Women's Sport

[FromEsme]

So since the Olympics, women's sport has vanished again. A major cycling team has had their sponsorship dropped ( you can read the story here ) and the Guardian and the BBC home pages have zero on them about women's sport. It's all men's men's men's.

MNers, what can we do to rectify this situation? I WANT to read about women in sport. I have written a letter to the sports editor of the Guardian, but what else can we do?

[steeples]

@ErrolTheDragon There are a few cycling events and If you contact JEan Hatchet or look at her blog there are details on it
there are also a few organisations that organise cycling events

[LangCleg]

steeples - welcome to Mumsnet. Almost certainly predictably, I will ask you not to @ me on threads I am contributing to. I prefer not to receive endless notifications - I'm on the thread already.

[ErrolTheDragon]

It's not at all obvious to newcomers, if you want to reference someone who is participating on the thread the preferred etiquette is to put their name, or an identifiable part thereof, between asterisks to bold it. The @ is generally of use to alert people to a thread they're not on which might interest them.

In this instance, for example, @DickKerrLadies might have a relevant contribution (and if any of you don't know why I'd say that, google Dick Kerr Ladies - one of the most popular football teams of the early 20th century.

[steeples]

Okay Sorry Cleg I did not know I will not at you anymore buddy

[EndoplasmicReticulum]

UCI world championships cycling in Yorkshire in 2 weeks going to watch women's race live. Will compare turnout to man's race, usually lots do watch here. This is to watch not ride obviously.

[BarbaraStrozzi]

Can I just point out the obvious?

This is a zombie thread from 2012, people.

The Telegraph now covers women's sport. The BBC has a women's football roundup on Four (akin to MotD) - and the Manchester derby, City v. Utd set a record crowd for a women's match of 31,000 plus (post the lifting of the FA ban, that is - no-one's yet matched Dick Kerr Ladies). England-Italy in the women's 5 nations set a record crowd for women's rugby (I was there - it was awesome). And there have been some epic achievements in endurance racing - a woman won the Spine race for instance.

Obviously still lots of work to be done - Women's Tour de France, for instance. No reason women couldn't do this.

And of course there's the ever-present worry that this might be as good as it gets due to men infiltrating women's sports.

[LangCleg]

[BarbaraStrozzi]

(Don't worry Lang, I am cringing too because I typed 5 nations instead of 6 nations... shows how long in the tooth I am).

[DickKerrLadies]

Whilst this is a zombie thread, it's quite interesting to read 7 years later (fucking hell, is it really that long since the London Olympics?!).

Since this thread was started, a UK women's bobsled team had to crowdfund to get to the Winter Olympics last year, where I'm fairly sure they outperformed at least one of the mens teams (please correct me if I'm wrong, it was a while ago and it's still early in the morning! )

On the flip side, women's football is currently riding a wave that I really hope continues. The quality of the football has also massively increased in these last 7 years. And all this with only a fraction of the money that is in the men's game.

I think that football is a bit of an anomaly though. It's our national sport (of the working class at least, IMO!), we fans take pride in being the home of football and we like to think that we appreciate good football no matter who is playing it. Men take it seriously.

Women's sport in general? I'm still not sure that it's taken as seriously as it should be. I wonder how many threads there have been in the last 7 years asking why female tennis players should get paid the same as the men.

I won't mention the bepenised elephant in the room.

[DickKerrLadies]

(Thanks for the @ by the way!)

[ArnoldWhatshisknickers]

As a sports fan, a good 80% of everything I watch on TV is sport I will answer the question, zombie thread or not.

So in light of this thread and the calls for more exposure and the fact there's an international match on right now..... Who's watching?

No, I didn't watch. I could say I was at work at the time, which would be true but also irrelevant as I often record events I'm interested in. I didn't watch because

a) I'm not English and have no particular interest in the England team.
b) I generally prefer individual sports, football is the only team sport I ever watch at all.
c) As football goes I much prefer club to international football.

Sports I have watched on TV in recent weeks include athletics, where I enjoy the women's as much as the men's and favour individual events at any given time depending on the strength and depth of the field.

MotoGP, no women there.

UFC, absolutely love women's MMA, it is a sport whose very nature allows us to play to our strengths and I really enjoy seeing how women approach it in a slightly different way to men and hearing the (almost exclusively male) commentators running out of superlatives in attempts to describe women's flexibility and balance. Enjoy the men's too, and as with athletics, the weight divisions I prefer vary depending on competitiveness at the time.

Tennis, mostly prefer the men's though there are some matches on the women's side that attract my attention, wish they'd show more doubles.

Snooker, again generally doesn't have women though a couple were invited to the Shootout earlier this year. I felt for Reanne Evans, who is the top woman, not because she lost to the legendary Jimmy White, the Shootout is pretty much a lottery anyway, but because she didn't do herself justice and you could see how annoyed she was with herself.

I watch sport for entertainment and don't watch women's for 'feminist reasons' if that makes sense, but there are many sports where women's is of as high a level of competitiveness as men's and is equally entertaining.