykey (others may say, politely, that her presentation was not traditionally feminine), I wondered what this moment felt like for another woman, the first American professional athlete to come out. So I called the tennis player Martina Navratilova, who is currently at Wimbledon, working as a commentator but also playing—in a legends doubles match—and asked. Navratilova's own coming-out, in 1981, was conflicted and mangled. Six years earlier, at the age of eighteen, Navratilova, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, had defected to the United States. At the same time that she made the decision not to return to Czechoslovakia, she also realized that she was gay. Navratilova was then one of the world's top two female tennis players—the other was Chris Evert. She had to talk to the press a lot, and the press was becoming increasingly interested in the subject of female athletes' sexuality. Navratilova had a policy of deflecting the question. "I never said no, I wasn't gay," she recalled. "I just said, 'I don't want to talk about it, it's private'—which I really feel it is, private. But they would never ask that question of a male athlete." Sports was a manly business: "Of course they are straight, unless they are figure skaters or something. Female athletes had to prove that they were straight. It's not a girl activity." There were, of course, lesbians on the women's tennis tour, but Navratilova said that the proportion was, "percentage-wise, not that much higher than the general population. There were a lot more lesbians on the golf tour, but they were more closeted." In 1979, Navratilova fell in love with the writer Rita Mae Brown, whose 1973 novel, "Rubyfruit Jungle," remains the only American lesbian-themed massive best-seller. (It was published by a feminist collective and picked up by Bantam, a few years later, when it had sold seventy thousand copies.) Brown introduced Navratilova to the world of politically active lesbians, in which she was a celebrity, and Navratilova began thinking of coming out publicly. The problem was, her application for U.S. citizenship was still pending and could be denied on the grounds of her homosexuality. (This provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act was dropped in 1990, when it was redrafted by Representative Barney Frank, of Massachusetts, who is gay.) Navratilova developed a new way of deflecting the sexuality question: she would now say, "I can't talk about it now." Privately, she told some journalists that she couldn't talk about it until she became a citizen. She also told some of the other tennis players that, once she had her passport, "If anybody asks me about it, I'm just going to say, 'Yes, I am gay.' " Megan Rapinoe, during a World Cup match between the U.S. and France.Photograph by Richard Heathcote / Getty In April, 1981, a woman named Marilyn Barnett sued Billie Jean King, one of the great female players and the founder of the Women's Tennis Association. Barnett, who had been King's lover for seven years, claimed that King had promised to support her for life, and was demanding compensation. Navratilova knew Barnett, who was a hairdresser and had travelled with King for several years. "She did my hair, too," Navratilova told me. King acknowledged the relationship but said that it was an affair she regretted, and affirmed her commitment to her marriage. "She was trying to pretend that she was still straight," Navratilova remembered. "She wasn't, but she didn't come out until the late nineties." The lawsuit caused journalists to ask ever more questions about tennis players' sexuality. Navratilova knew that she was about to be granted citizenship, which would have freed her to come out—except for one thing: "The sponsors had said to the people in charge that if there was another scandal that they would pull their sponsorship from the tour. So first I was protecting my citizenship, and then I was protecting the people I was with at the W.T.A. I felt I was responsible for sixty to a hundred women." Their livelihoods depended in large part on the sponsorship money that came from Avon, the cosmetics company then behind the W.T.A. In the summer of 1981, Navratilova got her passport. "And two days later this journalist calls me, in Monte Carlo. Now I can't come out because I'm protecting the tour. So I said, 'You are not going to write about it, are you?' He said, 'Not if you don't want me to.' I said, 'Of course I don't want you to.' He said, "O.K., I won't, then." And two days later it was in the Daily News." The headline was "Martina Fears Avon's Call if She Talks." Avon did not in fact drop its sponsorship of the W.T.A. Nor did Navratilova lose the endorsements she had—the racquets and shoes stayed in place. "But I couldn't get any deals outside of that in the U.S., because I was out," she said. Even as her career soared, as did the popularity of women's tennis, advertising agencies stayed away. "They would call my agent about a commercial or something, and she would say, 'How about Martina?' and they would say no and then Chris [Evert] would get the deal, or somebody else. It was the kiss of death. Advertisers wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole." I asked how long that lasted, and Navratilova had to think a moment. The only exceptions were Olivia Cruises, a company offering cruises for lesbians, and, in the late nineties, Subaru, the car company that ingeniously decided to advertise specifically to lesbians. Audiences, though, were more accepting than the advertisers. Two months after the article, Navratilova lost to Tracy Austin, and the crowd clapped its support for the one who lost. "So I felt accepted by the general public," Navratilova said. "They didn't care." Even after the Daily News article, Navratilova couldn't speak openly about her sexuality. She had left Brown for Nancy Lieberman, a professional basketball player who was in the closet. "Now I was protecting her. We were 'friends.' Everybody knew, but I never owned up to [our relationship] because she was still trying to get endorsements and play basketball." In theory, Navratilova believes, the question of one's sexuality should be separate from the question of one's relationship: "I will own my sexuality, but I don't want people in my private life. It's private; that's why it's called that." In practice, however, she felt she couldn't be fully out until her relationship with Lieberman ended, in 1984. Her next girlfriend, the beauty queen Judy Nelson, had no objections to being open about their relationship. A media frenzy ensued. "The first year we were together, the paparazzi followed us everywhere," Navratilova said. "It was pretty nasty. And the stories were all about 'her lesbian den.' And when we split up, they were calling it our 'love shack' or something. We'd been together for seven years, and they were calling it a 'love shack.' " So what did it feel like now, to see the adulation of Rapinoe, the celebration of the soccer team's victory accompanied by photographs of players kissing their same-sex partners, the ESPN photoshoot of Rapinoe and her partner, the basketball player Sue Bird? "It's just fantastic," Navratilova said. "It took a long time. This was thirty years ago that this was going on. It seems like it happened so quickly, gay marriage and all that, but if you are living in the middle of it, it happened very slowly. I am just thrilled that it's not only O.K.—it's becoming less and less of a thing. When people come out, it doesn't make headlines anymore. It's a non-issue, which I've always said—that I hope one day it will be a non-issue. That's exactly what I've been marching for for decades. I'm thrilled. I'm just so thrilled."" -By Masha Gessen

"What the Dodgers Meant to Brooklyn" Article

"More than 50 years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, many in the borough still think of the lovable Bums as their team. Fans fondly recall the glory days of the 1955 World Series and legendary players like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and a young Sandy Koufax. WNYC spoke with Michael Shapiro, author of "The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together," about the lasting appeal of a team that's long gone. An edited transcript: WNYC: You call the Brooklyn Dodgers the most local team in baseball. Why was that? How were they different than the Phillies or, closer by, the Giants and the Yankees? Shapiro: All those teams represented a city. The Dodgers represented a fifth of the city, a borough. Rather than all of New York, like the New York Mets - the New York Mets are not the Queens Mets, they are the New York Mets - the Brooklyn Dodgers were Brooklyn's team and I think that in itself set them apart, in good times and in bad. The passion that the fans have for the Dodgers is legendary - And somewhat exaggerated, but go ahead. But the Dodgers really only won in the '40s and '50s and before that it wasn't all that rewarding to be a Dodgers fan, right? The fact is that for much of their history the Brooklyn Dodgers were not a very good team. The thing about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the mystery of them is that here's a team that from 1947 to 1957, for 10 years, was the best team in the National League - they go to the World Series five times - and the second best team in baseball. Of course, four out of the five times they go to the World Series they lose to the Yankees. They win a World Series once, in 1955, and two years later they vanish. Another part of it too is that for most of those 10 years the core of the team, these legendary players, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine, were together. And most of them lived in Brooklyn. In fact, they would carpool to the ballpark, to Ebbets Field. I mean it was a really local team. The idea that you would have baseball players, Brooklyn Dodgers, whose kids played on local little league teams - this was all part of the Dodgers as a truly local sport. The Dodgers somehow became the repository of all these highly romanticized, and in some ways justified, notions of what baseball was supposed to be. Brooklyn, I don't think, ever thought seriously that Walter O'Malley would move his team to Los Angeles. And I think that sense of the Dodgers leaving, the Eagle going out of business, the trolley stopping running, the navy yard shrinking dramatically - all happened at roughly the same time. After the Dodgers left, Brooklyn sank. And really, the Brooklyn of today - the Brooklyn that is hot - stands in great contrast to the Brooklyn that I knew growing up in the '60s and the '70s. This romanticized notion, it sounds like it's sort of at odds with what the reality was at the time. The Dodgers were called The Bums... Well, they were The Bums because they were the lovable team. Something would always go wrong to deny the Dodgers - especially when they were good - a chance to win the World Series; famous or infamous plays. Before that they were know as the Daffiness Boys because they were really bad. Dave Herman their most famous player getting hit on the head with a fly ball, three guys on one base, these are sort of the legendary stories of the Brooklyn Dodgers. But there's something important here. When I went back to look at the Brooklyn Dodgers, writing a book about it, what I wanted to understand was, What did I miss? Did I really miss something by being too young to have ever gone to Ebbets Field? And was this really romanticized to the point where it totally exaggerated the thing. What I came to understand is that what the Dodgers were about was a topic of conversation. That, in many ways, is what really makes cities work and what holds cities together. For six months of the year in baseball there's a game virtually every day. Which means there is something for strangers to talk about in the elevator, waiting at the grocery store, all those ways in cities that people interact with people they don't necessarily know. And there's always that game to talk about: on the stoop, in the street, waiting for the subway. I think you can make a really powerful argument that what Brooklyn lost after the Dodgers left was a topic of conversation. The Dodgers win the World Series in 1955 and years later, my parents, who were not big baseball fans - my mother certainly couldn't have cared less - I asked my mom what was it like when they won. And she goes, "We won." We? Who's "we"? All of a sudden it was "we." The team was Brooklyn, Brooklyn's team. If the Dodgers left in 1939, I don't think anybody would have cared very much because they weren't missing anything. But this was a team that people looked at with a considerable and justified amount of pride. And then to lose them as they did and lose that conversation was a very difficult thing. So, yes, there is always a glossy image of what it was really like back then, but the fact is that something was a lost in Brooklyn when the Dodgers left. The Dodgers back then were drawing about 1 million or 1.2 million fans a season. Yeah, the Dodgers were doing well. They were doing financially better than the Yankees. You're talking about an era, in the 1950s, where the Yankees won so often that is was possible to get a walk-up ticket to a World Series game. It wasn't as it is today. There was no Stub Hub needed then. The problem was that Walter O'Malley, then owner of the Dodgers, saw that he could not continue being a profitable and successful owner if he stayed in Ebbets Field. And he wasn't wrong. Walter O'Malley was a businessman who had gone into the baseball business and he wanted, for the record, to stay in Brooklyn. He wanted permission to build a stadium in downtown Brooklyn where the Nets Barclay's Center is now going to rise. And that permission was denied him in terms of condemning the land on that spot on Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue by Robert Moses, the powerbroker, the lord of all that fell and rose in New York. So you contend that Moses was ultimately more to blame than O'Malley. How about 100 percent. Not more. All. Didn't O'Malley's plan depend on getting a lot of concessions from the city? Nothing compared to what Los Angeles was giving him. All he really needed was a for Robert Moses to use his power, which he did all across the city for many years - decades - to condemn what was basically the site of an old wholesale meat market that had been abandoned on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue. And once that land was condemned, he would use his own money to build that stadium. He wasn't asking for a handout. He wasn't doing what George Steinbrenner did years later in getting the city to basically build him a replacement for a perfectly adequate Yankee Stadium that had been refurbished in 1975. O'Malley wanted to stay in Brooklyn; his letters show it. He never wanted to leave. And if all had gone right Sandy Koufax would have been pitching in Dodger Stadium in downtown Brooklyn and I would have gotten to follow him. Let's talk about the last couple of years. O'Malley announced in August 1955 that the team was going to be leaving Ebbets Field... Well, he didn't announce that he would be leaving until, he announced it at the very last minute in October of 1957. After the World Series he announces that he is going to leave. After having spent the previous year or so playing Los Angeles off of New York. But even until the end, he was still trying to find a way to stay. Because remember, Los Angeles only looks like a brilliant business move and a success in retrospect. It was not clear that he was necessarily going to be welcomed; he was a New Yorker. Los Angeles was foreign territory. And it was not a sure thing. Nor was is clear whether he was going to be able to have the city council approve this generous offer that was being extended to him. And there's a wonderful story that Rosalind Wyman, who was a Los Angeles City Council member who in many ways spearheaded bringing the Dodgers to Los Angeles, tells of the day that the L.A. City Council was taking a vote on whether or not to make this offer formal, whether to extend this offer to Walter O'Malley to come to L.A. The mayor of Los Angeles, Norris Poulson, calls her into his office and says, 'Listen, no one at this point knows what Walter O'Malley is thinking so you've got to get him on the phone and you've got to ask him if we extend this offer are you coming?' So Rosalind Wyman walks down the hall, goes to her office, places a call and gets O'Malley on the phone. And she explains to him exactly what the mayor has said: If you get this offer, are you going to come. She told me this story and she said O'Malley responded by saying, 'I want to thank you for everything you've done, but I am a New Yorker and if I get a good offer here, I am staying. Rosalind Wyman thanks him, hangs up the phone, goes down the hall back to the mayor's office and he asks, "What did he say?" And she replies, "I couldn't reach him." The Los Angeles City Council votes to extend the offer; New York says nothing, no counter offer, and O'Malley leaves. Right until the end he wanted to stay. What was the reaction like when they actually left? It's a good question. Many people think that there was tearing of garments and putting ash on the foreheads and mourning, but the fact was by October of '57, first of all the team is not good anymore -- they had last gone to the World Series in '56 and lost in seven games to the Yankees. They finished in third place, but that core of the team is really aging. And this dance between L.A. and New York of are they staying or going, staying or going, to say nothing of whether the Giants are going to go to San Francisco, at this point had gotten really, really tiring. And by the time they left there were a few sort of tepid rallies -- keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn sort of thing -- but by the time they left the reaction in the papers was I am sick of both of them, enough already. It had gone on for so long and it had been so drawn out that a) it didn't come as a shock and b) was not attended by a week of mourning. It's been 53 years since they left-- My son, who is 15, says to me when he sees me wearing a Dodger hat or a Dodger shirt, he goes, "Dad, get over it. They are gone." But why is the connection still so strong? Why are you still wearing that stuff? [Sighs] I came of age convinced if the Dodgers had stayed, everything would have been better. I would have grown up in an interesting place. I would not have grown up in the dull, flat Brooklyn that I knew growing up. I would have come of age in a dynamic, engaging, interesting place. And so the Dodgers for me represented a past that I missed out on. I think for people who are older it was a past that they remembered. And I think that towns don't get over that kind of thing so quickly. They really don't." -by Yuval Rosenberg

"If you though sports were ever separate from politics, think again" Article

"Sports are, at a baseline, the ultimate meritocracy. There's a winner and a loser, and the outcome is seldom in question -- a rarity in a world that's mostly gray. And yet, sports have never been wholly separated from politics, from race, from gender, from business, from society. Sports are, and always have been, a microcosm of where we find ourselves as a country -- perhaps as a world. As with any other form of entertainment, the ability to think of sports outside of our society has been a privilege of those who, until now, haven't been affected by their consequences. Tell Jesse Owens he should've "stuck to sports" when his four gold medals and record-setting performance in the 1936 Berlin Olympics directly flew in the face of Adolf Hitler's plan to use the Games as a showcase for supposed Aryan superiority. Tell it to Babe Didrikson Zaharias, a multisport Olympian who, in 1938, became the first woman to play in a men's PGA tournament and often dealt with misogynistic criticism of femininity versus her athleticism. So much so that, when she took up golf, the then-Olympic gold medalist changed her wardrobe and wore lipstick to fit the expectation of how a woman should look. "I know I'm not pretty, but I try to be graceful," she said at the time. Tell that to Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or to Billie Jean King or Venus Williams, who, in different eras, fought for the same level of pay equality for men and women. Tell that to black players, Irish players, Italian players, female players, all of whom have fought over decades and centuries for the right to merely exist as athletes, to contribute highly sought-after skills that have long transcended artificial barriers. Irish athletes made it on the baseball field and in the boxing ring in the 19th century, when stores hung "no Irish need apply" signs and newspapers portrayed Irish immigrants as terrorists. Female students parlayed Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting discrimination at educational institutions, into a silver medal in women's basketball at the 1976 Olympics. Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state and a black woman, was barred from membership at Augusta National Golf Club because of her gender until four-and-a-half years ago. She joined in 2012, when the club began admitting women. The historical assimilation of immigrants, the "mainstreaming" of black talent, the elevation of women outside of "female" roles, the value of unions, the questioning of government subsidies for corporations in the form of bond abatements for stadiums or league-wide tax breaks -- these are all ways sports have never just been about sports, ways in which some of us haven't been able to just "stick to sports." These are all ways sports, and sports coverage, can help us understand our world just a little bit better, as long as we continue to elevate those voices that aren't always heard. When you really think about it, the division between sports and politics has long been eroded. The separation is what takes effort to uphold -- and it's mostly done by people whose right to exist in this space isn't questioned. Some of us have been outsiders for a while, constantly proving that we belong in the sports world. "How did you get to be a sports fan?" is a question I'm asked more often than not. My answer is usually very simple: "I was a New Yorker growing up two subway stops away from Yankee Stadium in the '90s. How could I not be a sports fan?" Many of us have loved sports even when the feeling wasn't mutual. Even when the communities surrounding these beautiful games were decidedly exclusionary, even when they told us we didn't belong. It often feels like my status as a sports fan is questioned as a coded way to question my status as an American. I'm aware of those implications now more than ever, when our divisions based on race, gender, class, education, religion, geography, have been manipulated into an ever-narrowing definition of what it means to be an American, to be a patriot. I have to ask whether a white man who grew up in the suburbs would be asked how he "got to be a sports fan." But the ability of sports to unite along political lines, racial lines, gender lines, religious lines, class lines -- that has always been there. We were all Yankees after 9/11, and we were all #BostonStrong after the marathon bombing. Years earlier, across an ocean, South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup behind Nelson Mandela's pleas for national unity and reconciliation after decades of apartheid. Sports' potential to unite has always been there, and so has the ability to recognize when all of these seemingly disparate worlds intersect. Watching sports with no eye toward the political, or the racial, or the gendered, or what have you, is a privilege many of us have never been afforded, simply because we were perceived as outsiders to mainstream institutions. And it's not limited to sports. It's no more possible for a survivor of sexual assault to unemotionally watch her team bring on a player accused of rape than it is for a descendant of Irish immigrants to unemotionally read "Angela's Ashes." Nor should it be: Recognizing the importance of sports beyond simple escapism serves to elevate this thing that we love and feel, at times beyond the point of rationality. The plain fact is that many people are now coming around to the realization that sports can't just be taken at face value. And that's OK. Sports can be a barometer for the movements we must make through difficult times -- through social tensions, through existential crises. Sports don't just exist for sports' sake -- sports can be art. You can always find great sports stories that speak to who we were at any point in history. Hemingway, Kerouac, Thompson -- some of our greatest essayists were also our greatest sportswriters. Some of our most important social commentary has come in the form of sportswriting. I would never place myself in the company of those writers, but my conception of myself as a sports fan has always come alongside my conception of myself as a New Yorker, as a woman, as a person of color and as an American. It's difficult for me to separate those sides of myself. And it seems to become increasingly difficult for many other sportswriters to separate their sports sides from their human sides, to separate their journalism from their morality. Sure, this paradigm shift seems sudden; as both journalists and human beings, it seems impossible not to question attacks on freedom of the press, not to wonder what an immigration ban means for Mo Farah, not to throw Tom Brady into every conversation possible. But that's what has always made sports compelling -- as art, as spectacle and, yes, as politics. Sports can reflect the best, and at times the worst, of our collective humanity, and it allows us to experience both ends of that spectrum while studying the fine line that separates the two." -By Kavitha A. Davidson

"Where the Fans Rule" Article

"Today is one of the most unique spectacles in all of sports, the annual shareholders meeting for the Green Bay Packers. With profits at an alltime high, thousands of "owners" (fans who hold Packers' stock certificates) will gather in an 80,000-seat boardroom (Lambeau Field) to hear about the state of the franchise (excellent, if you've gotten over last January's playoff loss). During my time as the Packers vice president, I presented several of these reports breaking down the cap situation to the friendliest group of shareholders you'll ever find. The schedule of presentations typically begins with an overview of the previous year from the President/CEO—now Mark Murphy—and a few remarks about the future. But it's the next speech that everyone comes to hear: the general manager's report, broken down by position group, addressing the team's prospects and personnel. Former general manager Ron Wolf was always quite revealing when describing the team's strengths and weaknesses. He played to the crowd, saving the quarterback position for last and being sure to describe Brett Favre as "the finest quarterback in the National Football League" to wild applause. The most common question that I received from fans at the annual meeting was, "Is Aaron Rodgers really going to be the guy who takes over when Brett retires?" I always said yes, yet few believed me. Most thought we would pursue a veteran quarterback. Current GM Ted Thompson is far less expansive in his comments, using bland descriptions of players like, "He's a fine young man and we think he'll play well for us this year." Nevertheless, Thompson will draw steady applause.Following the general manager's report, the crowd thins. Subsequent reports on finance, marketing, investments, and community relations are important, but the majority of people want to hear about football, not business. And hey, the Packer Pro Shop and Curly's Restaurant beckon! In recent years the Packers have given shareholders a free tour of Lambeau. It was important to add value, especially to those traveling long distances to attend the meeting, which now occurs before camp opens instead of at the end. The shareholders' meeting always reaffirmed my belief that the Packers are much more than a football team. They're a community, a way of life. Many consider their Packers stock, which isn't transferable and has no dividend potential, to be one of their most valuable possessions. When managing the Packers' payroll and contracts, I often thought about what was in the best interest of shareholders. I viewed myself as a steward of a public trust. The closest approximation the Packers have to an owner is the Executive Committee, which deals with only off-field matters. The football operations staff is given complete autonomy in managing the team and player finances. The Financials A key element in the run-up to the shareholder meeting is the release of the team's financial statement (always a profit) for the previous fiscal year. Within minutes of that document going public, I would get calls and texts from player agents who playfully (and sometimes not so playfully) had suggestions on ways we could put that profit to good use for their clients. A strong showing on the financial report made it especially difficult when I was negotiating over a relatively small amount of money. Agents would point to the newspaper headlines about our tens of millions in profit, with no debt to retire, but I would gently tell them that if we showed a loss I would never ask their client to take less to help the cause.Just last week, the rosiest report in franchise history came out: the Packers had a record profit of $54.3 million on revenues of $308 million. The profit represents a 26% increase from last year's then-record of $43 million. Murphy, however, will try to tamp down the report and point to the cyclical nature of contract negotiations skewing the numbers—this offseason's lucrative extensions for Rodgers and Clay Matthews will not be reflected until the next year's report. No matter, this year still illustrates the huge uptick in financial performance for NFL teams since the 2011 CBA. Speaking of which... A Bargaining Issue Although the Players Association has long implored NFL teams to "show us your books," the Packers financial statement is the league's only one available for viewing. Which increases scrutiny on Green Bay from an array of observers. I remember giving a presentation at Stanford during the NFL's career symposium and being peppered with questions about the report. I begged off, saying I didn't have the documents in front of me. Upon saying that, the entire audience pointed to the screen behind me, where our revenue and expense chart was being displayed on a PowerPoint! On a macro level, the Packers' financials have always been an interesting subject when it comes to collective bargaining. Just like his predecessor, the late Gene Upshaw, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith argues that such a healthy profit—in the league's tiniest market, no less—is compelling evidence that all teams should be sharing more money with players. I remember having many conversations with Upshaw over lunch during his annual visit to Green Bay. He would look out my office window, down at the Lambeau Field Atrium where tour groups and restaurants hummed along, and say wistfully, "We need to get some of that money." I would always remind him that while the Packers are one of the great success stories in all of sport, its unique brand doesn't compare to anything else in the NFL. More more than 100,000 people are on the season-ticket waiting list, more than a million have toured Lambeau, and practice squad players routinely get recognized on the street. He knew all this, of course, but he couldn't pass up the opportunity to argue his case. And to be sure, there is a key number in the Packers' report that shows a glimpse into all teams' financials. It's the national revenue from the league, largely from broadcast deals, of $180 million. The import of that number is this: every team should be able to cover its player payroll from national revenue alone, allowing other income to be used elsewhere. Because there is no true owner taking the money for his/her own personal benefit, the Packers' profit goes toward renovations and is put into a reserve fund that now exceeds $250 million. For a franchise with no stadium debt, this represents quite a healthy balance sheet. During the 2011 CBA negotiations, however, the owners argued that Green Bay's drop in profit from $20 million to under $10 million the previous year was linked directly to player costs outpacing revenue growth. Now, in the two years since the new CBA clipped the players' share of revenue to add to the owners' bottom line, the Packers' profit has spiked in consecutive years to startling record levels. Not wanting to give the impression that they took advantage of the players in the CBA negotiations, these are certainly figures the owners don't want publicized quite as much. But that, my friends, is a column for another day." -by ANDREW BRANDT

"'Summer of the Women': How 1996 Olympics changed sports forever" Article

"Twenty years is about the length of a generation. A group of people born around the same time, living under a common experience. By that measure, America's current 20-year-olds have never doubted the role or value of female athletes. That is thanks in large part to the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Those Games were the "Summer of the Women," a watershed moment that forever changed the stature of women in sports. "That Olympics set the tone for many generations to come," said Dominique Moceanu, a member of the gold-medal-winning 1996 U.S. gymnastics team. "We became part of something magical. "When you have more distance, you can see how special that moment was." The legacy of the female athletes of 1996 will live on in Rio de Janeiro. American women are again the favorites in soccer, basketball, water polo and gymnastics, and the U.S. will send competitive swimming and track teams. The 292 women on the 555-member U.S. team are the most female athletes to compete for a nation in Olympic history. Women had shared the Olympic spotlight with male athletes long before 1996. Many gymnasts, track stars and swimmers had earned glory and fame. But that summer's Olympics were different. Not only did the "Magnificent 7" gymnasts win gold, but American women also dominated team sports, winning gold in basketball as well as in softball and soccer — two sports added for the first time in Atlanta. While the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta marked a watershed moment, these are some of the other significant moments in women's sports history. "The U.S. women athletes really answered the call," said Stanford women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, who took a yearlong leave of absence from the Cardinal to coach the Olympic team. "It just showed that, given the opportunity, how hungry they were and what sacrifices they were willing to make. "It was thrilling." The American women participating in the Atlanta Games were the first generation raised under Title IX, the federal law passed in 1972 that prohibits sexual discrimination in educational institutions. They had benefited from scholarships and the increased growth of women's athletics. "It really was Title IX coming to fruition," said Julie Foudy, a Stanford graduate and member of the '96 women's soccer team. "We were the first generation. And we were so many light-years ahead of other countries in terms of funding, infrastructure and grass roots. "I think that was the first time when people said, 'Whoa, look at the domination of our women.'" The women did dominate. Not just in gymnastics or in the pool or on the track, but also on the tennis court — Lindsay Davenport won gold — as well as in team sports. The basketball team spent a year together, training and traveling the country to play against collegiate programs. They drew huge crowds and lavish amounts of media attention. "We knew it was a huge deal," said University of San Francisco coach Jennifer Azzi, a player on that Olympic team. "We knew it was powerful and significant. I remember when we played at Georgetown and (Hoyas coach) John Thompson told us, 'You're making people respect you. You're earning respect for the game.'" The soccer and softball teams were newcomers to the Olympics, and they surprised onlookers by playing in front of huge crowds. More than 76,000 packed the stadium in Athens, Ga., for the gold medal soccer game against China. Thousands made the trek to the softball stadium in Columbus, Ga. "We felt so much energy," said Michele Smith, a pitcher on the '96 softball team. "There was so much excitement from the younger generation of female athletes. It made a profound impact to give them the ability to dream about the Olympics. You need that vision to inspire people." The fact that the Games were in the United States magnified the impact. Parents brought their daughters to see the teams. The athletes drew off the energy of the adoring fans. It was a lovefest. "I don't think at the time I realized how special it was to have the Olympics at home," Foudy said. "There was just a heightened enthusiasm. When we were out, people started chanting, 'U-S-A, U-S-A' or waved flags or started singing the national anthem. That was our first experience with that." After the Olympics, Azzi drove from Atlanta to her home in Oak Ridge, Tenn. She was shocked when thousands showed up at the local mall to honor her return. "I didn't even realize that everyone was watching," she said. While the individual athletes and teams were focused on the task at hand, they also realized they were part of something special. "I think we were cognizant," Foudy said. "We were all fighting the same fight, and there was a real camaraderie and sharing of stories. I remember on the off-days, when you just want to put your feet up, watching other sports and being so ecstatic that the women were rocking it." The legacy of the Atlanta Games went far beyond the gold medal count. Two professional basketball leagues sprang from the yearlong training camp. The short-lived ABL folded, however, and its players were absorbed by the WNBA, now in its 20th season. Three years after the women's soccer team won gold, the United States hosted the wildly successful Women's World Cup. The U.S. women's soccer team remains arguably the most popular U.S. national team. "Without 1996, I don't think U.S. Soccer and FIFA would have had the courage to say, 'Let's do it big, let's do it right,' in 1999," Foudy said. Though softball was dropped after the Beijing Olympics in 2008 — in part because of the International Olympic Committee's insistence that it be considered in lockstep with baseball — it remains incredibly popular. And Smith is the lead voice of ESPN's softball coverage, one of many '96 athletes who have gone on to work in media. "It's continued on, overlapping with the next generation, passing it down," Azzi said. "At that time, it was like, 'Wow, women can do this.' There's no question anymore." The concrete legacy of the Atlanta Games provided a tangible rebuttal a few years later when, during the Bush administration, Title IX came under attack as being too restrictive. A commission appointed in 2002 to review the law's impact suggested revisions that would have changed how schools could comply with the law. Foudy and former swimmer Donna de Varona, both members of the commission, offered a strongly worded dissent and are widely credited with helping keep the provisions of Title IX intact. Anyone who had questions about the power and impact of Title IX needed only to roll video of the 1996 Olympics. The Summer of the Women. "Every day, you could say look what you're creating," Foudy said. "You're creating role models. A whole culture of empowered young women."" - by Ann Killion

"The Miracle on Ice" Article

"What a difference 30 years makes — in sports, and in politics. Now, as the United States team prepares for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, do we really care if we beat Russia? How quaint it all seems now, and yet, how significant — my memories of writing about the baby-faced bunch of Americans who were preparing for the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, New York. Herb Brooks's eyes narrowed. I sensed he was making a fist. He began to explain to me what it took, what he planned, to defeat the vaunted Soviet Olympic hockey team, the overwhelming favorite to capture the gold. This Herbie was from the Midwest — St. Paul, Minnesota — yet he described himself as "a street kid." Heck, I'm from Brooklyn. That's where street kids are from. But he spoke passionately of creating an American style of hockey, a form of sport making use of capitalistic ideals — competition, exuberance, youth. Forget the past. This was a new era. It could have been a metaphor for an American template. Indeed, it was. He wanted to restore respect to his country, which was being held hostage in Iran. He wanted us to be proud of ourselves, our teams, and he knew that President Jimmy Carter was threatening to boycott the Summer Games in Moscow over the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I like to think that the downfall of the once evil empire actually began with American hockey. Indeed, the Cold War helped create Soviet superiority in many aspects of sport. The Soviets believed that victory on the playing field, or the rink, would make them the envy of other countries. Somehow, that would be translated into believing the Soviet political system was the better one. So they tossed out traditional ideas of how to become prolific at a sport. If a coach spotted an 8-year-old with leadership skills, why, he'd be perfect as a center — the decision-maker on a hockey line. They created dry-land training routines, actually using a soccer ball instead of a puck, so that the players learned how to kick with their skates. They were relentless, unemotional. They were the Soviet bear. But emotion, said Brooks, was what it would take to beat the fabled Soviets, who made no distinction between amateur and professional. They had defeated this young American team 10-3 in an exhibition game. Some years earlier, they had shocked Canada's nervous system by routing its National Hockey League all-stars in the opening game of their fabled series. It led one of the N.H.L.'s best, Frank Mahovlich, to marvel, "Give them a football, and in a year they'll win the Super Bowl." I was touring with the young U.S. hockey team. Brooks was a college coach, a decent enough player as a kid, but not good enough to make the cut on the last U.S. team to win a gold medal, back in 1960. After that, the Soviets had taken the big prize in every Olympics. Now I see that Brooks's ideas were also a microcosm of capitalist society, and the way it eventually defeated the Soviet Union off the ice. There were two great hockey-playing centers in the United States —New England, particularly the Boston area, and the colder regions of the Midwest — especially Minnesota and Wisconsin. Brooks played the players from the two regions against each other. He named a scrappy guy named Mike Eruzione from Boston University as his captain. He put players from Minnesota on the ice, then scrapped them for New Englanders, then reversed the order. Brooks had only a few months to put a team together. He made himself the brunt of the team's anger and annoyance. He felt that would help them coalesce as well. I had to convince Arthur Gelb, the New York Times's managing editor, to send me to Lake Placid. The paper didn't think it was worth the money to send a reporter to cover ice sports. When, magically, the United States scored early upset victories, when the crowd in the tiny, 7,000-seat Lake Placid Arena — which looked like a cock-fighting amphitheater — began chanting "USA! USA!" routinely, the Americans were poised to face the might Soviets. Actually, the U.S. did not defeat the Soviets for the gold medal. The last round wasn't starting until Sunday, and this was a Friday afternoon game. In fact, the ABC television network thought so little of the public's interest, that it didn't even show the game live. It was taped for a later showing. Meanwhile, I was up in my aerie in the badly ventilated, cigarette-smoke-filled arena. I had a newfangled computer, but it was too big for the press box. Instead, one of our reporters was to file my typewritten copy from the basement. When a game was over, rather than buck the crowds all the way down to the bowels of the ancient place, I had to figure out another way to get in my story. I had my old Olivetti portable. I typed the story. Page one was finished. I then rolled the paper into a ball. On a balcony one floor below, Dave Anderson, our Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, was waiting. I tossed him the paper. He caught it and rushed down the stairs. Then he came up again. I typed Page 2, and sailed it down to him. It was 4-3 for the U.S. with 10 minutes left. The minutes ticked away, then the seconds. Al Michaels, the play-by-play announcer, shouted into the microphone, "Do you believe in miracles?" Moments later, he screamed, "Yes!" Goalie Jim Craig draped himself in the American flag as he scanned the stands. "Where's my father?" he repeated. The next Sunday morning the team defeated the Finns and won the gold medal. Some time later Brooks and Michaels were reunited. Brooks said to the announcer about that "miracle" call, "A bit over the top, wasn't it, Al?" Then Brooks smiled. Hard to imagine today that a player would wrap himself in his country's flag, would see a victory as something symbolic, one system better than another. Perhaps, in a way, we've made some progress. " -By GERALD ESKENAZI

"Veterans Speak Out Against the Militarization of Sports" Article

"While researching my book "The Heritage," I was struck by the enormous effect the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have had on sports — how they look, how they're packaged and how they're sold. Before 9/11, giant flags and flyovers were reserved for the Super Bowl. Today, they are commonplace. Even the players wear camouflage jerseys. The military is omnipresent. And it's by design. The public accepts this as supporting the troops, but one group of individuals — the veterans themselves — is more skeptical. One voice stood out: William Astore's. "They bring out a humongous flag," he says. "Military jets fly overhead, sometimes it's a B-2 stealth bomber, sometimes it's fighter jets." "I think, at first, there's a sort of thrilling feeling," Astore says. "I'm like all the other fans: a big plane goes overhead — 'Wow!' That's kind of awe inspiring. But at the same time, to me, it's not something that I see should be flying over a sports stadium before a baseball game or a football game. You know, these are weapons of death. They may be required, but they certainly shouldn't be celebrated and applauded." Astore grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, the bare-knuckle town of famed boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. He's an avid Red Sox fan, and when he watches sports, he sees the perpetual selling of war, and something very cynical: patriotism for sale, with troops as bait. The MLB All-Star Game in Washington, D.C., this week was so awash in ceremony, it conjured thoughts of an old joke with a new twist: "I went to a military parade and a baseball game broke out." "I think our military has made a conscious decision, and that decision was, as much as possible, to work with strong forces within our society," Astore says. "I think our military made a choice to work with the sporting world — and vice versa. I think that's something that's in response to 9/11." Before 9/11, an American flag the size of a football field was unheard of. "What I remember from going to games is: I remember the national anthem, a conventional-sized American flag, and that's all I remember," Astore says. "And I have to say that I thought that was enough. "You know, after 9/11, there were so many people that I saw who broke out the flags and put them on their cars and had a spontaneous reaction to a feeling that we, as Americans, needed to come together. And that felt good." In the years following 9/11, professional sports took a healing gesture and transformed it into a way to make money. In 2015, Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake released the report "Tackling Paid Patriotism," which criticized the deceptive, taxpayer-funded contracts between the Pentagon and virtually every pro sports league. In 2012, the New York Army National Guard paid the Buffalo Bills $250,000 to conduct on-field re-enlistment ceremonies. In 2014, the Georgia National Guard paid the Atlanta Falcons $114,000 to sing the national anthem. In 2015, the Air Force paid NASCAR $1.5 million in part for veterans to shake hands with racing legend Richard Petty. Your tax dollars. At work. "I hate to say it, but I wasn't completely surprised," Astore says. "But I was disgusted by it. Patriotic displays, they mean a lot more to me when they're spontaneous. But to learn that these had been paid for — that corporate teams, teams owned by billionaires, basically, were collecting money from the military. Paid for, obviously, by you and me, by the American taxpayer. Well, it was sad." "Tackling Paid Patriotism" shed light on the millions of taxpayer dollars being spent by the military on patriotic displays at sporting events. "Tackling Paid Patriotism" shed light on the millions of taxpayer dollars being spent by the military on patriotic displays at sporting events. American flags are the ultimate Good Housekeeping seal. And thanking veterans for their service disconnects the public from what has been nearly two decades of war. The ballpark ceremony obscures the realities of war and, by focusing on soldiers, inoculates the government from antiwar criticism. Astore tells me it's a form of emotional manipulation. "Under the Bush-Cheney administration, we weren't even able to see the caskets of dead soldiers," Astore says. "The cost of war — that very ugly face of war — was being kept from us. "And the only time we see it, sometimes, is when they bring out a wounded soldier, for example. And maybe he or she has lost two or three limbs, but they're brought out into an NFL stadium or an MLB baseball game. And the impression that you get is, 'Everything's OK, see?' But we don't see this person struggling to get around at home. And maybe being depressed because they've suffered this horrible wound in war." Nick Francona grew up in baseball. His last name is a dead giveaway. His grandfather, Tito Francona, played 15 years in the big leagues and was teammates with Hank Aaron in the 1960s. His father, Terry, played 10 years in the majors, and, famously, managed the 2004 Red Sox to their first World Series in 86 years. Nick took a different path. "I was in my freshman year at Penn," Nick says. "A friend of mine that I played travel baseball with, he had enlisted after high school and was an infantry Marine. And he was in Iraq during my freshman year in college. And it used to keep me up at night. And it would bother me a lot where I would kind of sit there and be, like, 'Man, I'm playing a lot of online poker, going to econ classes, and going out to bars and, like, we have a war going on.' I felt like I was missing out and not contributing or not doing my part." "I remember the national anthem, a conventional-sized American flag, and that's all. And I thought that was enough." Bill Astore Nick joined the Marines, becoming a scout sniper platoon commander in Afghanistan. "I remember my mom, at one point, wanted me to — she was, like, 'Well, you can pick any of the jobs. Why don't you be a comptroller or a finance-type of officer?' " Nick recalls. "I'm like, 'Mom, no one watches a Marine commercial and is, like, I really want to do the accounting for them.' " Almost immediately, Nick felt the commercial effects of post-9/11 sports. In May 2010, even before he was deployed overseas, he was being sold as a hero. It felt inauthentic. "They were having Marine Week in Boston, and it was a pretty big deal," Nick says. "They had wanted me to throw out the first pitch at Fenway during one of the games. It would've been a good story of having the manager's son being a Marine and throwing out a first pitch at Fenway. But I was horribly uncomfortable with that and didn't think I had done anything to deserve that and gave them a firm pass on that one." After he left the service, Nick worked in baseball for the Angels, Dodgers and Mets. Ostensibly, he was a liaison to veterans. But what was being sold to the public as patriotism felt like commercialism. What Astore wrote outside of the game, Francona felt working within it. Camo jerseys. Corporate sponsorship of service, without the authenticity of service. The veterans felt like props. "And, I mean, if you look at kind of the tone of what Memorial Day has become about, it's pretty gross," Nick says. "Even on the teams' official Twitter accounts — a flame emoji for, like, 'Look how hot these camo hats are.' And it's, like, 'Really, guys? That's the plan?' I mean, you can imagine how some of these Gold Star families reacted to that. They were not remotely amused. "I might have asked the question 100 times and said, 'OK, if you're selling a $40 hat, how much of this is going to charity, and where is it going?' I think it's fair to say, if you're an average fan watching Major League Baseball, you're going to be, like, 'Man, these guys are really supportive of the military.' " This support, Nick says, does not exist within MLB. According to the league's figures, only 10 of the league's 5,000 employees are veterans. "That's genuinely difficult to accomplish," Nick says. "Like, if your goal was to hire as few veterans as possible, that's pretty impressive. I'm almost certain that there's more than 10. But they've really gone out of their way to avoid being able to even identify the veterans. I've been arguing that for 10 years. Like, 'Figure out who they are, so we can support each other and link up and try to address some of these issues.' And they patently refused to be involved in that." Working with the Mets, one moment defined his frustrations. He created a Memorial Day program where he matched players with Gold Star families from similar backgrounds. The players recorded videos that told the stories of the fallen. Players, he says, were emotional learning the stories of the dead soldiers from America's wars. They wore bracelets naming soldiers they were matched with. It was authentic and personal, appropriately respectful of a day commemorating sacrifice. "So I'm on the flight back, and I get an email from someone with the Mets asking, like, 'Oh, great job. Now we need to get all the families to sign these waivers, to waive the rights as licensees for the bracelets that these guys wore.' And I'm, like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not ... like, absolutely not.' "They referred to them as 'license holders.' The families. And I'm, like, 'I think you mean parent of dead Marine or soldier.' Patently offensive. And there was no way I was going to have them sign that and refused to do so. I wanted to know exactly whose bright idea this was and was going to give them a piece of my mind. And that ended it pretty quickly. And the next day was my last day there. "They called me in and said, 'You've done a great job here, really had a huge impact. You've also had a big impact on the veteran stuff with Major League Baseball, but your comments aren't compatible with having a career in baseball. So we're going to have to part ways.' " The Mets fired him. Nick Francona is now out of baseball. "I'm certainly not happy about not working in baseball. It was my dream job, and I was good at it. And the people that fired me, ironically, told me I was very good at it. It sucks. Even thinking about it, I wouldn't go back and say, 'I wish I had just compromised my principles a little more so I could succeed here.' Like, if that's the price of success, I'll find something else. I think it's sad. And I think it speaks volumes about the state of Major League Baseball." Recruiting is a main reason the military is embedded in sports. In an interview for my book, I told three-star General Russel Honore I didn't want the Army recruiting my son while he watched the Red Sox. His response? "You better hold on to them, if you don't want them in the Army. We're gonna recruit the hell out of them. That's how we man the force." "I appreciate the general's honesty," Astore says. "It's refreshing, in a way. But I just think that's the wrong way to recruit. "I lived in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, for nine years. Of course, that's the home of the Little League World Series. And one year, an Air Force van showed up. So kids, little leaguers, could come and go into this van and play video games. And the Air Force thought this was a great idea for recruitment. And I thought to myself, 'This is completely inappropriate.' "I mean the Little League World Series should be for children. They're not even teenagers yet. And for baseball, yeah. It should not be an opportunity for any military service to show up and try to recruit youngsters. "When I was interested in the military in high school, I went to see my civilian guidance counselor. There wasn't a Marine recruiter challenging me to a pull-up contest. So I see these kinds of things as a gradual process of the militarization of our society. And I just see it as something that we, as a democracy, should be guarding against." Where do sports go from here? I asked one baseball executive, who told me his sport promotes the military not out of patriotism but out of fear — the fear of being called unpatriotic. Nearly 20 years after 9/11, Bill Astore believes these rituals have served their purpose. "We sing 'God Bless America' during the seventh-inning stretch, because, well, that's what we do now," Astore says. "We have a huge flag and military flyovers because that's what we do. We celebrate a military person after the fourth inning because that's what we do. And we've come to expect it. "I think we as Americans need to come together and recognize that all of this needs to be ratcheted back, that we need to return to a simpler time — when you played the national anthem, you respected our country and then you play ball. And you just enjoy the game the way it was meant to be enjoyed."" -by Howard Bryant

"Sprinter Dutee Chand Becomes India's First Openly Gay Athlete" Article

"A champion sprinter with village roots has become India's first openly gay professional athlete, less than a year after the country's top court overturned a longstanding ban on gay sex. A member of India's national track and field team, Dutee Chand, 23, was previously known for fighting for the right to race against other women. She has hyperandrogenism, a condition that naturally produces high testosterone levels, and which in 2014 prompted the sport's governing body to ban her from competition. The decision was reversed a year later after she challenged it in court. On Sunday, Ms. Chand was quoted by an Indian newspaper as saying that she was in a same-sex relationship with a woman from her rural village in eastern India. She said she was inspired to go public after September's ruling by the Indian Supreme Court that unanimously struck down a colonial-era ban on consensual gay sex. "I have always believed that everyone should have the freedom to love," Ms. Chand said in an interview with The Sunday Express. "There is no greater emotion than love and it should not be denied." Many Indians are socially conservative, and go to great lengths to arrange marriages with the right families or castes. Countless gay people there have been shunned by their parents and persecuted by society, and few think that a same-sex marriage law is on the near horizon. Ms. Chand said in the interview that she hoped to settle down with her partner sometime after the upcoming World Championships and the Olympic Games in Tokyo. She declined to name her partner, saying that she did not want her to become the object of undue attention. Ms. Chand's announcement — which came amid news that the country's conservative prime minister, Narendra Modi, appeared headed for re-election — prompted jubilant responses from her longtime supporters. Karuna Nundy @karunanundy "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice". In the next few days I'm going to tweet Indian stories like these. Here, Dutee Chand finds her soulmate. #MayOurRepublicFlourish #ExitPoll2019 Dutee Chand says she's in same-sex relationship with soulmate Dutee Chand, the 100 m record holder and winner of two silver medals at the 2018 Asian Games, is the first Indian sports star to acknowledge being in a same-sex relationship. Payoshni Mitra @MitrP I have always been proud of @DuteeChand and admired her courage. It is not easy to come out in certain societies. This is huge for India! With you, Dutee, first indian athlete to come out, ever! @nkoshie thanks for the piece... @AthleteAlly @WomensSportsFdn @BillieJeanKing "I have always been proud of @DuteeChand and admired her courage," Payoshni Mitra, an Indian researcher who has advocated on behalf of Ms. Chand and other intersex athletes, said on Twitter. "It is not easy to come out in certain societies," Ms. Mitra added. "This is huge for India!" Adille J. Sumariwalla, the president of the Athletics Federation of India, described Ms. Chand's announcement as a personal matter that the federation "has nothing to do with." "We support our athletes in every way to perform better without getting into their personal lives and totally respect their privacy," he said in an email on Monday. Ms. Chand was raised in Gopalpur, a village in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, by illiterate parents who earned less than $8 a week as weavers. Her legal fight for the right to race against other women — at a moment when biology is no longer seen as the sole determinant of gender — has been closely watched as a bellwether of how sports bodies should set boundaries between male and female competitors. The dispute began in 2014, when the Athletics Federation of India gave Ms. Chand an ultrasound and told the government that it had "definite doubts" about her gender. Further tests showed that Ms. Chand's natural testosterone levels were above what track and field's governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, deemed acceptable at the time for female competitors. Officials banned Ms. Chand from competition for a year, and said she could return to the Indian national team only if she medically reduced her testosterone level. But Ms. Chand refused and filed a case at the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, a kind of Supreme Court for international sports, arguing that the I.A.A.F.'s testosterone policy was discriminatory. Many saw the rule as yet another example of international sports organizations policing women for having "masculine" qualities. In 2015, a three-judge panel in the case struck down the I.A.A.F.'s rule, saying that the exact role natural testosterone plays in athleticism remained unknown. Ms. Chand promptly returned to competition, and last year won silver medals at the Asian Games in the 100-meter and 200-meter races. But a new I.A.A.F. rule requires female athletes who have male-patterned chromosomes to regulate their hormone levels if they wish to compete in middle-distance races. In May, the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed an appeal against that rule by Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic champion runner from South Africa. Ms. Semenya had called the rule, which went into effect this month, "discriminatory, irrational, unjustifiable." But the court said that while she had "done nothing whatsoever to warrant any personal criticism," the rule was necessary to maintain fair competition in female athletics. Ms. Chand, who had supported Ms. Semenya's appeal, criticized the rule. "This is a wrong policy of the I.A.A.F. and whatever reason they are giving, it is wrong," she was quoted as saying at the time." -By Mike Ives

"U.S. women's soccer and equal pay: What's next" Article

"The U.S. women's soccer team has had a well-publicized fight for equal pay since winning this summer's World Cup. But the battle with U.S. Soccer and FIFA started well before fans broke out in chants of "Equal pay!" at the team's ticker-tape parade in New York City in July. What is the story behind the USWNT's fight for equal pay? How do other sports match up? What has happened since the World Cup? Here is a primer on one of the biggest topics in sports right now -- which we will continue to update as more news happens: What's the latest? In August, mediation talks broke down between the USSF and the women's soccer team, with a spokesperson for the players saying they "eagerly look forward to a jury trial." The two sides met in New York for several days but could not reach any formal agreement. On Aug. 19, District Judge R. Gary Klausner set a trial date for the lawsuit brought against U.S. Soccer by members of the women's national team (more on this below). The trial will begin May 5, 2020, and last four to five days. The U.S. women -- the plaintiffs -- filed a motion on Sept. 9 requesting the court certify the players as a class. Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd and Becky Sauerbrunn would be appointed as class representatives. The class designation would award the players injunctive relief for any player who is a team member on the day of final judgment or appeal, as well as back pay and punitive damages for any player on the team at any time between Feb. 4, 2014, and the present. The USSF, however, filed a brief opposing certification of the players' class status on Sept. 30. That filing contends that class certification should be denied because from 2014 to 2019, the proposed class representatives -- Morgan, Rapinoe, Lloyd and Sauerbrunn -- were paid more than the highest-earning men's national soccer team members "and therefore suffered no injury." In its filing, USSF provided charts that claimed Lloyd, Rapinoe, Sauerbrunn and Morgan each earned over $1.5 million (including salaries for playing in the NWSL), while the highest-earning men's player made $993,967. If the NWSL salaries are excluded, Lloyd, Rapinoe, Sauerbrunn and Morgan made just over $1.1 million. Things have continued to be contentious between the two sides since the conclusion of the World Cup. In July, U.S. Soccer president Carlos Cordeiro released a letter that claimed the federation has paid the female players more than the men in recent years. Cordeiro's letter details analysis -- which he says was conducted by his staff and reviewed by an accounting firm -- that shows that U.S. Soccer paid female players $34.1 million in salaries and game bonuses from 2010 to '18 and paid male players $26.4 million in the same period. However, there was some murkiness because of the differences in the compensation structures for the men's and women's teams. What's more, salaries in the National Women's Soccer League were factored in to the calculations. Levinson called the letter "a sad attempt by USSF to quell the overwhelming tide of support the USWNT has received from everyone from fans to sponsors to the United States Congress." The U.S. men's team issued a statement in support of the USWNT, saying, "The members of the United States National Soccer Team Players Association once again stands with the members of the world champion Women's National Team in their pursuit of fair compensation for their work as professional soccer players. The USMNT players were not impressed with US Soccer Federation president Carlos Cordeiro's letter made public on Monday. The Federation downplays contributions to the sport when it suits them. This is more of the same." How did the USWNT get here? The equal pay battle didn't begin around the World Cup, but it was heightened by the event. The U.S. women have been fighting for equality for some time. In 2016, five high-profile members of the USWNT -- Carli Lloyd, Hope Solo, Alex Morgan, Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn -- filed a complaint against the United States Soccer Federation (commonly referred to as U.S. Soccer) with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC never issued a decision on the case, and in the meantime, the women signed a new collective bargaining agreement with the USSF. In August last year, Solo filed her own case against U.S. Soccer -- with similar complaints -- in a personal lawsuit, which remains pending in California. Things ramped up this year. On March 8 -- not coincidentally, International Women's Day -- 28 members of the USWNT filed a lawsuit against U.S. Soccer accusing it of gender discrimination. The complaint was filed in California district court and argued that U.S. Soccer "has a policy and practice of discriminating" against members of the women's national team on the basis of gender. The lawsuit contends that the USSF is in violation of two federal laws: the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The U.S. women's team has been far more successful on the international stage than the men's team. This World Cup win was the women's fourth. The men's best finish came in 1930, when the team placed third. The men didn't qualify for the 2018 World Cup, yet compensation does not reflect each team's performance. The U.S. women's current lawsuit contends that if the men's and women's teams won each of the 20 non-tournament games they are contractually required to play, women's team players would each earn a maximum of $99,000 ($4,950 per game), and men's team players would earn $263,320 ($13,166 per game). The suit also states that from 2013 to 2016, women players earned $15,000 for making the national team, and the men earned $55,000 in 2014 and $68,750 in 2018. (In response to this, U.S. Soccer told ESPN that these figures were pulled from the old collective bargaining agreement, and a new one was signed in 2017.) Were the "equal pay" chants directed at U.S. Soccer? They were most likely directed at both U.S. Soccer and FIFA, the world governing body of soccer, which puts on the World Cup. FIFA awarded $30 million in prize money for this year's women's tournament. The 2018 men's tournament had $400 million in prize money. Although FIFA president Gianni Infantino has said he wants to double the prize money for the women's tournament by 2023, the gap between the genders could grow, with FIFA expected to award $440 million for the men's tournament in 2022. FIFA's position on prize money is that it's tied to revenue. Simply, the men's tournament brings in much more than the women's. Some projections of what the tournaments earn in revenue have been made public, but not all of the numbers are available. (The New York Times reported projections of $6.1 billion for the 2018 men's tournament, and FIFA projected the Women's World Cup would bring in $131 million over the four-year cycle.) This raises the question of whether it's fair to cut prize money proportionately. FIFA has the funds to close the gap; the organization's cash reserves hit a record $2.74 billion in 2018. Many women's players have also expressed frustrations about institutional favoritism toward men. One example they point to: FIFA's decision to schedule two men's tournament finals (the Copa America men's final and the CONCACAF Gold Cup men's final) on the day of the Women's World Cup final. Said Megan Rapinoe on the eve of the title game, "If you really care, are you letting the gap grow? Are you scheduling three finals on the same day? No, you're not. Are you letting federations have their teams play two games in the four years between each tournament? No, you're not. That's what I mean about the level of care. You need attention and detail and the best minds that we have in the women's game helping it grow every single day." Are there issues besides money outlined in the USWNT lawsuit? Yes. The USWNT has also fought for better conditions. The women had lesser accommodations while traveling and routinely had to play on artificial turf instead of natural grass, which is kinder to the body. According to the complaint, between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2017, the USWNT played 62 domestic matches, 13 (21%) of which were played on artificial surfaces. During that same period, the USMNT played 49 domestic matches, only one (2%) of which was played on an artificial surface. (Since the lawsuit was filed, U.S. Soccer has scheduled all of the women's games on natural grass.) As for travel, the lawsuit states that in 2017, the men's team flew on chartered flights on at least 17 occasions, and the women did not have a chartered flight that year. In response, U.S. Soccer told ESPN that 2017 was the final year of qualifying for the men's team prior to the 2018 World Cup, and therefore most of the flights were chartered for a competitive advantage. The organization said it has consistently offered the same travel accommodations for the men's and women's teams. Chants of "equal pay" broke out at the USWNT's victory parade in New York City. What is keeping U.S. Soccer from paying the women's team equal salaries? It's a bit complicated. The men and women both have negotiated separate collective bargaining agreements with the USSF. (The women's current contract runs through 2021.) The biggest difference is pay structure. The men receive much higher bonuses when they play for the national team. The women receive guaranteed salaries (about $100,000 a year), but their bonuses are much smaller. The women haven't necessarily complained about their pay structure -- after all, this is what they negotiated -- but they want their fair share of the money being doled out. The lawsuit contends that "the USSF has never offered female WNT players pay at least equal to the pay afforded to male MNT players." The USSF's formal response to the lawsuit claimed that any differences in pay are "based on differences in the aggregate revenue generated by the different teams and/or any other factor other than sex." But let's talk about that money. Where does it come from? The biggest revenue streams are TV deals, sponsorship deals and ticket sales. It's tricky to decipher how much the men are bringing in with TV deals and sponsorship deals versus the women because those deals are often sold in bundles. When it comes to ticket sales, the women have actually earned more over the past three years, according to audited financial statements obtained by The Wall Street Journal. From 2016 to 2018, women's games generated approximately $50.8 million in revenue, compared to $49.9 million for men's games. Here's the sneaky caveat: The men average higher attendance, but the women have played more games, which leads to more revenue. The women have also done more promotional and media tours than the men in that span. What is a potential solution? There is one outlined in the lawsuit: The WNTPA proposed a revenue-sharing model to "test the USSF's 'market realities' theory." In that model, player compensation would be directly linked to how much revenue each team generates. What else have the men said about it? The U.S. men's team issued a statement in support of the women's lawsuit and the revenue-sharing model. It read: "The United States National Soccer Team Players Association fully supports the efforts of the US Women's National Team Players to achieve equal pay. Specifically, we are committed to the concept of a revenue-sharing model to address the US Soccer Federation's 'market realities' and find a way towards fair compensation." Has everyone been supportive of the issue? In short, no. In July, 2014 World Cup team member Jermaine Jones ignited controversy when he said in a video interview posted on the website TooFab, "The girls, I appreciate everything they're doing, they're doing an amazing job, but of course, as men, we know it's tougher to win a World Cup than the girls." He later went on to say, "I think they have to be careful too because you have players [like] Alex Morgan, they are making more than some of the guys, but then they scream out and say, 'We need more money.' ... It can backfire real quick." In an interview with The Guardian published on Tuesday, Aug. 13, Atlanta United manager Frank de Boer said he does not believe in equal pay. "I think, for me, it's ridiculous," he said. "It's the same like tennis. If there are watching, for the World Cup final, 500 million people or something like that, and 100 million for a women's final, that's a difference. So it's not the same. And of course they have to be paid what they deserve to [earn] and not less, just what they really deserve. If it's just as popular as the men, they will get it because the income and the advertising will go into that. But it's not like that, so why do they have to earn the same? I think it's ridiculous. I don't understand that." (De Boer later said he regretted those remarks, especially the use of the word "ridiculous.") Can anyone else step in? Some politicians are trying. U.S. Senators Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wrote a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee in July calling for a hearing "on the significant issue of pay disparity between men's and women's sports in the United States." The letter stated: "As you know, this Committee has previously held hearings on issues within its jurisdiction over sports matters, including hearings on combating sexual abuse in Olympic sports and preventing opioid abuse among athletes in the previous Congress. "Following the USWNT's latest World Cup victory, a hearing would afford a timely opportunity for the Committee to recognize the importance of protecting and empowering athletes -- while also examining the troubling pay disparities that have been highlighted in recent weeks." Does pay inequity spill over to other women's professional sports? Yes. Hockey is perhaps the best recent example. Ahead of the 2017 IIHF World Championships, the U.S. women's national team threatened to boycott as a protest against USA Hockey, citing stalled negotiations for "fair wages and equitable support" from its governing body. The players and USA Hockey ended up agreeing to a landmark, four-year agreement just before the tournament, ending the holdout (and the chance that USA Hockey would put out a replacement squad for the tournament). The team's annual compensation improved to roughly $70,000 per player, plus performance bonuses that could push their incomes over six figures if they win the Olympics or world championships. USA Hockey also agreed to other player asks, such as establishing a committee to look into how the federation could improve its marketing, scheduling, public relations efforts and promotion of the women's game, plus fundraising and other efforts for girls' developmental teams. The U.S. women's hockey team won gold at the 2018 Olympics, less than a year after threatening to boycott the 2017 world championships due to wage and other inequalities. While men can earn millions of dollars in the NBA, NHL or soccer leagues, few will be surprised to hear that the same opportunities don't exist in women's professional sports. Differences in sponsorships, ticket sales and TV rights, among other things, contribute to big disparities in pay between men's and women's pro leagues. Although the NWSL -- the longest-running professional women's soccer league in North America -- increased its roster size and salary cap for this upcoming season (a positive sign), its salaries pale in comparison to figures we see in men's soccer. The 2019 NWSL salary cap is $421,500, with the minimum player salary $16,538 and the maximum player salary $46,200. The MLS Players Association lists salaries on its website: The lowest-paid players for 2019 make $56,250, and the highest-paid player is Zlatan Ibrahimovic at $7.2 million. Frustration over salaries and quality of life concerns were principal reasons WNBA players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement last year. (That means the current agreement will end after the 2019 season, and both sides will have to negotiate a new one.) The current rookie minimum is $41,965, and the veteran maximum is $117,500 -- a fraction of their NBA counterparts' salaries. Players say they aren't expecting to make NBA salaries, but they don't think they're being paid what they're worth. Some players supplement their income by playing abroad in the offseason, though that carries inherent risks. Look no further than the costly injuries to Indiana Fever guard Victoria Vivians (torn ACL while playing in Israel) and reigning WNBA Finals MVP Breanna Stewart (ruptured Achilles while playing with her Russian club), who are both out for this WNBA season. The women's professional hockey landscape is in even more upheaval. After the Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL) made the stunning decision to shutter after the 2018-19 season -- citing an "unsustainable business model" -- more than 200 women's hockey players announced they would not play in any league until there was a more viable option that included better benefits and more money. That led to a formation of a union, the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association, which features most of the top players in women's hockey, including Team USA's Hilary Knight, Kendall Coyne and Brianna Decker. The PWHPA will go on a barnstorming tour this fall -- with confirmed dates already in Toronto, Chicago and New Hampshire -- to drum up fan interest and maintain their visibility. But players who participate in the tour, which will include exhibitions and meet-and-greets, will not be compensated. There's still an existing league, the NWHL. Even though the NWHL promised a 50-50 cut from league sponsorship and media deals, salaries for those intending to play in 2019-20 range from about $5,000 to $12,000. And the U.S. women's soccer team isn't the only team in the sport fighting against its own federation. Just two months after appearing in its first World Cup, the Jamaican women's team -- the Reggae Girlz -- has announced it will not train or compete until its players are paid. The Reggae Girlz claim the federation owes them money. Forward Khadija Shaw told the BBC: "Of course 100 percent we always want to represent our country. It's not just about the money, it's a stand that needs to be done. Hopefully this can be resolved as soon as possible and we can put this behind us and represent our country ... We are in a position where we are literally fighting just to get paid by legal agreements. [This is] about change, change in the way women football is viewed, especially in Jamaica." The Reggae Girlz have been fighting for equality ever since 2010, when the Jamaican Football Federation cut their funding. They were unable to play for a period of time, and lost their FIFA ranking. Could sponsors and brands step in and help level the playing field? Adidas announced in March that it would be paying its athletes on the winning World Cup team the same performance bonus payments that would be owed to their male counterparts. (Adidas does not disclose the amount of its bonuses.) In April, LUNA Bar made a $718,750 donation to the USWNT Players Association, with the stipulation that the money be used to pay the 23 members of the 2019 World Cup team. The figure was calculated to make up the $31,250 per player difference in bonuses given to men and women for making the World Cup roster. Secret Deodorant (through parent company Procter & Gamble) did something similar after the World Cup, announcing (via a full-page ad in The New York Times) that it would donate $529,000 -- or $23,000 for each of the 23 players to help close the pay gap. There are plenty of other examples. However, experts in the industry say that while the boost and exposure are nice, brand involvement historically hasn't leveled the playing field. Jayna Hefford, who served as commissioner of the CWHL last season before it folded, said that while it shows a "sound corporate responsibility that might resonate with consumers," she learned to understand that "company mandates are to make money and run a business," so it has to be a partnership that makes sense. While Hefford stressed that women's hockey players aren't expecting NHL salaries -- echoing the WNBA players -- it is difficult to count on sponsors to keep the league afloat. Val Ackerman, the first president of the WNBA, said that traditionally, sponsors don't dictate how that money is spent. For instance, a sponsor isn't saying, "Here's $500,000, but it must be allocated to player salaries." Rather, the money goes into a general revenue pot, and the owner or commissioner can view at as an additional revenue stream from which to draw. Running a league costs tens of millions of dollars -- more than brands are usually willing to spend. What's more, it's not sponsorships that bring in the big bucks, but rather TV deals that have raised the profiles of leagues such as the NBA, NHL, NFL and MLB. What happens next? We'll wait and see. No new mediation is currently scheduled, but a letter to U.S. Soccer officials dated Aug. 12 and signed by the 28 players involved in the suit says in part: "While we are prepared to take our equal pay fight through a trial if necessary, we believe that both sides would benefit from an equal pay and equal working conditions settlement now." It's also to be determined if politicians in Washington step up with hearings and what might come from that. What is clear: This conversation isn't going away. "All players, I'm saying every player at this World Cup, put on the most incredible show that you could ever ask for," Rapinoe said. "We can't do anything more to impress, to be better ambassadors, to take on more, to play better, to do anything. It's time to move that conversation forward to the next step."" -by Emily Kaplan

"With Braves Set to Move, a Broader Look at Atlanta" Article

"ATLANTA — A collective gasp rose here last week when the Atlanta Braves announced that they were moving to the suburbs. The franchise, after all, has been not only a sports team, but also a mirror of Atlanta's aspirations. The Braves became the first big-league team in the Deep South when they moved to Atlanta from Milwaukee in 1966. The team quickly became a national presence thanks to Ted Turner's cable network and was an early symbol of the region's evolution beyond the confines of its segregated past. As demographics changed and development migrated to the largely white suburbs, the team remained a proud anchor of an increasingly black city. But now, as the team makes plans to head a dozen miles northwest to a new $672 million baseball stadium in Cobb County, a regional civic conversation has begun: Is the move a blow to a city beginning to enjoy a post-recession urban renaissance, or is it a signal of a new era in which traditional assumptions about the divide between city and suburb no long apply? Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta, who recently brokered a deal to build a $1.2 billion downtown stadium for the Atlanta Falcons, spent the week taking hits for letting the Braves go. His critics, he said, are shortsighted. "We've got to make a decision — either we're going to be a region or we're not," he said at a packed news briefing the day after the Braves' announcement. "It bothers me that we have not come far enough as a community that people feel that a team moving 12 miles is a loss to the city of Atlanta." The traditional lines between the city's 423,000 residents and those of the nearly 3.8 million people living in its suburbs have long been fading, especially demographically. Places like Gwinnett and Cobb Counties north of Atlanta have become much more racially diverse in the last decade. The number of black residents in Cobb County grew by 47 percent from 2000 to 2010.On the other hand, Atlanta, long a majority black city, is becoming whiter. During the last decade, the white population has grown by 17 percent, although black residents still make up just over half the population. Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who became Atlanta's mayor in 1982, said the geographic boundaries that once divided the 10-county region are as much a part of history as its once-deep racial divisions. "One of the things I learned when I was mayor is that nobody pays any attention to jurisdictions but elected officials," he said, adding that one of the region's problems is that it has always segregated the city from the outer communities. "The truth of it is," he said, "it's one big economic unit." Mr. Young, like many civic leaders here, says that moving the baseball stadium offers a chance to redevelop a section of Atlanta that has languished from the start in the shadow of the stadium. Like many cities, Atlanta is enjoying a wave of new urbanism driven by a crop of educated workers who have moved in from the suburbs and other, smaller cities, filling coffee shops and restaurants in neighborhoods that used to be cultural wastelands. The population is on the rise, growing about 6 percent in the last couple of years. The Beltline, an urban walkway and bike path featuring 22 miles of reclaimed railroad bed, has opened up the core of city. A streetcar project opening next year will connect downtown with nearby neighborhoods. The College Football Hall of Fame is moving in downtown, and a rising high-tech district stretches from Georgia Tech north of the city's famous aquarium into the high-rise condos of the Midtown neighborhood. Nearly two dozen major apartment projects are underway. Developments like the Ponce City Market on the edge of Old Fourth Ward, which combines apartments, shops, restaurants and offices in a historic former Sears, Roebuck & Company factory building, promise to remake how residents use the city. Many here argue that amid that backdrop, the loss of the team is a blow — especially when baseball stadiums are being used to revitalize the urban cores of cities like Denver and Minneapolis. "I find it ironic that in the last few years that we have been becoming a 'real city' but we are losing our baseball team," said Steve Fennessy, the editor in chief of Atlanta magazine. "That's a significant wound to our self-esteem." Turner Field, nicknamed The Ted after Ted Turner, the team's former owner, has never really served as an engine of revitalization, although civic leaders have tried. After the 1996 Games, the team moved into what had been the city's Olympic Stadium. It sits on a sea of parking lots separated by a freeway from the city's downtown core, which is less than a mile away.The surrounding neighborhoods have some newer lofts and houses but also some of the poorest households in the city. The stadium is without a stop on Atlanta's chronically underfunded Marta train system. There is not even a bank or a grocery store nearby. The stadium is less an urban amenity than what urban planners call a drivable suburban location — that is, a place people drive to for only one purpose and then leave. The Cobb County site is actually more in line with a new ethos of urbanism that rewards smaller, walkable communities, said Chris Leinberger, a professor at the George Washington University School of Business. This year, he released a study of new urban development patterns in the Atlanta metro area as part of his work for the Brookings Institution. In it, many parts of suburban Atlanta had a more urban feel than the city itself. "The whole concept of city versus suburb is a really obsolete concept, and moving the baseball stadium reflects that," he said. The new, smaller stadium is being planned for an unincorporated part of Cobb County's Cumberland area. That slice of the county is home to headquarters for companies like Home Depot and the Weather Channel and is already flush with shops, restaurants and hotels. It is also home to the Atlanta Opera and the Atlanta Ballet, which stage most performances in the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. The area around the stadium could be a distinct walkable urban place, Mr. Leinberger said, describing a kind of guided development designed to deliver the feel of urban living in a smaller community. "The real distinction in Atlanta now is between those places that are walkable urban areas and those that are drivable suburban areas," he said. "Where they are doesn't matter as much." Of course, without any train transportation or meaningful bus service, people will still have to travel on Atlanta's famously congested freeways to get there. And they will need plenty of parking, something Braves management said was lacking at the in-town stadium. Moving the stadium will put the team closer to a majority of its fans and allow the team's out-of-state owners, the Liberty Media Corporation, to control and profit from development around it. But the team is still the Atlanta Braves, said Mike Plant, an executive vice president with the organization. "We're not rejecting the city of Atlanta," he said. "We're the Atlanta Braves for another 30 plus years. And Metro Atlanta is a big place." -By Kim Severson

"Iran Soccer Star's Sister Wants Women to Be Allowed at His Matches" Article

"Iran is the highest-ranked soccer team in Asia, a position that underlines the Middle Eastern country's status as a regional favorite to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, to be held in nearby Qatar. Thousands of Iranians are expected to make the short journey to cheer on their team, just as they did when the tournament was held in Brazil in 2014, and in Russia last year. Many were women who live in Iran, yet are prohibited from attending men's soccer matches in their home country. Iran's biggest obstacle to qualifying for the World Cup may be off the field, because a campaign to change that prohibition is getting louder. The campaign's leaders, including the sister of Iran's team captain, are asking FIFA to ban Iran from World Cup qualifying unless the country changes the law. The women leading the movement say they share the same passion as male fans for Team Melli, as the men's national team is known, yet believe only a serious threat of exclusion from the World Cup by FIFA will lead to the end of a prohibition that has lasted for four decades. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, wrote a letter last month to Mehdi Taj, the president of Iran's soccer federation, asking him to provide an answer no later than July 15 about what "concrete steps" the federation would take to ensure that Iranian women could attend World Cup qualification games, which start in September. The deadline passed Monday without a response. "I ask FIFA to put more pressure, and by pressure it means sanctions, right?" said Maryam Shojaei, who has campaigned the past five years by brandishing banners protesting the men-only rule when Iran plays outside the country, including at the World Cup in Russia last summer. "There has to be a consequence for the Iranian federation, that could be suspension of Iranian football." So far, FIFA has shown little appetite for penalizing Iran for a violation the organization describes as against its "most basic principles." Should it finally act, the consequences could be personal for Shojaei. Her brother Masoud Soleimani Shojaei is the team's captain, a national hero who has appeared in three World Cup tournaments for Iran. Identifying herself publicly for the first time as the Iranian captain's sister, Shojaei, a Canadian citizen, said she began her campaign after she saw the popularity of the Iranian national team among women at the 2014 World Cup. She said her protests have nothing to do with her brother. She did not tell him that she had traveled to Russia, where she protested at the 2018 World Cup as the founder of My Fundamental Right. Separately, Masoud Shojaei has spoken out about the issue at home. Resistance to the ban comes at a time when the Women's World Cup has given soccer a worldwide spotlight for players, fans and others to speak out about several gender issues, including pay equity and investments in women's teams by national federations. (Iran has a women's national team, which plays its games in head scarves and in front of only female fans when at home, with male fans prohibited from attending.) The lack of progress is embarrassing for Infantino, who attended a game in Tehran in November 2018 with senior Iranian officials. For that game, Iran lifted the prohibition, allowing a few hundred women to attend. Infantino described the event as a momentous sign of progress, while activists described it as a stunt, no more than an exercise designed to fool a credulous foreign dignitary. Shojaei said she told FIFA's secretary general, Fatma Samoura, ahead of the game that the Iranians would use Infantino's appearance at the game at Tehran's Azadi Stadium to put on a "show." She also presented Samoura with a petition that had more than 200,000 signatures. "Without getting guarantees that women could buy tickets and by sitting there with women who were placed there for him to see, he took part in a charade that was a terrible betrayal of Iranian women who have been begging him in writing for years to act," said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. "Every Iranian woman knew that this was a charade and they wouldn't be allowed in." FIFA declined to comment. Infantino's letter expressed alarm at incidents surrounding an exhibition game between Iran and Syria on June 6, just a day before the start of the Women's World Cup. Women trying to attend the game were detained by security for several hours, including some who claimed they were beaten. Other campaigns to lift the ban on women predate the efforts by Shojaei, who in April put her name to a complaint against the Iranian federation that was submitted to FIFA's ethics committee. The committee is notorious for operating with little transparency. Another longtime campaigner, who has fought against the restrictions on women for 15 years, managed to watch Iran for the first time by traveling to the World Cup in Russia. The woman, who uses the name Sara to conceal her real identity for fear of arrest, said she, too, believed FIFA must act decisively rather than merely speak out. Of the more than 20 women who started the campaign, now called Open Stadiums, Sara is the only one to remain in Iran. The rest, she said, fled the country. "It should be based on statute that they suspend the federation," Sara said. Last March, while Infantino was in the company of Iranian officials, Sara protested with three dozen female soccer fans and activists by trying to enter the Azadi — some while dressed as men — for the biggest match in the country, a showdown between the clubs Persepolis and Esteghlal that was watched by as many as 100,000 men. The protesters were arrested and detained for several hours. The movement to lift the stadium ban has gained a nationwide following, becoming part of the larger conversation about women's rights in the conservative Muslim country. In its earliest days, even many Iranian feminists dismissed the movement. "If someone asked me, 'What's your biggest achievement, what gives you the most satisfaction?' I would say this: 'The ayatollahs when they're talking about women's rights, they are always talking about women attending stadiums,'" Sara said. Shojaei, who moved to Canada in 2007 and became a citizen in 2012, has had her banners confiscated while overseas, including in Russia, where FIFA, which has adopted a new human rights guidelines, had provided express permission for her to attend with its delegation. "I talked to two well-respected clergy, and they said it's nothing to do with Islam," she said. The ban, which has been extended to volleyball and basketball, provides a stark contrast with other cultural arenas in Iran, including theaters, where people of different genders freely mix. But in a country hobbled by sanctions, the successful soccer team has unmatched popularity, with millions of fans tuning in when Team Melli takes the field. That popularity, said Shojaei, means the threat of a ban from World Cup qualifiers would most likely lead to the lifting of a ban that went into effect not long after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. "Forty million Iranian women are fans, and they've been banned for four decades. If the football team is banned for one World Cup, I think that's worth it," she said. "I'm sure at the end — in 10 years, 20 years — people will appreciate it."" -By Tariq Panja

"The Olympics Have Always Been Political" Article

"Russian President Vladimir Putin has always recognized the power of sports. In 2007, with energy prices steadily rising, and Russia's economy bolstered by oil earnings, he flew to Guatemala City to meet with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). There he wooed officials in English and in French, promising an Olympic Games on a scale never seen before. His work paid off when Russian won the bid to host the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Before the games began, Putin emphasized his desire that politics and sports remain separate—though the Russian leader appeared to dabble in one while promoting the other. At a news conference before the games opened in January 2014, many of the questions reporters asked centered on a Russian law that banned "gay propaganda," as well as on corruption in the run-up to the games. One Chinese reporter asked Putin if foreign scrutiny of the Russian legislation and corruption were "manifestations of the Cold War?" Yes, Putin said, before complaining of reporters asking so many political questions. The Olympics, he said, "are intended to depoliticize the most pressing international issues and open additional ways to build bridges." It is a sentiment he repeated after the Sochi games, and reiterated when faced with a total ban from next month's Rio games on all Russian athletes because of a widespread state-sponsored doping program. Such a ban, Putin said, would be a "dangerous recurrence of politics interfering in sport." The IOC ultimately allowed Russian athletes to compete in Rio, though its track-and-field competitors are barred because of the doping revelations (Russia will host its own games for them). Ever since a Russian whistle-blower revealed the doping scandal in 2014, up to this month when a 100-page investigative report found Russia's spy agency helped its athletes dope, Putin has said sports and politics should be kept separate, and complained they were being combined as a foreign ploy to smear Russia. But the world has always mixed politics and sports, and Putin's Russia is one of the worst offenders. "Putin has spent his entire administration in office taking various measures to project an image of strength for Russia," Michael Newcity, a senior research scholar in Slavic and Eurasian studies at Duke University, told me. Putin has projected this strength by invading Ukraine, by defending Syria's president, and through sports. During the Soviet era, the state controlled and promoted sport. In 1949, the USSR's sport committee's goal was to "spread sport to every corner of the land, raise the level of skill and, on that basis, help Soviet athletes win world supremacy in major sports ... ." That goal succeeded by most standards. Soviet athletes dominated global sports (despite allegations of doping). The Soviet Union is no more and Russia is no longer communist, but the state still very much controls sports, and intertwines it with politics to this day. Russia was, in Newcity's words, a "basket case" when Putin assumed power in 1999, and Russians yearned once again for something to take pride in. Under Putin, Russia's economy grew, boosted by rising energy prices. Disposable income doubled and the country boasted a healthy middle class. The country was one-quarter of the famed BRIC nations (along with Brazil, India, and China), celebrated as a rising economic giant. "The Sochi Olympics were kind of a coming out party as a great power--that the Russian economy was booming, and it was their opportunity tell the world they are back," Newcity said. Putin loves sports. He's a black belt in Judo. And sports became central to his plan to show off a restored Russia. To wrangle the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Putin personally oversaw the details, soliciting the help of Russia's wealthiest men to dangle the promise of a Sochi transformed into a winter resort. It's safe to say he did this. Putin outspent the Beijing Olympics by nearly $10 billion, making them the most expensive ever. Putin and Russia aren't alone, however, in this attempt to use sporting events to showcase might. The world has always equated the fastest, strongest, most- winning country in the world with the most economically successful, most politically potent. The best proving ground to do that is the Olympics. Jonathan Grix and Donna Lee, the authors of "Soft Power, Sports Mega-Events and Emerging States," wrote that it doesn't matter how authoritarian (China) the country's government is, or how stark its income equality (Brazil), sports express a universal likability. By hosting international sporting events they can show the world that they are guardians of universal norms and, in so doing, can construct attraction by illuminating truths such as fair play that have universal appeal. Winning, like hosting, is another way to showcase geopolitical relevance. The 1936 Berlin games were largely an international advertisement for Adolf Hitler's Germany and his policies, but are best remembered for Jesse Owens's four gold medals. Conversely, boycotting the games or banishing a country from competition has been a way to protest, or to shun the politics of a state. The IOC banned South Africa from competition for 21 years during the apartheid era. In the Cold War, in 1980, the U.S. refused to compete in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Russia returned the favor in the 1984 Los Angeles games. And that's just the 20th century. Politics, and political banishment in the Olympics date back to its ancient Greek version. The city-state of Elis, which controlled the ancient games, remained neutral in disputes and wars. But during the Peloponnesian War in 424 B.C., Elis sided with Athens and banned Athens's rival, Sparta, from competing in the 89th Olympiad. Given that history, it may be there never was hope of an Olympic Games devoid of politics, something George Orwell believed was inseparable from any international competition. "Sport," Orwell argued, "is war minus the shooting." "And how could it be otherwise?," he wrote." I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles." Those general principles are once again in full display ahead of the Rio games where much of the pre-Olympics attention is on Russia's doping scandal, Putin's dismissal of it all as an attempt to malign his country, and his repeated calls for politics and sport not to mix. "The other sportsmen," he told those Russian athletes being allowed to participate in the games, "understand that the quality of their medals will be different." " -by J. WESTON PHIPPEN

"108 Women's World Cup Players on Their Jobs, Money and Sacrificing Everything" Article

"The eighth Women's World Cup comes at a pivotal time for the women's game. For years, players around the world have demanded better pay and more support from their federations. In some countries, serious progress has been made; in many others, the fight continues. We wanted to know what it's like to be an elite women's soccer player in this moment. To get inside that bubble, The New York Times sent a survey to every national team participating in this year's World Cup and heard back from more than 100 players from 17 of the 24 countries competing in France. And through a partnership with Goal Click, we gave dozens of players disposable cameras and asked them to capture their lives as they see them. Through their photographs and answers to our questions, the players took us places fans and the news media rarely go. Here are their stories, in their own words and images. *What does your family think of your job as a professional soccer player? 'They think that it is still a complicated dream for a girl to have, and that it is still important to have good knowledge and skills, to have more than one string to your bow.' Emelyne Laurent, 20, France forward 'Proud, but unsure if it is economically viable.' Ali Riley, 31, New Zealand defender 'That it doesn't last a lifetime.' Mariana Larroquette, 26, Argentina forward 'My family is happy. But we're still not professional in Italy.' Sara Gama, 30, Italy defender 'I think they think I'll do a couple of years but ultimately leave early due to monetary reasons.' Miranda Nild (Suchawadee Nildhamrong), 22, Thailand forward 'Initially they were against it, saying, "Girls playing soccer?" ... But they are very happy now that I am a member of the Korean national team and that I am doing well on the best team.' Lee Sodam, 25, South Korea midfielder 'My mum especially hated my job — because I'm a woman I shouldn't be playing soccer, rather be in an office working or married by now.' Francisca Ordega, 25, Nigeria forward *About how much money did you make playing soccer this year? 'Not much. I don't get a salary, only travel expenses for the national team on FIFA dates.' Natalia Campos, 27, Chile goalkeeper 'So little that I can't make the end of the month.' María Belén Potassa, 30, Argentina forward 'A few hundred thousand. Between $300,000 and $400,000.' Ashlyn Harris, 33, United States goalkeeper 'Cool amount of money that could take care of me.' Rasheedat Ajibade, 19, Nigeria midfielder 'I was in university on a soccer scholarship, so all the money I received on scholarship was put towards my education.' Chanel Hudson-Marks, 21, Jamaica defender 'I'm sorry, I don't talk about that.' Valérie Gauvin, 22, France forward" -By ALLISON McCANN

"The Art of Letting Go" Article

"The videos started to appear in America a few years ago, crossing the Pacific and landing on our digital doorsteps like mysterious gifts. Their contents were joyously unfamiliar: Korea Baseball Organization sluggers walloping balls and then flipping their bats with abandon, sending them spiraling through the air. Montages surfaced on a website called mykbo.net, gifs hit social media, and ecstatic headlines soon followed: Korean Baseball Player Flips Bat Like a Champion Now This Is a Righteous Bat Flip This KBO Bat Flip Will Rock Your World, Free Your Soul When I first saw the clips, I was astonished. What was this place, this parallel sports universe where baseball players could shatter the game's unwritten rules? While American ballplayers from Mickey Mantle to David Ortiz have flipped their bats, the act is still perceived as a great offense here -- an insult to the pitcher, the opposing team and all that's sacred in America's pastime. This tension came to a head last October, when Blue Jays outfielder Jose Bautista triumphantly flipped his bat after a magnificent home run during the American League Division Series, a viral gesture that was codified into memes, baseball cards and, most recently, a corn maze in Canada. Many fans were thrilled. But some current and former players, such as Cole Hamels, Mike Schmidt and Goose Gossage, were not. "Bautista is a f---ing disgrace to the game," Gossage said. As Major League Baseball struggles to overcome its staid image and lure younger fans -- according to Nielsen, most of the sport's TV viewers are over 50 -- the simple bat flip has come to symbolize the culture war being waged within its ranks. It's a conflict between those who believe the game should embrace the traditions of other countries and flashier elements of other sports, and those who, as Bautista wrote in The Players' Tribune, are "old-school, my-way-or-the-highway type of people who never want the game to evolve." Meanwhile, in the Korea Baseball Organization, bat flips aren't just permitted -- they're embraced. "A bat flip isn't disrespectful here in Korea, which is a very formal, respectful country," says Dan Kurtz, a Korean-American who started mykbo.net in 2002 as a message board for English-speaking fans. "A guy flips and the pitchers don't do anything about it. It's just part of the game." Kurtz explains that bat flips, which are called ppa dun in Korea -- a term that combines the words for "bat" and "throw" -- are ubiquitous in the KBO. But he isn't sure how that happened. "People ask me, 'Why can't we do this in Major League Baseball?'" he says. "I want to know: Where in Korea did it originate and why?"" - by ESPN the magazine

"Girls say Connecticut's transgender athlete policy violates Title IX, file federal complaint" Article

"Three Connecticut high school track and field athletes filed a federal Title IX discrimination complaint over the state's athletic transgender policy, stating that it has put them at a competitive disadvantage and harmed their chances of earning college scholarships. The complaint was filed Monday to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights by the law firm Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of the three girls. The complaint asks the government agency to initiate an investigation of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference's policy that allows athletes to enter competitions corresponding with their gender identity. "What we are asking for is a return to fairness, and anything that allows a biological male to come into a women's sporting event and take away their medals or their podium spots or their opportunities to advance or college scholarships is unfair," Christiana Holcomb, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a phone interview. "Any solution cannot end up with that as an outcome." The complaint comes at a time when the participation of transgender athletes in sports has reached the national spotlight. In Connecticut, the success of transgender runners Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, both of whom were identified in the complaint, drew attention after they finished first and second in the 55-meter dash at the state indoor track championships this winter. This spring, Miller won the 200-meter dash and was a part of the first-place 4x400-meter relay team at the state outdoor championships. In the complaint, the law firm claims the CIAC's policy discriminates against girls and "threatens to reverse the gains for girls and women that Title IX has achieved since 1972." It also states that "highly competitive girls" are "systematically being deprived of a fair and equal opportunity to experience the 'thrill of victory.' " Connecticut is one of 19 state high school associations that are deemed to have fully inclusive policies that allow transgender athletes to compete without restrictions, according to transathlete.com. Other states either have no policies or ones that are described as needing "modifications" before they can be considered fully inclusive or ones that are described a "discriminatory,"as determined by the website. "I am a girl and I am a runner," Miller, who attends Bloomfield High, said Wednesday in a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union. "It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored. Living in a state that protects my rights is something that I do not take for granted. So many young trans people face exclusion at school and in athletics and it contributes to the horrible pain and discrimination that my community faces. The more we are told that we don't belong and should be ashamed of who we are, the fewer opportunities we have to participate in sports at all." The athletes who filed the complaint include Selina Soule, a junior at Glastonbury High who has been vocal about her thoughts on competing against transgender athletes, and two others whose names and schools were not disclosed for fear of retaliation. "The girls repeatedly emphasize they have friends who are transgender; they have nothing against these individuals as individuals," said Holcomb, the attorney. "They just want fairness in sports, and biology is what matters in the sporting context, not a person's identity." The complaint states that in the time since Soule's parents complained to school officials of sex discrimination, track coaches have retaliated against her by forcing her to "perform workouts that are not generally applied for short-distance sprinters" and keeping her from competitions until she has completed them. Additionally, it states that a coach told Soule that if a college recruiter asked about Soule, "he would not be able to give a good report." Soule declined a request to comment. "It is so painful that people not only want to tear down my successes but take down the laws and policies that protect people like me," Yearwood, of Cromwell High, said in a statement through the ACLU. "I hope that the next generation of trans youth doesn't have to fight the fights that I have. I hope they can be celebrated when they succeed not demonized." As of Wednesday, the CIAC had not been contacted by the Office for Civil Rights, but it said in a statement that it would "cooperate fully if it decides to investigate this complaint. We take such matters seriously, and we believe that the current CIAC policy is appropriate under both Connecticut law and Title IX." Holcomb said it could take anywhere from a few months to a couple of years before there is a final resolution from the Office for Civil Rights. The issue of gender identity has reached the highest levels of the sport: The Court of Arbitration for Sport recently upheld track and field's global governing body's decision that required two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya to artificially lower the testosterone level in her bloodstream to be eligible to compete in certain women's events. Semenya has appealed to the Swiss supreme court and recently won an interim ruling pending that full decision. The success of Yearwood and Miller at the state championship this winter drew national attention, including from President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted: "I feel so sorry for the young ladies who trained their whole lives to be the best in their state and to hopefully attain scholarships etc etc . . . this is a grave injustice." "Discrimination on the basis of sex extends to trans people," Chase Strangio, staff attorney with the ACLU's LGBT & HIV Project, said in a statement. "Girls who are transgender are girls. Attacking two Black young women who are simply participating in the sport they love just." -by Samantha Pell

"ESPN SportsCentury: Greg Louganis" Movie

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"Let Them Wear Towels" Movie

Lisa Olson was just trying to do her job as a reporter for the Boston Herald in 1990 when a group of New England Patriot players sexually harassed her in their locker room by exposing their genitals and making lewd and vulgar comments. Even though a subsequent NFL investigation concluded that Olson had been "degraded and humiliated," the 25-year-old continued to be tormented by Patriot fans -- so much so that she temporarily moved to Australia to resume her career. The incident touched off a national debate about the presence of female journalists in the male sanctum of the clubhouse. That debate should have been settled 12 years earlier, when Melissa Ludtke of Sports Illustrated successfully challenged Major League Baseball after she was kept out of the New York Yankees' locker room. Why has equal access for women reporters remained such a hot-button issue? That question is asked in "Let Them Wear Towels," a history and examination of females working in the man's world of the locker room. Through interviews with such pioneer women as Ludtke, Claire Smith, Lesley Visser and Christine Brennan, you'll hear stories of raw behavior and humorous retaliation, angry lawsuits and remarkable resolve.

"Once Brothers" Movie

The film chronicles the relationship of two basketball players from SFR Yugoslavia—Vlade Divac (Serbia) and Dražen Petrović (Croatia). The duo played together on the Yugoslavia national basketball team from 1986 to 1990 and were at one time close friends, but the Yugoslav Wars drove them apart emotionally, as they came from opposing sides. Petrović died in an automobile accident in 1993 before the two could reconcile; much of film focuses on Divac's regret that they were never able to resolve their differences.[

"The Band That Wouldn't Die" Movie

The film follows the story of Baltimore's Marching Ravens, a marching band that has supported three separate American football franchises since 1947 and witnessed the controversial relocation of the National Football League's (NFL) Baltimore Colts franchise to Indianapolis in 1984.

"The 99ers" Movie

The world of women's sports was kicked upside down on July 10, 1999. Before a sold-out crowd of more than 90,000 at the Rose Bowl and an estimated 40 million Americans watching on television, the women's soccer team reached a cultural and athletic pinnacle with its penalty-kick shoot-out victory over China to win the Women's World Cup. These players were more than the pony-tailed poster girls celebrated by mainstream media. As told through the voice of a longtime team captain, Julie Foudy, we get an inside look at the strong team ethic and rare "do for each other" mentality that propelled them to victory that day and turned the team into a cultural touchstone. With unprecedented access, the film uses candid, behind-the-scenes footage shot by the players themselves during the tournament to present a unique portrait of the women who irrevocably changed the face of women's athletics. Reuniting key players from the 1999 squad and talking with current U.S. players as well, the film will examine how women's soccer - and women's sports as a whole - has changed since that epic day at the Rose Bowl.

"PBS American Experience: Jesse Owens" Movie

This is the true story of how Jesse Owens humiliated Adolph Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. These games were held in Berlin and Nazi Germany expected to demonstrate arian superiority by sweeping the events but one American had a different idea.

"Let the Nomad Games Begin!" Article

"Horseback Wrestling. Bone Tossing. Dead Goat Polo. Let the Nomad Games Begin! CHOLPON-ATA, Kyrgyzstan — The American team that played a brutal version of polo at the World Nomad Games does not expect the sport to get picked up by the Olympics any time soon. Why not? "We use a dead goat," said Scott A. Zimmerman, a team co-captain. The game of kok-boru, with its headless goat carcass, was the main attraction at the weeklong international sports competition held this month in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan. Other highlights included bone tossing, hunting with eagles and 17 types of wrestling, including bare-chested horseback wrestling, where the weaker competitor often clings desperately to the animal's head as spectators roar in anticipation of him hitting the dirt. The organizers hope to resurrect nomadic traditions, especially those of Central Asia, whose cultures were pushed toward extinction by decades of Soviet collectivization and then globalization. While many top-flight athletes competed, qualifying for an event was easy: Basically anybody who signed up online could play. The bulk of the Czech Republic delegation, for example, was a group of male friends who fished around for an easy sport. They discovered ordo, or bone tossing, which involves eight players using a chunk of cow bone to dislodge two-inch pieces of sheep bone from a large dirt circle. (It's a lot harder than it sounds.) They could not, however, find the right bone bits in the Czech Republic with which to practice. So how did they learn to play? They just thought about it, mostly, admitted the Czechs, who went home without any medals. The outdoor events took place in two stunning venues — a hippodrome built for the Games on a high-altitude saline lake surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Tian Shan mountain range, and the vast meadows of a sweeping mountain gorge, where some 1,000 yurts were erected. With archers clopping by on horses, and the smokey aroma of grilling meat, the meadow site evoked a nomadic encampment from a bygone era. After 72 years spent under Communist domination — and more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union — Kyrgyzstan and its neighbors are still trying to define themselves. While the number of Western visitors was relatively small, the Games attracted Kyrgyz spectators from around the landlocked, mostly Muslim country. The Games also seek to create a kind of Brand Kyrgyzstan, attracting tourists to an impoverished, landlocked, predominantly Muslim nation of about six million people. The emphasis on nomadic traditions casts Kyrgyzstan as part of a grander Turkic civilization, and perhaps equally important, helps counter the growing strength here of the intolerant Wahhabi strain of Islam imported by clerics educated in Saudi Arabia. The Games started on a modest scale in 2014 when about 600 athletes from 19 countries took part. The third edition of the biannual event attracted 1,976 competitors, representing 74 countries. The elaborate opening ceremony, with 1,500 dancers and other performers, retold the myth of creation from the nomad perspective. First came primordial earth, then man, horses, yurts and hence nomads — who gave rise to the rest of us. The performance rocked the sold-out 10,000-seat arena. Team uniforms, on display at the parade of competitors, ran from the professional to the improvised. The Germans wore black sweatsuits with a few pairs of lederhosen thrown in for an ancestral touch, while the Pakistanis sported matching green vests and scarves. Others teams looked as if they had wandered in from the nearest cafe; the man carrying the flag of Estonia wore jeans and a white T-shirt. The United States fielded more than 50 participants, many of them Peace Corps volunteers working in Kyrgyzstan. The American kok-boru team, some waving their own cowboy hats, brandished the flag of Wyoming, home to 8 of 10 players. The Games are somewhat controversial in Kyrgyzstan. Critics argue the money to produce them would be better spent on much-needed development like schools. Yet local participants reveled in the events. As a circus performer, Aida Akmatova, 32, developed her signature trick of shooting a bow and arrow with her feet. At the Games, she competed in horseback archery. "This is not just another performance, but a key event in my life," she said. "I can help pass down our culture, our traditions." The rest of the world has been catching on to the appeal of the competition. In 2016, the lone guest of honor was Steven Seagal, the former Hollywood action star. This year high-profile guests included President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. "Our origins are from here, so we want to make the relations stronger and stronger," said Vermes Balazs, 28, a Hungarian farrier dressed in leather armor he had tooled himself. About a dozen such horsemen escorted Mr. Orban to his seat of honor at the Games. "This is the most dangerous game in the whole world, you have to be fearless to play it," Mr. Subanov said. "It is much more dangerous than American football." The rough, physically demanding game once served as the Kyrgyz equivalent of West Point, training warriors for the battlefield. All eight players try to scoop up an 80-pound goat carcass off the dirt. Every effort provokes a hellacious, rugby-like scrum on horseback, with whips cracking and hooves pounding. Any player who manages to wrest the carcass away gallops downfield to fling it into an elevated goal about the size of a kiddie pool. The United States versus Russia was one of the first kok-boru matches. Given that the Russian players were of Kyrgyz origin, an American victory would have surpassed the upset of the "Miracle on Ice" hockey win at the 1980 Olympics. The American players, most in their first game ever, struggled, with the announcer bellowing, "Whoooops!" every time one of them dropped the carcass. At one point an American player, Ladd Howell, recruited because of his experience wrangling rodeo calves, broke away from the massed riders and galloped toward the goal. He threw the beast into the goal with such force that he fell in after it, provoking a roar of laughter from the stands. While the game disturbs many animal-rights activists, Garret J. Edington, a co-captain of the American side, said the team was not there to challenge local traditions. "It is part of the culture that we are here to experience," he said, adding that the winning team gets to eat the goat. The British ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Robin Ord-Smith, was a bit flummoxed about how his country could participate in the Games. "We don't really do nomads," he said. Then, an inspiration: Scotsmen! Oddball sports involving trials of strength, skill and dexterity? Check. Exotic national dress? Check. Tribes? Clans! So he imported four men in kilts for an exhibition display of Highland games, including the caber toss, which involves throwing the equivalent of a telephone pole end over end. While there's no sign the caber toss will join the roster of official sports any time soon, the Games are expanding beyond Kyrgyzstan's borders. Turkey will host the 2020 version. "In a globalized world, people forget their cultures, what sets them apart," said Mr. Subanov, the visiting accountant. "It is more interesting to live in a world with different nations, different cultures. It would not be good for the whole world to become New York."" -By Neil MacFarquhar

"No distractions: An NFL veteran opens up on his sexuality" Article

"Ryan Russell is a three-year NFL veteran. He was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys in 2015 after a successful college career at Purdue. He played one season with the Cowboys and two for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He started seven games for the Bucs in 2017. This is his story, in his own words. IN EARLY AUGUST, I met with an NFL team that was interested in signing me as a free agent for the upcoming season. This was a big moment for me because, other than the love for my family, playing football again in the NFL is my dream. The team invited me to meet with their front office and members of their coaching staff because, even though I missed all of the 2018 season after suffering a shoulder injury in 2017, I feel the organization believes I have the skills and character to contribute to their success. What they know about me, they like -- but there was one very important detail about my life they weren't familiar with. My performance in the interviews and workouts was first-rate. Coaches saw that I still have the kind of speed and agility to pressure quarterbacks that prompted the Dallas Cowboys to choose me in the fifth round of the 2015 draft and enjoy two successful seasons in Tampa Bay. Execs and I discussed the legacy of the organization and the culture they are trying to build to achieve success at the highest level. Though the team didn't ultimately need help at my position, I feel positive about how I presented myself that day: a hardworking, coachable, accountable and trustworthy player whose priorities are in the right place. I've never felt more confident that if I continue to train and value the right things, I can add to the winning culture of an NFL team. But for all the encouraging feelings about the visit, I do have one strong regret that has inspired me to make a promise to myself: This is the last time I will ever interview for a job as anything other than my full self. Out of love, admiration and respect, I want the next team to sign me valuing me for what I do and knowing who I truly am. Have I lied to teammates, coaches, trainers, front-office executives and fans about who I am? Not exactly. But withholding information is a form of deceit. And I want the next part of my career -- and life -- steeped in trust and honesty. During the season you spend more time with your team than with your own family; truth and honesty are the cornerstones of a winning culture. My truth is that I'm a talented football player, a damn good writer, a loving son, an overbearing brother, a caring friend, a loyal lover, and a bisexual man. Today, I have two goals: returning to the NFL, and living my life openly. I want to live my dream of playing the game I've worked my whole life to play, and being open about the person I've always been. Those two objectives shouldn't be in conflict. But judging from the fact that there isn't a single openly LGBTQ player in the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball or the NHL, brings me pause. I want to change that -- for me, for other athletes who share these common goals, and for the generations of LGBTQ athletes who will come next. GROWING UP, I always felt as though my existence slipped between the cracks of two worlds. I wasn't flamboyant, tidy, or any other stereotypes kids are forced to construct their world around. I wasn't straight, hyper-masculine or aggressive; I cried quite a bit, and, as a young black man, I didn't fit the bill. I played football -- so I put that in the straight column. I wrote poetry and romance stories -- so I put that in the gay column. Over time, I came to build two worlds. There was football, the drive to play at a professional level, a place that catered to my competitive instincts. Football was a world of opportunity where, if I performed well, I could earn a scholarship, support my family and build a life for myself long after I stopped playing. Then there's my personal world, which probably isn't much different from most people who are figuring out who they are in adulthood. It's a world of relationships, inner thoughts and off-the-field interests. For me, that's my mom and brother, hometown girlfriends, guys I spent time with in my early 20s, and my best friend Joe, a teammate from Purdue who died last year. It's my poetry, my bouts with depression, my love of Tarantino films and my passion for Hemingway. For me, the beauty of life can be found in a simple walk on the beach, the thrills of traveling to new places and the savoring of delectable cuisine. I attempt to capture life between the pages of my journals and sometimes the words are the truest form of soul. Pursuing a career in the NFL is such an intense challenge that I began to compromise my personal world -- and my personal happiness. Though I confided in close friends and family and gave myself permission to date both men and women discreetly, I deprived myself the basic privilege of living an open life. That meant I had to be strategic and cautious about meeting guys or getting involved with them during the regular season. It also meant that even though I was building important friendships on my team, I couldn't be authentic or honest about who I am or what was going on in my life. I wasn't always fully present in the locker room. Being an NFL-quality teammate takes more than just excelling on the field. It comes with common trust built by knowing your teammate is physically and mentally fortified. You know the man next to you as well as you know yourself and you, in turn, trust him irrevocably. If you aren't fully present and authentic in the training facility, you simply can't be a standout teammate. After my first season, a well-known blogger messaged me. He had come across an Instagram story of a man I was dating that included a quick snippet of me in the background. Even though the man and I were never in a post together, the dates, times and similar locations were enough evidence for the blogger to deduce that we were an item. The blogger could have revealed I was in a gay relationship. My professional world and personal world were colliding with me caught in the cataclysm. I panicked, then wrote back, reminding him that there were implications about his actions he didn't fully understand. If the blogger outed me, I was sure that would kill my career, one that was supporting not just me, but my mother and grandfather. He'd eradicate a childhood dream that was the product of years of work and sacrifice. After hearing me out, know what that blogger told me? That he would grant me this favor, but that I should be more careful. Let that sink into your brain: Even though openly LGBTQ people are thriving in every area of public life -- politics, entertainment, the top corporations in America -- they are so invisible in pro sports that a gossip blogger is doing a favor for a bisexual football player by not disclosing that he happens to date men. Nobody should need a favor to live honestly. In nobody's worlds should being careful mean not being yourself. The career you choose shouldn't dictate the parts of yourself that you embrace. UNTIL RECENTLY, I didn't love myself enough to live openly and honestly. I was ashamed of who I am. I prayed countless nights for God to take away this part of me. I was ashamed to love women because I knew I could also love men. I stayed up so many nights in fear of being found out, in fear that the professional sports world would reject me for the way I was born. I lied to myself every chance I could. I looked in the mirror and lied, got into relationships and lied, woke up every morning and went to sleep every night lying about the fullness of my soul. During my first few seasons in the NFL, I rationalized my fear because it was easy to convince myself that hiding who I was made the most sense. The competition is so stiff to stay in the league, that any small mark can lead a front office to choose another guy for your job. Whether you're gay or straight or bisexual, you're always making sacrifices for the sake of your career, whether it's not going out during the season, or working out during your downtime. For me, not publicly acknowledging my sexuality became one of those sacrifices, just one of those hundreds of little interests or passions a pro athlete puts off until their playing days are long gone. But after my departure from the Dallas Cowboys, confiding in a few loved ones about who I am, and getting a new chance to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I started feeling the freedom of transparency -- even if it was small at first -- and the fear of people finding out and rejecting me slowly dissipated. Being more comfortable in my own skin made me a better teammate. I was able to play and start at the highest level in the world, and felt like I belonged. With football, no matter the topic, there is criticism and scrutiny. I took on the mantra, "If you don't know me personally, I don't take what you have to say personally." I began to apply the same idea to outside opinions of my sexuality. My third season in the NFL was my most successful (I played in 14 games for Tampa Bay, started seven, and had two sacks) even after battling a debilitating shoulder injury in Week 5. Nursing an injury during a contract year is an impossible situation. If you listen to your body and don't play, that doesn't reflect well on your resilience. Play through the injury, as I did for a good chunk of the season, and you risk making it worse. Playing with one arm, I finished the season with several starts and earned the respect of my team. Unfortunately, my impending surgery and unknown offseason recovery time didn't give the organization enough confidence to sign me to a future deal at the end of the season. Now, after the injury, losing my best friend, Joseph Gilliam, to cancer, and battling severe depression, truth became a part of my survival. I didn't make a Week 1 roster last season, but life was too short to do anything other than what I loved. I moved to Los Angeles and began writing stories I wished I'd heard more of as a child. I continued to heal and train for football because I knew my best days as an athlete were ahead of me. I also began to date openly and freely. In many ways, the past year of my life has been the most fulfilling, even if I wasn't able to play a snap in the NFL. I guess I always knew that healthy romantic relationships, supportive communities and meaningful hobbies make life more purposeful and less stressful. But until I started existing day-to-day in that kind of life, I didn't realize how true it was. That brings me to today, and the biggest challenge yet: Can I bring these two worlds together? Can I take all the progress in my personal life over the 12 months and combine it with the professional success that I experienced the previous year? Can I unify my separate professional and personal lives into a single one? I don't believe this is a big ask in 2019. I can tell you from experience that as long as a teammate contributes to success on the field and in the locker room, NFL players aren't concerned about who their defensive linemen date. I've never been suspended or a distraction for my conduct off the field. The NFL is a multibillion-dollar entertainment entity with the power to create working conditions that allow LGBTQ people to perform their jobs like everyone else. NFL teams who worry about the "distractions" that would come with additional media coverage have skilled PR professionals who understand that there are bigger issues on Sunday afternoon than a quarterback being asked, "What's it like having a bisexual teammate?" There are a lot of problems in the world, and a lot of issues facing the NFL. And I can say with confidence that LGBTQ players having the comfort to be themselves, date who they want, share parts of their life with friends and teammates will not rank among those issues. I witnessed college players come out, one of whom was drafted afterward, along with NFL vets who have come out after their playing days are done. I watched all this happen with a combination of hope and anxiety, feeling as though my existence once again lay between two worlds. Nevertheless, I know now truth is survival, and that we cannot survive in this world without vulnerability and love. Also, the best version of myself, the best partner, the best friend, the best teammate, is one that's open and honest. Next, it will be a signed player, then a Pro Bowler, then a Super Bowl champion who embraces who he is publicly. I feel as though this could be a step toward that future. For myself, I'm not looking to be a symbol or media star. I just want to play ball for a team that knows me off the field and values me on it. I want to encourage teammates to be the same people they have always been. I want us to remain as close as family. I want to be able to dedicate my life to football without feeling like I can't dedicate my life to truth as well. Whatever I was to you before this letter, I'm still that now. We just know each other a little better." -Ryan Russell, as told to Kevin Arnovitz

"Andraya Yearwood knows she has the right to compete" Article

"She is one of the fastest teens in Connecticut. So why do people not want her to run? Because this 17-year-old Black transgender girl represents what they are afraid of: no longer being the norm. There are people who do not want Andraya Yearwood to run. They are bothered by the sight of her. Angered by the thought of her. The black scrunchie on her wrist, the ponytail down her back. The steely stare she offers as coaches, parents and fans hurl insults toward her at track meets, not caring that she's an earshot away. The vitriol intrudes before races. Afterward. In her Instagram comments. They say she has a "biological advantage." They say allowing her to run isn't fair. They do not recognize her as a girl. They insist she is a boy—a boy who shouldn't compete in the girls division. When Andraya is on the track, about to burst out of the blocks, she doesn't hear this noise. Doesn't feel it. She travels somewhere else. "I don't have to think," she says. So she zooms. Pumps her arms harder, moves her legs more quickly. The 100-meter dash is where she shines most. The last two seasons, she finished second in the state open in the 100, with a time of 12.29 in 2018. In 2017, her freshman year, she won a Class M title in the 100 and finished second in the 100 at the New England High School Outdoor Track and Field Championships. "Unheard of" for a first-year, according to her coach, Brian Calhoun. Now in her third year competing for Cromwell High School, in Cromwell, Connecticut, she feels unfazed. Confident. Probably more than she ever has. "Because they don't want me to run, I have to run harder," she says. "I want to go to nationals in order to prove them wrong, to be like, You guys don't want me to run? But look, I qualified for nationals." Andraya is a 17-year-old transgender girl. A Black transgender girl in a small town that is 90 percent Caucasian. A Black transgender girl in a world that is intent on policing and erasing girls like her. She is perplexed by the lengths to which some people have gone to drill into her their underlying message: You're free to be yourself, just not here. Over there. Not with us. Over there. When Andraya is on the track, about to burst out of the blocks, she doesn't hear this noise. Doesn't feel it. She travels somewhere else. When Andraya is on the track, about to burst out of the blocks, she doesn't hear this noise. Doesn't feel it. She travels somewhere else.(Jesse Dittmar for B/R) The noise has been loud since her freshman year, when an adult man, whom she had never met, posted a video about her on YouTube. He spoke furiously into the camera, calling for her competitors to boycott. He titled his video: "How to Stop Andraya Yearwood from Beating Girls for Three More Years!" It hasn't worked. The sky is dark. Black-purple. On this Friday night in late November, the Connecticut snow is deep enough to sink a boot. Fresh sole imprints lead up to the bright red door of the home Andraya shares with her mother, Ngozi Nnaji. Inside, Andraya is upstairs, tinkering with the white Christmas lights that hang above her bed. She's wearing a bright yellow cold-shoulder crop top with black jeans ripped at her knees. Her nails are painted white with silver glitter on her ring fingers—she wants rhinestones next time. Her smile is warm but cautious. She replies "yes" instead of "yeah," when answering questions. She tucks her braids behind her ears, nervously, every few minutes. She has a habit of doing this when talking to reporters: eager to say the right thing, afraid to say the wrong thing. Open and guarded all at once. Back in June, she and her family appeared on Good Morning America in front of a national audience to speak about a petition that circulated to prevent transgender girls like Andraya from running in the girls division in Connecticut. Her voice was strong, firm. She encouraged other transgender girls to follow their hearts, to do what they want to do in life. What viewers couldn't see was the pressure Andraya felt when speaking out and when being singled out. It seized her. Squeezed her too tight. Tonight, she is noticeably relaxed. As she looks out her window, she fantasizes about living somewhere far from here, about competing in college out of state. Maybe sunny California! Maybe even Mexico! Her voice brims with excitement. She loves airports and traveling. She's in the process of learning 13 languages, including Portuguese, Italian, Albanian and American Sign Language. She's taking AP Spanish. She is restless; the monotony of Cromwell, where she has lived since first grade, gets to her. "In the school hallways, I just feel like a zombie," she says. Cromwell is a small town with one high school, one middle school, one intermediate school and one elementary school. There is a diner; a mall 20 minutes away (Andraya loves the mall); low-hanging streetlights coated in snow; a Dunkin' Donuts every half-mile; and white, blue and cream New England brick houses, some of which have mailboxes out front for the Hartford Courant. "She lives in a bubble," Ngozi says. Andraya feels protected and safe—happy, even, in her bubble. She is genuinely supported, buoyed by love as much as she is burdened by hate. Andraya's father, Rahsaan, and Ngozi, who are divorced, have always accepted and loved their daughter. Andraya's three brothers and one sister and best friends and coaches and classmates have too. They see her as her: a determined teen (she longed to do backflips, so she taught herself how within weeks and now flips across pavement) who is also stubborn (Ngozi used to have to sprinkle hot sauce, a favorite, onto Andraya's green peas because she refused to eat them), graceful (she is polite to her staunchest critics) and, above all else, highly motivated. Ngozi and Rahsaan worry about what could happen when Andraya leaves Connecticut for college, if that's what she chooses. The bubble—the many layers of protection they labored to build around her—could burst. They won't be able to control who she talks to, as they do now. They won't be able to prevent physical harm, as they may think they can now. Andraya is grateful that she feels comfortable, accepted and safe at school. So when the noise online roars too loudly, she can turn her Instagram to private. She can power off her phone. That gives her some feeling of control. Of distance. But the threat is still close. Always close. Before her race at the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) 2018 State Open, Andraya walks over to retrieve her number near the starting line, where athletes gather before their heats. Only competitors and event staff are allowed there. Andraya comes upon two women. Parents from other schools, she presumes. They have their backs to her, so they do not know she is trailing closely behind. "He shouldn't be running!" one of the women says. "I know!" the other says. "Why is he running on the girls' team? HE IS A BOY!" And then the two women turn around. They look at Andraya. She looks at them. It is as if months pass between blinks. "Why are you on the team?!" one of the women shouts at Andraya. "Why are you here?!" Andraya feels something inside of her pounding. Fear. That's what it is. A fear no longer dormant inside her. Shock, too. She is shocked that these women—these grown women—are brash enough to say these things to her, a teenage girl. Not over Instagram. Not over Twitter. To her face. What's to stop them from doing more? she thinks. In a matter of seconds, her brain begins the mental gymnastics of computing every potential scenario. Their words could turn into actions. "It was very scary, being in a position where someone could harm me at any given moment," Andraya recalls. "Whenever they wanted to." The women don't harm her, physically, but the moment causes Andraya to contemplate giving up running. "Do I want to keep doing this? Is it worth it? I don't want to put myself in danger," she says to herself. She finishes second. When she crosses the finish line, staff is there, like always, ready to escort her if needed. (The CIAC implemented a special protocol for Andraya.) Nobody knows about the encounter; nobody knows what Andraya heard before her race. "It was very scary, being in a position where someone could harm me at any given moment. ... I felt so numb." — Andraya Yearwood Some parents yell profanity at Andraya in the stands. A number of kids fire back. "The kids began yelling back at them, 'This is our meet, not yours. What's wrong with her competing?'" says Karissa Niehoff, former CIAC executive director and current executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations. "They supported Andraya." Niehoff describes Andraya as typically handling herself with "consummate grace and class." But the confrontation with the two women is a visceral reminder that Andraya experiences threats and challenges that those she competes with and against do not have to face. "I felt so numb," Andraya says. "I just didn't feel like I should be the person doing this. ... It was all too much." As she thinks through what's happening, she imagines another transgender girl going through a similar confrontation. Or one much worse. She doesn't want that to happen. She wants to help other girls, like her friend Terry Miller, another transgender girl in the area, who competes at a high school less than 30 miles away. So Andraya makes a decision: keep running, keep sharing her story publicly. As a child, she didn't know what the word "transgender" meant. Neither did her family. They just knew what Andraya liked to wear, and they allowed her to wear whatever she wanted. As a first-grader, she had a pink, glittery Disney backpack that featured princesses Cinderella, Belle and Sleeping Beauty. She loved trying on her mom's heels and wearing pink and purple fuzzy boots with little puffy pompoms on the front. She started wearing wigs in seventh grade and skirts in eighth. Around that time, she told her parents she was gay. But later her therapist told her about transgender people, and that's when she realized who she was. She just never had the language to describe it until then. "All along Andraya has been Andraya. It's one of the things people need to understand," says Coach Calhoun, who was also her eighth-grade language arts teacher. "This is not a phase. This is not a fad. This is not 'trying something.' "This is a person's right to live their life as they truly believe they are." Her parents embraced her, too. "There was nothing to it," Rahsaan says. "Your child is your child." Ngozi felt the same way, but she was also concerned about Andraya's safety and mental health. "My greatest fear is not that she's transgender, but because of the lack of acceptance, that she becomes an addict, becomes suicidal, becomes victim to so many other things," Ngozi says. "I just won't allow that to happen." There were other concerns too, given that violence disproportionately affects transgender people of color—particularly women of color. The killing of transgender people is a national epidemic, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Of the at least 26 transgender people who were shot or killed by violent means in 2018, 21 of them—81 percent—were women of color. About 300 miles away, in Baltimore, a Black transgender woman named Tydi Dansbury was fatally shot, left to lay unconscious on the side of a street. Not to forget some of the other Black transgender women whose lives were cut short: Celine Walker. Tonya Harvey. Amia Tyrae Berryman. Antash'a English. Keanna Mattel... "As a Black male with Black kids, you're always worried about a time where a physical altercation could come up, regardless of who the instigator is," Rahsaan says. Andraya's peers have been understanding. When she first told her close friends she was transgender in middle school, they were essentially like, OK, cool. You're transgender. Can we go to the mall now? Most of Andraya's schoolmates accepted that she was using the girls' bathroom. Several teachers, however, did not. They complained to school administrators. The "solution" was to have Andraya use the bathroom in the nurse's office. She was still not allowed to use the girls' bathroom or girls' locker room. "I thought, If they let me wear what I want to wear and dress like a female, that's enough. But it's not," she says. "It isn't." When Andraya started high school, she and her family knew that she might run into opposition once she began competing. "We knew there might be some controversy," Ngozi says. The strategy at first was to not necessarily be proactive. Let things happen. Let Andraya go about her business. But as cameras showed up to meets and as articles began to be written, the family changed course. "We were like, 'If there's going to be a story, let it be a story that we tell,'" Ngozi says. Andraya began giving interviews to local newspapers, asserting her right to compete. She shrugged off her critics as making a big deal out of her doing what she simply loves to do. She resisted being defined by their perceptions. Kept running as they kept trying to limit her. Those 12 seconds that she flies down the track for the 100 are only a fraction of who she is and who she wants to be. Her favorite event is actually the high jump. She loves the feeling she gets while flying into the unknown, letting the wind wrap around her as she sails through the air. For a brief moment, while airborne, she travels somewhere else. A place where she can just be herself. In June, the petition began circulating. It called for athletes to run in the division based on the sex they were assigned at birth, unless the athlete had undergone hormone replacement therapy (HRT). "It blew my mind," says Andraya. "People really started a petition to not get me to run." Bianca Stanescu, a parent in the nearby town of Glastonbury, started the petition. "I'm fighting for the principle of it," she says. Her daughter, Selina Soule, is a junior at Glastonbury High. Soule finished sixth in the 100-meter at the 2018 State Open. Stanescu contends that allowing a transgender girl to run in the girls division is an "injustice." That doing so is to give "special treatment." People like Andraya, she says, have a "biological advantage." "We were like, 'If there's going to be a story, let it be a story that we tell.'" — Ngozi Nnaji, Andraya's mother There are a host of genetic factors that can give an athlete an advantage, such as fast and slow twitch fibers, height. Environmental and economic factors are at play, too, such as access to training facilities. "A level playing field is a fallacy," says Dr. Myron Genel, Yale professor emeritus of pediatric endocrinology. He is a member of the International Olympic Committee's Medical Commission on issues regarding gender identity in athletics. "There's so many other factors that may provide a competitive advantage," Genel says. "It's very hard to single out sex as the only one." There is no proof that cisgender men are inherently more capable than cisgender women. According to an NCAA handbook called "Creating Positive & Inclusive Athletic Environments for Transgender Athletes," the fear that "transgender women will be able to dominate women's sports without effort due to the inherent advantages men have over women" is "a new iteration of the old stereotypes that kept women & girls out of sports prior to Title IX." Nationally, there are no uniform federal guidelines that dictate in which gender division transgender athletes must compete. Different states have different policies at the high school level. CIAC policy follows state statute; students are allowed to compete with the gender with which they identify. (HRT requirements are not included in CIAC policy.) However, Texas has a policy that only allows students to compete in the division of the sex on their birth certificates. Some states do not have policies at all. "We're still not necessarily, across the country, doing a great job of providing equality," says Glenn Lungarini, CIAC's executive director. At the NCAA level, transgender women may compete with cisgender women only after undergoing HRT for a year. (Ngozi declined to discuss whether Andraya has undergone HRT: "Her medical treatment doesn't define whether she's transgender or not," Ngozi says.) Regardless, it is still difficult to quantitatively define what "fairness" in this context truly means. For example, fairness could be seen as following the rules. Stanescu told local affiliate WTNH News 8 in June that Andraya is "following the rules" and "doing nothing wrong," since she is competing in accordance with CIAC policy. Then again, Stanescu wants to change the rules because she thinks they are unfair. She wants to prohibit transgender girls from competing against cisgender girls unless the former have completed HRT. Stanescu told WTNH that transgender girls who have not undergone HRT should be allowed to run against cisgender girls but have their times measured against cisgender boys. Of course, HRT has been shown to have effects beyond hormone levels, according to a study in the Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities. Researchers found that HRT resulted in physical changes to transgender women, which led to "a loss of speed, strength and endurance—all key components of athleticism." Hence, the question then becomes: Who ultimately gets to experience "fairness"? And is that even the right question to be asking? "There is a difference between what is right and what is fair, and people have to decide which side of the fence they want to be on," says Robin McHaelen, executive director of True Colors, a Hartford-based nonprofit that provides services to LGBTQ youth. "If she can't play, we are denying her all of the other benefits of participating in team sports, the things that have nothing to do with winning and losing," McHaelen says. "It has to do with developing teamwork, relationships, feeling like you belong, developing discipline." "There is a difference between what is right and what is fair, and people have to decide which side of the fence they want to be on." — Robin McHaelen, executive director of True Colors But like many of Andraya's critics, Stanescu focuses on winning and opportunity instead. She argues that cisgender girls will no longer win races if they compete against transgender girls and that transgender girls are taking away scholarships from cisgender girls. That train of thought falls in line with some of Andraya's staunchest critics: Title IX advocates, who fought to give cisgender girls opportunity in sport. However, there is no evidence that transgender girls take away scholarships from cisgender girls. Andraya hasn't received an offer yet. Stanescu insists her petition is misunderstood as a personal attack on Andraya and Miller, on transgender girls in general: "It's about the rule," she says. "It's not about them." But it is about them. Stanescu's petition directly targets girls whose identities represent something some people are afraid of: no longer being the default, the norm. The truth is, Andraya doesn't dominate. Not yet anyway. She has had success, but her 400 is still a work-in-progress. Her 100-meter times—including a 12.17 personal record—are just outside of major university marks. Coach Calhoun believes the mark is within reach. "It gives her something to compete for, something to strive for," he says. To improve her times, she'll have to dig in. She's relatively new to weightlifting. She recently learned how to squat. How to summon all of her strength. How to crouch lower and spring back up, over and over. Andraya is relatively new to weightlifting. She hopes that training will improve her times. She's always had the drive. She's always been a fighter. A survivor. Andraya was born extremely premature at 24 weeks. There were so many tubes connected to her tiny body, which weighed one pound, 12 ounces. She had to stay in the hospital for six months. When she was released, she went home on oxygen and a feeding tube. "Every day, you didn't know if she was going to survive," Rahsaan says. "The doctor said if she survives this, she will do great things because this will be the toughest fight of her life." But the fight she is in now—a fight to be who she is—is in some ways just beginning. Andraya takes a seat at the front of Askwith Hall at Harvard University. She's been invited to speak on a November panel called "The Intersection of Gender Identity, Race and Student Support." She sits next to her mother onstage. She feels a little nervous but less than she has in the past. Once, she spoke at Wesleyan and was so nervous taking the stage in front of 100 students that she forgot to introduce herself. This time, at Harvard, she feels more confident. Excited. Being at a university causes her mind to drift toward the future. She is receiving some recruiting interest from Harvard's track coaches, in addition to those at UConn, Springfield College and West Point. "They want me," she says. "They want me on their track team." But the world outside of track? Far less accepting. Just the month before, in October, President Trump said his administration was considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, unchanging condition determined by the sex assigned at birth. This move is part of a larger concerted effort to rescind Obama-era policies that recognized and protected transgender people under federal civil rights law. Andraya's first thought was Why? Why are people so intent on erasing people like her? "Just because the government erases the word 'transgender,' that doesn't mean that we don't exist," she says. "That doesn't mean that I'm not still transgender." She brings a similar tone to Harvard. The panel's moderator, Gretchen Brion-Meisels of the university's Prevention Science and Practice Program, asks Andraya why she chooses to speak out. Andraya is receiving some recruiting interest from "They want me," she says.(Jesse Dittmar for B/R) "I'm here today to advocate for transgender individuals," Andraya says, "and to allow them to be able to live in their truth without having to hide or be afraid." Ngozi still worries about how her daughter will be perceived in college, how she will be perceived when she enters spaces far less accepting than Cromwell. Rahsaan worries about the immediate future, how Andraya will be treated while in Morocco and Spain this summer. Andraya thinks about all of this, too, but in this moment, at Harvard, she is focused purely on the moderator's next question: How does it feel to be an activist? How does it feel to have a voice? Something inside of Andraya stops cold. Me? She thinks to herself. She had never thought of herself as an activist before. Brion-Meisels offers a definition of an activist as someone who advocates on behalf of others. Yes. Me, she thinks to herself, smiling. Me." -by MIRIN FADER

Intersex

"Intersex" is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.

"Nike Told Me to Dream Crazy, Until I wanted a Baby" Article

"In the above video, the United States national champion Alysia Montaño turns Nike's ad rhetoric against her former sponsor: If companies want to stand by the inspirational slogans they tout, they must ensure sponsored female athletes receive maternity leave. Update: Following this report, the outdoor company Burton announced that it changed all female athletic contracts to include language that protects women during and after pregnancy. Many athletic apparel companies, including Nike, claim to elevate female athletes. A commercial released in February received widespread acclaim for spotlighting women at all stages of their careers, from childhood to motherhood. On Mother's Day this year, Nike released a video promoting gender equality. But that's just advertising. The economics of sports like track and field are different than those of professional sports like basketball or soccer. In track, athletes aren't paid a salary by a league. Instead, their income comes almost exclusively from sponsorship deals inked with apparel companies like Nike and Asics. The best of the best can supplement that income with prize money from winning races outright. But the majority of athletes — who are often the breadwinners for their families — sign exclusive five- or six-figure deals that keep them bound to a single company. For the vast majority of athletes, their sport is a way to earn a decent living by doing what they love and excel at. They don't get rich. Sports take a heavy toll on the human body, and sponsors accommodate this with time off for injuries. But rarely do they offer enough time off to have a child. The four Nike executives who negotiate contracts for track and field athletes are all men. "Getting pregnant is the kiss of death for a female athlete," said Phoebe Wright, who was a runner sponsored by Nike from 2010 through 2016. "There's no way I'd tell Nike if I were pregnant." More than a dozen track athletes, agents and others familiar with the business describe a multi-billion-dollar industry that praises women for having families in public — but doesn't guarantee them a salary during pregnancy and early maternity. For the Olympian Kara Goucher, the most difficult part of motherhood wasn't resuming training just a week after childbirth in 2010. It wasn't even when her doctor told her she must choose: run 120 miles each week or breast-feed her son. Her body couldn't do both. The toughest moment was when Ms. Goucher learned that Nike would stop paying her until she started racing again. But she was already pregnant. So, she scheduled a half-marathon three months after she had her son, Colt. Then her son got dangerously ill. Ms. Goucher had to choose again: be with her son or prepare for the race that she hoped would restart her pay. She kept training. "I felt like I had to leave him in the hospital, just to get out there and run, instead of being with him like a normal mom would," Ms. Goucher said, crying at the memory. "I'll never forgive myself for that." Nike acknowledged in a statement that some of its sponsored athletes have had their sponsorship payments reduced because of pregnancies. But the company says it changed its approach in 2018 so that athletes are no longer penalized. Nike declined to say if it wrote those changes into its contracts. According to a 2019 Nike track and field contract shared with The Times, Nike can still reduce an athlete's pay "for any reason" if the athlete doesn't meet a specific performance threshold, for example a top five world ranking. There are no exceptions for childbirth, pregnancy or maternity. Most people who spoke to The Times requested anonymity because they feared retribution, or had signed nondisclosure agreements, which may help explain why these arrangements have persisted. Many American laws protect the rights of pregnant employees — they can't be fired, for instance. But, since professional athletes are more like independent contractors, those protections don't apply. When Alysia Montaño ran in the 2014 United States Championships while eight months pregnant, she was celebrated as "the pregnant runner." Privately, she had to fight with her sponsor to keep her paycheck. Sponsors do sometimes pay new mothers — Serena Williams is branded as a famous example. But those who do get paid often have to beg for the money. Ms. Goucher made more than a dozen unpaid appearances on behalf of Nike during her high-risk pregnancy. She had to wait more than four months to disclose that she was pregnant, so that Nike could announce it in The Times for Mother's Day. These kinds of pressures can lead to health complications. Ms. Goucher, for instance, has suffered from chronic hip injuries ever since she raced the Boston Marathon seven months after childbirth. "It took such a toll on me mentally and physically, for myself and for my child," said Ms. Goucher. "Returning to competition so quickly was a bad choice for me. And looking back and knowing that I wasn't the kind of mother that I want to be — it's gut wrenching." New mothers don't just deal with their sponsors. Top athletes receive health insurance from The United States Olympic Committee and U.S.A. Track & Field. But that insurance can vanish if women don't place in the top tier of the nation's most competitive races. Ms. Goucher and Ms. Montaño both lost their health insurance because they were unable to compete at that level while having their children. "Some people think women are racing pregnant for themselves," said Ms. Wright. "It sometimes is, but it's also because there's a baby to feed."" -By Alysia Montaño

Title IX

A United States law enacted on June 23, 1972 that states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

"The 16th Man" Movie

Rugby has long been viewed in South Africa as a game for the white population, and the country's success in the sport has been a true source of Afrikaner pride. When the 50-year-old policies and entrenched injustices of apartheid were finally overthrown in 1994, Nelson Mandela's new government began rebuilding a nation badly in need of racial unity. So the world was watching when South Africa played host to the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Though they had only one non-white player, the South African Springboks gained supporters of all colors as they made an improbable run into the final match where they beat the heavily favored New Zealand team. When Mandela himself marched to the center of the pitch cloaked in a Springbok jersey and shook hands with the captain of the South African team, two nations became one. Oscar winner Morgan Freeman and director Cliff Bestall will tell the emotional story of that cornerstone moment and what it meant to South Africa's healing process.