Beth Made Me Do This

This is just the ramblings of me on stuff I think is kind of important.

[jackdart]

20:00

So that's time! Just as the team arrive in Vilnius, Lithuania! Could not be more proud of both Stu and Chloe, wouldn't have changed anything about them for the world. Great weekend and hopefully they will have memories that will stay with them forever! Remember you can still donate and every penny goes to charity!

[jackdart]

International Women's Day and Sport

Wimbledon Equality?

  Women. The centenary of International Women’s Day is an invitations to reflect on where we are in the fight; at last, we feel, we are fast approaching equality in pay, rights, and representation. So, doesn’t this seem also the ideal time to highlight the areas where there is still a lot of inequality? Those who hold the power - the judiciary, government and the church – are still overwhelmingly male. Oh, and so are the big hitters in the world of sport.

Now despite the fact that sport may seem to be insignificant in comparison to the other three, it is the one where the most intransigent gulf in equality exists. The female athletes do the exact same job as the men but for a comparative pittance. If sport was like any other walk in life then it would be fair to agree that someone who is the best salesman at your company should be paid more than someone who would fail to sell a heater to an Inuit. This pay scaling though works on the fact that one is better than the other, if they were both as good as each other would they not be paid the same regardless of gender?

A World and Olympic Champion is the best at what they do; whether it be rowing, swimming or athletics, they are recognised by everyone as the best in the world. So biology, rather than ability, must be what means that one receives better rewards than the other?

Anyone who has witnessed the ongoing Olympic preparations will tell you that female athletes train at least as hard, sacrifice at least as much and perform at least as well as their male, yet this doesn’t seem to be enough to secure their, well, security beyond the games. Surely winning silverware for your country and gaining the recognition that you are world champion deserves more? Certainty, one woman in a million can breakthrough into the male world of reward: Birgit Prinz, female footballer of the year on several occasions, proved that you don’t have to be male to play in the top leagues as she was offered an opportunity to play in the top flight of Italian football, one of the best leagues in the world, only to turn the opportunity down.

Now this raises an even greater question: why turn down the opportunity to play in one of the best leagues in the world when you’ve been proven to be one of the best players ever to have graced the female filled turf? Solidarity with the 999,999 financially unrecognized women? No. Revealingly, Birgit Prinz herself confessed this was because she was worried about not being good enough to get into the team and didn’t want to simply dwindle away during the peak of her career and be forgotten.

This can also be seen in many other sports, particularly those that are more comparable such as athletics. The difference between current men’s 100m world record holder Usain Bolt and the female equivalent Florence Griffith-Joyner is 0.91 seconds, a massive difference in 100m and Griffith-Joyner’s time wouldn’t even be good enough to get into the men’s final at the last Olympics. So perhaps the gulf between men and women in sport is bigger than our idealistic views of parity would have us believe. The appositely-named “Battle of the Sexes” tennis game is often cited as a true testament to a woman’s ability to compete with a man. Despite how much it would please me to tell you this is true, I can’t; the aforementioned game of Riggs v King - not taking anything away from King who won in straight sets quite convincingly - was more a Battle of Ages than of Sexes. King was 26 years Riggs’ junior, and there had been similar matches both before and after in which the male won quite convincingly, particularly in Navratilova v Connors, where Navratilova was given an advantage by not having to play to the same rules as her competitor.

  In the end, sport is purely advertising. Would you rather have the best athlete in the world advertising your product, or someone who is just ok? It’s as if sport is just a byproduct, an audition for the endorsement deals to come. Roger Federer, arguably the best player ever to play tennis, is also one of the dullest to have held a racket, yet he somehow has endorsement deal after endorsement deal which has taken him to the second highest earning sports star in the world in past years.  He has obliterated anything that has stepped onto a tennis court – little wonder the big companies like to associate themselves with that!

Kobe Bryant, the American basketball player, has the highest selling jersey in the world and if almost half the world is female then some females must also be buying his jersey. The main problem here isn’t with equality among sports stars, but among sports fans: men, unlike women, have an issue wearing something intended for the opposite sex - whereas you will see numerous women walking up and down in an England shirt with “Beckham” on the back without a care in the world. This then immediately halves your potential buyers and limits the ability of the companies to make money.

Wimbledon. Recently it has been expressed that Wimbledon is now paying equal prize money to male and female champions. It isn’t. Maria Sharapova, currently ranked 13th in the world, is the highest earning female sports star in the world. Now, Sharapova’s main income is not through prize money but through modeling and being used by international brands such as Canon. She was the most searched sportsperson on Yahoo! In both 2005 and 2008 and voted 7th in a FHM poll for the most desirable bachelorette, and holds the record for the most lucrative endorsement deal for a female sports star ever after signing a $70m 8 year deal with Nike. That’s more money, contracts and fame than either of the Williams sisters despite the fact they are the (far) superior tennis players.

A hundred years of IWD’s and there can still never be gender equality because, when it comes to women, sex sells. If Sharapova wasn’t as attractive she wouldn’t make anywhere near as much as she does. If Serena Williams looked more like Sharapova would she stand a chance of being one of the highest paid athletes regardless of gender? Possibly so. Oddly, Roger Federer doesn’t seem to need to rely on sex appeal. The fact of the matter is that Wimbledon hasn’t made a step towards equality for women, if anything it’s taken a step away and back into the bigoted past. If this is an attempt to draw the younger sports stars into tennis, so ensures the viewing figures are kept high, it isn’t the most talented, able, big-hitting young women who will make it, but the ones who keep the old men happy.