Five sets, grunting, consistency and other "women's issues" at the Australian Open

When it comes to women’s rights, tennis is the New Zealand of the sporting world. It was the first to see equality in prize money, well before other big dollar pro sports which still insist on putting women in the back seat (literally). On the court women can wear whatever they like (pending sponsor’s approval of course). Times have changed since the 90’s when female players in junior tournaments in Australia were still being forfeited for wearing shorts. Women umpire men’s matches and all seems well for females in the tennis community. It was 1973 when Billy Jean King and the eight “renegades” threatened to boycott the US Open, won equal prize money and changed the course of history. 

Four decades on, has the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) realised its dream of gender equality? According to Martina Navratilova, there is still a long way to go. She told BT Sport about the double standards that still exist, “With Serena it’s ‘she doesn’t have much competition.’ Well, Roger (Federer) didn’t have much competition for a while either but they weren’t bemoaning that fact, they were never saying there’s no depth in men’s tennis. They’re quick to say it about women.”

It’s not just the lack of competition in women’s sport that is granted double standards by media outlets around the world (and some spectators). When a woman is playing well, it’s because of the genius of their male coaches (think Li Na and Carlos Rodriguez) but men’s coaches only tweak their game and it’s the male player who is the genius. If the women aren’t winning a string of titles, it’s their hormones stopping them from being consistent. Never do we hear mention of Margaret Court’s 24 grand slam wins (the most ever) including taking all four in one calendar year. 

Women like Margaret Court are often written out of history in this way. When Andy Murray won Wimbledon last year, the headlines told us that he was the first Brit to do so in 77 years. Never mind that four British women had won Wimbledon during that time. 

When women grunt or scream after hitting the ball, journalists complain that their matches should come with complementary ear plugs. When Rafael Nadal or David Ferrer grunt we read nothing from the pen of journalists like Richard Hinds from the Sydney Morning Herald who seems to be obsessed with female players grunting. I believe the ATP and WTA should do something to crack down on grunting but to pretend it’s just a women’s issue is feeding into old sexist notions that women are only present on the earth for men to look at and God forbid they make unladylike noises or assert their opinion.  

The TV networks also do their best to make sure that women are never seen as equal to the men in tennis. During the Australian Open this year, Channel 7 often showed a men’s match on Hisense Arena instead of a women’s match on Rod Laver Arena (centre court). In one of these instances the match on Rod Laver was an epic which went to 10-8 in the third set between Maria Sharapova (Seeded 3) and Karin Knapp. Channel 7 did cross to the Sharapova match in the middle of the third set but for the rest of the time had shown the first set of a Wilfried Tsonga match on Hisense Arena. On a separate occasion Channel 7 televised a Gael Monfils match instead of a Victoria Azarenka match on centre court. Both of the women’s semi-finals were scheduled during the day whereas the men’s were in prime time at night. Too bad if you enjoy watching women’s tennis and are one of the millions of Australians who work during the day. You would be forgiven in assuming the women’s tennis had finished after the first week. Channel 7 almost never lets a woman commentate a men’s match but has no problem with Bruce McAvaney (who knows nothing about tennis) sit in the bunker and make asinine comments about how important it is for a player to win a game when they are 4-0 down. Thanks for that Bruce. 

When men win in straight sets, few people mind because they’ve played a whole three sets but when women win in straight sets it can look like a whitewash, the match can be short, it can look as though the loser had no fight and it can seem like ticket holders get less value for money. . 

Commentators on this issue conveniently forget that it’s not women’s fault that the tennis administrations through the ages have deemed them too weak to play five sets.  Now that women have forced tournament organisers to treat them as human beings and pay them equal prize money, sexist journalists have cried foul because women don’t work as hard for their money as the men. 

The debate about women playing five sets is brought up every time the Australian Open comes to the country. Everyone’s got an opinion but, of course, no one asks the female players whether they want to work harder for the same pay. If they don’t want to play five sets then it should not happen. Considering the sexism they have to endure day in day out we can call the extra pay they’re getting per hours worked as compensation.  Let’s not forget that the men’s smaller ATP events usually have higher prize money than the women’s WTA events. So the women have to work harder than the men to attract sponsorship dollars.

If a player is marketable, they will earn far more from their endorsements than in prize money. So they are under a lot of pressure to act according to the social norms that are forced upon all of us. Chris Evert was the original “glamour girl” in tennis and the media treated her very differently to her 80 match rival Martina Navratilova. Before one final in Florida, a paper labelled the match as “Good vs Evil”. Navratilova acknowledges that she was considered the “big muscular lesbian from a communist country” and it is common knowledge that she lost millions in endorsements when she came out of the closet in the 1980’s. 

Today, occasionally comments from the media move from simple objectification like, “glamour girl” or “Polish beauty” to more explicit sexism similar to Navratilova’s era. After the 2013 Wimbleon final, Marion Bartoli was told she was “never going to be a looker” during a radio rant by BBC commentator, John Inverdale. While Bartoli had to move on with her life and try to negotiate her way through these offensive statements, Inverdale went on to commentate the men’s final for the BBC the very next day. 

How this obsession with beauty translates into income is revealed by the difference in endorsements for Sharapova and Serena Williams. Although Williams is the better player and earns more in prize money, the white skinned, blonde Russian, Sharapova earned $10 million more than Williams last financial year.  In 2012-2013 Williams earned $8.5 million in prize money and $12 million in endorsements whereas Sharapova earned $6 million in prizemoney and $23 million in endorsements. 

Through the stories of Navratilova, Bartoli, Williams or through their own experiences, sportswomen learn very quickly to look and behaving a certain way to win sponsorship. This means wearing very short skirts, make up, jewellery; anything impractical and prohibitive to playing tennis to their full potential and doing everything they can to be physically attractive. Or even posing nude as Agnieszka Radwanska did for ESPN Magazine.

Maria Sharapova has been the highest paid sportswoman in the world for the last nine years. This is incredible and shows the impact of Billy Jean King and the WTA founders threatening to boycott one tournament 41 years ago. It was brave but it was also a simple gesture that could be emulated if there are other female athletes willing to organise and fight for what they deserve. Although tennis has come so much further than every other sport, when you look closely at women’s tennis today, the contrast from the men’s game is stark. The sexism in tennis today is more subtle than it used to be Or we are desensitised to it because we face it every day, everywhere  – through unequal pay at work, objectification of women’s bodies in pop culture and every time we play or watch other women’s sport. Regardless of how subtle the sexism in tennis is, it will still take enormous bravery to speak out against it. So that the female players are not in isolation when they do so they need to maintain solidarity and keep organising. Lessons we can take into every aspect of life, even if we’re not great sportswomen ourselves.

Corporate Greed Is Chewing Up The Olympics

If there was a competition for corporate grubbiness ruining sporting events, the Olympics would take gold every time.

This was never so apparent than during this year’s London Olympics. Even the most nationalistic, idealistic Olympics spiriteers couldn’t help but be disappointed when the IOC went all fun police on London butchers making sausages into the shape of the Olympic rings. Some East Londoners were equally as unimpressed when they came home to find that their national guard had set up missiles on the roof of their apartment buildings aimed at the Olympic village to protect it from terrorists.

In Australia, the free to air Channel 9 coverage was causing sports lovers to vent their frustrations on social media. Unless Aussies had Foxtel we were left watching Channel 9’s Olympics swimming championships and having to endure Carl Stefanovic in between events (and the people in London with missiles on their rooves thought they had it bad).

The sponsors with their Gestapo style control of branding, the UK Government with their missiles and the media with their dodgy TV rights deals are all major players in the business of greedily profiting from the Olympics. But any story about corporate greed and the Olympic Games has to start at the very top of its empire, with the International Olympic Committee. 

The IOC are the guardians of Olympism. Despite what it sounds like Olympism is not discrimination against Olympic medallists. Rather, it’s the brand that’s exclusively owned and controlled by the IOC which is used to generate revenue to help fund Olympic Games.

The IOC has 106 members who decide on who gets to host each Olympics and other major decisions of the organisation. IOC members include aristocrats, CEO’s, sports officials, Olympians and at least 10 royals who are all rubber stamped onto the committee by the 15 member executive board.

Members are not elected by anyone in their own country and as a result there is nothing democratic about the IOC and it is accountable to no one. Often member seats stay in the same family for decades. Like the Grimaldis of Monaco who have been members for 3 generations or the Guells from Spain who kept their seat in the family for 63 years. And it’s no wonder that IOC members participate in nepotism wherever they can. Although members don’t get a salary, the perks of being an IOC member are lavish. They get travel allowances for their annual meetings, are flown first class and stay in only the best hotels. During each Olympics they are chauffeured around in limos on roads sectioned off for the “Olympic family” and are given the very best seats to any Olympic event they wish. Members used to receive bribes in the form of cash, expensive gifts or holidays or other favours from aspiring host nations but this has decreased in recent years after an investigation into bribery rocked the IOC in 1999.

However, the IOC is far more than just a vehicle for wealthy dignitaries to swan around the world getting wined and dined. It owns a very valuable brand which it sells off to the highest bidders each four year cycle.  It’s estimated that leading up to London 2012, the IOC generated about $3.9 billion for its TV rights and $1billion in sponsorship revenue. While the Olympic rules get stricter each year for athletes, spectators and locals who have the misfortune of living near the Olympic village, the IOC’s high morals don’t extend to the sponsors it chooses.

This year, amongst the main sponsors for the Olympics were McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Dow, Visa, General Electric and BP.

Coca-Cola has been associated with the Olympics since 1928 and McDonalds since 1976. In the lead up to London Jacques Rogge the IOC president was quoted as saying, "Both companies bring forward the spirit of the Olympic Games through creative and engaging global programs that promote physical activity and the values that the Olympic Games are all about."  I don’t know about you, but for me, nothing displays the Olympic spirit like the 1500 seat McDonalds that was erected inside the Olympic village serving Big Macs to 55 000 customers a day while the Olympics were on. Maybe, when using the motto, “Faster, higher, stronger” the IOC should clarify that they are referring to its spectators’ blood pressure. 

Coca-Cola and McDonalds aren’t the only companies in the line-up that the IOC should have shunned if they had any morals at all. Dow Chemical is still being blamed for not cleaning up the mess it created after a gas leak in Bhopal in India in 1984.

And, to top it all off, the IOC allowed BP, notorious for being responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill just two years ago, to be their official sustainability partner. BP managed to use its Olympics ads to jump eight points in the brand perception ratings in the US. Protesters in London saw this hypocrisy and splashed a series of BP Olympics billboards with paint that made them look like they were covered in oil.

The IOC behaves very much like a corporation itself and goes to great lengths to ensure it makes huge profits and that its “Olympic family” - its members and associates are well looked after. And they don’t let a few ethically unsound sponsors get in the way of this. Nor do they mind that, despite promising the host nation a boost to local jobs, the economy and sports facilities, the Olympics often ends up leaving a black hole in the economy, thousands of displaced residents and overbuilding.

The real cost of this year’s Olympics to British tax payers was 9.3 billion pounds. This blew out from original government estimates of 2.5 billion pounds. And all while the country was in the midst of recession and austerity. The UK government, under obligation from the IOC, passed laws to create a tax haven for all the Olympics global sponsors which ensured they didn’t have to pay any tax on salaries or profits generated during the Olympics. Thankfully, after an online petition collected 225 000 signatures, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Visa, and the other big sponsors pledged that they would pay tax on their Olympics profits at the full UK Government rate.

London was not alone in forking out big for its Olympics. To host the Olympics in 2004, it is estimated that Athens spent over $15 billion and in 2008 China spent $42 billion. While the host nations scrounge around for tax dollars to pay off their Olympics debts, Jacques Rogge boasted to Reuters this year that since 2001 the IOC’s reserves have grown from $105 million to $558 million. 

Much of the IOC’s healthy bank balance is contributed to its every increasing TV rights deals. For us in Australia this meant that Nine and Foxtel paid about $128 million to the International Olympic Committee for the rights to screen the 2010 Winter Olympics and the London Games. As part of the deal Channel 9 weren’t allowed to show any different Olympic coverage on its digital only channels. In contrast, Foxtel were able to show eight channels. The other networks had to abide by the 3 x 3 x 3 rule between 16 July and 15 August. They were only allowed to show three minutes of Olympic footage in a program separated by three hours, three times a day and within this they couldn’t show any more than 30 seconds of an event. Nor could any footage be used more than 48 hours after an event had occurred or before Nine or Foxtel had shown it. 

While the TV networks were limiting our viewing pleasure, the print media were joining them in a take no prisoners competition to create the most sensational stories of the games to sell more papers. During the lull in pre-Games stories, the Herald Sun ran a series of photos of Liesel Jones in her togs beside an article describing her as out of shape. Implying that an extremely fit athlete is fat is incredible dangerous because it adds to the continual bombardment of sexist messages and in turn worsens body image issues amongst women.

That’s not to say that, by criticising Leisel Jones, the Australian media’s nationalism is fading. When the 16 year old Chinese swimmer, Ye Shiwen, swam faster than Ryan Lochte (the male winner) in the last 50m freestyle leg of the 400m individual medley and won two gold medals, the media latched on to speculation that she was a drugs cheat. Ye Shiwen rightly pointed out that swimmers from other countries don’t receive the same negative media. When Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics, no one alleged drug use (even though it turned out that Phelps was a pot head). Most explanations thrown around for Phelps’ achievements were his size 14 feet, his long, thin torso, height and large armspan and proportionally short legs.  This was a similar story when Ian Thorpe was Australia’s golden child a few years earlier. According to her parents, Ye Shiwen also has very large hands and feet and has had the added advantage of being in an elite state run swimming program since she was 6. There are elements of racism and sexism in this story but that goes unnoticed by the mainstream media outlets that cover the games.

You might think that the Brits had it a little better than us this year because, while they couldn’t escape their reactionary mainstream media, it would have been easier for them to go and watch the games live since it was being held in their own backyard. But although local London workers paid for most of the Olympics via their taxes and by vacating their homes for construction of the Olympics venues, most were only able to afford to watch the Opening Ceremony on TV. All the good seats are given away free to Olympics administrators and their VIP mates, heads of state, European royals, diplomats, heads of corporate sponsors and other high government functionaries and the rest of the tickets were on sale $600 each.  Let’s hope after all their sacrifice, the BBC didn’t rub it in their faces by getting some rich pomp like Eddie Macguire to commentate. Although I’m sure they would have.

Not everyone just puts up and shuts up with these sordid Olympics manoeuvrings. On the day after the opening ceremony in London 400 people rallied against the corporatisation of the Olympics. A spokesperson from the group calling itself the Official Protesters of the Olympic Games told reporters, “We're not opposed to the sports events, and we're all in favour of having a big party – but only if everyone's invited.“  It’s no wonder some people felt like this. Unfortunately, as capitalism grows older and corporations invade every aspect of our lives, sports are just another commodity to be exploited for profit. And with the IOC at the helm, it looks like things will only get worse for anyone who simply wants to enjoy the Olympic Games as a global celebration of human athletic achievement.

This is an edited extract of a speech I gave to Socialist Alternative in November 2012.

Female Olympians still sit at the back of the (Air)bus

The 2012 London Olympics will be the first time in history that women have been allowed to compete in every sport at the Games. Despite this milestone, all is not equal on a modern female Olympian’s trip to London.

If a female athlete overcomes all the inequalities in funding, resources, media and coaching and qualifies for the games, she will be lucky to get a seat on the flight to London which is as good as the men’s. This week, Fairfax reporter Sam Lane broke a story criticising decisions that forced the Australian women’s basketball team to fly economy to London while their male counterparts flew business class. Even though the women’s team is ranked higher than the men’s.

Fairfax printing an article calling out anyone on sexism in sport is a little like Ricky Nixon giving Grant Hackett relationship advice. Fairfax’s unequal reporting of men’s and women’s sport is undeniably sexist and causes far more problems for women sports people across Australia than the Olympics flights incident. Nevertheless it is good that Lane broke this story and that commentators around the country are finally criticising one aspect of sexism in sport.

Basketball Australia quickly pointed out that the women’s basketball team has received more funding than the men in some Olympic years but nevertheless has ordered a review of its policies and seems genuinely keen to ensure that male and female Olympic teams are treated equitably.

But arriving in London female athletes are expected to take another back seat – in the Opening Ceremony behind a man carrying the Olympic flag. This has been the case in 18 of the last 21 Olympics but some athletes are calling for the ratio to be evened up. Natalie Cook, gold medallist and five-time Olympian announced in an interview about the Olympics this week that it was about time for a woman to carry the flag. The misogynists could control themselves no longer. Cook has been called a “whinger” by sports writer Todd Balym and according to Lindsay Gaze, father of former flag-bearer Andrew Gaze, Cook should definitely not be allowed to carry the flag now that she has spoken out. He told the Herald Sun, “I don't think her characteristics or qualities are typical with those of the past.” Apparently pointing out sexism is not an Olympic quality. Father of the modern Olympics and critic of female participation in sport, Pierre de Coubertin, must be looking up from his grave and nodding with approval at Gaze’s comments.

The flag-bearing role in the opening ceremony is usually given to one of the athletes who has competed in the most Olympics. This has been used as a merit-based argument for giving the flag to another male athlete this year. Given that female athletes are often at child-bearing age, their Olympics careers have a tendency to be derailed. This, plus the many other barriers facing female athletes should mean that longevity in the Olympic team is not the only factor in the decision as to who carries the flag. There are many women who deserve to walk out the front of a group of super fit people carrying a symbol of colonisation and Aboriginal repression as much as the men.

No doubt that once the female athletes start competing they will be faced with a barrage of comments about their “hotness”, and be derogatorily called “girls” as opposed to “women”. Just another Olympics in the life of a female athlete.

Let the games begin.

First posted on the Socialist Alternative website.

Confronting homophobia in tennis

The best tennis player who ever lived has given the gay marriage campaign a serve over the last few months. According to 62 grand slam title winner Margaret Court, gays need to go. Or at least be turned straight. Even fellow sports legend Warnie, who is annoyed at cyclists, has the sense not to suggest we turn all the bikes into cars. But with God on her side, the tennis player turned Christian preacher Reverend Court believes anything’s possible. And the idea of gay marriage, well that “violates their very own God given nature of what is right and what is wrong”.

The organisers of Rainbow Flags Over Margaret Court Arena disagree. They have launched a Facebook site to encourage tennis fans to “inundate Margaret Court Arena with rainbow flags during the Australian Open” in response to Court’s comments.

I went to Margaret Court Arena to show my support for the campaign on Day 4 of the Open but unfortunately there were no rainbow flags in sight. A competition for the most racist behaviour by someone in a Southern Cross onesie was being hotly contested, but no rainbows. This was probably because it costs at least $30 to go to the Open (the most expensive protest I’ve ever attended) and you can’t exactly just drop down to the local IGA and pick up a rainbow flag on your way to the tennis. Despite the limited presence in the stands, the campaign has received enormous media attention and provided an important organising space for people who support the issue.

The group has some powerful allies joining them in the media spotlight. Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, two of the greatest ever tennis players and longtime activists for gay and lesbian rights have spoken out against Court since her bigotry made the papers during the ALP conference debate in December last year. Navratilova told tennischannel.com at the time, "Her myopic view is truly frightening as well as damaging to the thousands of children already living in same-gender families.”

Ironically, Navratilova was invited to participate in a legends doubles match on Margaret Court Arena on the middle Sunday of the Open this year. She played the match but wore a rainbow ribbon on her sleeve. A media snub was carried out against the star, with Channel 7 showing no images of Navratilova, only images of the opposing team in their brief crosses to the game.

Navratilova and King have been gay rights campaigners for decades and groundbreakers in professional sport – which is one of the most homophobic arenas on earth. The segregation of males and females in pretty much every sport highlights difference between the genders and helps shape gender stereotypes: that women are fragile and meek and consequently female athletes can only be appreciated for their sex appeal, whereas men are strong and violent and should be appreciated for their skill level.

Failing to conform to these norms can be damaging to players as sports administrators and sponsors continue to subscribe to the erroneous notion that sex sells sport. Navratilova and King publically announced their sexuality in the early 1980s and lost millions in sponsorship as a result. Ever since, they have been heroes of the gay and lesbian community, paving the way for a stream of high profile lesbian players – such as Amelie Mauresmo, Gigi Fernández, Lisa Raymond and Renee Stubbs – to publically disclose their sexuality.

This year at the Australian Open, 18 year old player Laura Robson carried on their legacy by wearing a rainbow hair band for her match on Margaret Court Arena on Day 1. When asked why it was worth being involved in the controversy, Robson explained, “I believe in equal rights for everyone – that is why I wore it.” Robson played an important role in the campaign by being the only current player courageous enough to support the campaign publically.

No high profile male tennis players have been willing to stick their necks out for the cause. And despite Navratilova and King’s work in the field of sport, most sports have very few “out” professional athletes. The largest football code in Australia, AFL, has none. Sport often reflects the values within our society. It shows how entrenched homophobia is in our society and how far there is to go.

On the other hand sport actually helps shape homophobic ideas in society by giving justification for these inequalities. Margaret Court can use sport as a platform to promote her homophobic beliefs because her tennis achievements have given her a high-standing in the community. Precisely because of this it is important for her beliefs to be challenged in the sporting arena.

Tennis has made more ground in the area of gay and lesbian rights than many other sports. The players, fans and supporters of equality are right to do whatever is in our power to return Court’s serve and protect that legacy.

This article was first posted at the Socialist Alternative website.

Putting the layers on lingerie football

Australia has its first lingerie football star, Chloe Butler. For the former AIS runner it’s cause for celebration. She plays tackle football in front of stadiums full of fans – something which young girls in Townsville where she grew up could only dream of while watching Jonathan Thurston or Matt Bowen rip up the field for the Cowboys. And she gets more endorsements than she did playing for the ACT Brumbies during the Australian rugby season.

However, there is one catch. As the name of the league suggests, Butler is forced to play tackle gridiron in her underwear to be subjected to sexist leering no matter how hard she runs, catches or tackles her heart out for her team, the Los Angeles Temptation.

When the Lingerie Football League was established by Mitch Mortaza in 2009, it was not part of some patriarchal crusade to oppress women.

Here is Mortaza’s account of how he dreamed up the Lingerie Bowl and then the Lingerie League after watching an NFL match,
“Even though there were great musical performances at halftime, there seemed to be a mass exodus of people at halftime leaving their very expensive seats within the stadium…Obviously, those people were also leaving their TV sets. Now how can we capture this audience that is leaving their TV sets on television’s biggest viewing day? That is how the Lingerie Bowl was born. Because of the viewership and commercial success of the previous Lingerie Bowls, we thought we should consider launching more of a year-round model”.

Mortaza believed that there were opportunities to make money out of advertising if he could get more people to watch the half time entertainment at the Super Bowl and that was how lingerie sports came about.

When the world is organised in a way where money and profit matters most, it makes sense that a small few make money while larger sections of people in society end up being collateral. Like Jessica Hopkins, a Lingerie Football League player for Seattle who has publicly expressed her feelings about having to wear her underwear to play football, “It’s not fair but we all know sex sells, I'd much prefer to have my skin covered when playing tackle football on hard astro turf, but the lingerie/sexy aspect of our game is what gets people interested.”

Ok, but gets who interested in what? In a study at the University of Minnesota, researchers found that the core fan base of women’s sports – women and older men are offended by hypersexualised images of female athletes and although younger men in the study saw the images as “hot” their interest in women’s sport didn’t increase. The researchers argue that all that sex sells is sex, not women’s sport. Mary Jo Kane who was involved in the study argues that this “sex sells” approach, “reassures (especially male) fans, corporate sponsors and TV audiences that females can engage in highly competitive sports while retaining a nonthreatening femininity”.

Of course sexism is rife in sporting circles around the world, and lingerie football is just the latest in a long line of barriers women face in a quest to be recognized for their talents. In Australia just 4% of TV sport broadcasting is dedicated to women; the average income for a professional netballer is $5000 compared with $180 000 for AFL players and this is for two sports which both have roughly the same number of participants in Australia – around half a million.

The segregation of males and females in pretty much every sport highlights difference between the genders and helps shape gender stereotypes – that men are strong, violent and physically superior and should be appreciated for their skill level, whereas women are fragile and meek and consequently female athletes can only be appreciated for their sex appeal.

As children we learn that girls who play a variety of sports well are “tomboys” - that this is abnormal and instead, girls should aspire to be feminine and that means playing a girl’s sport like netball or Barbies or netball.

On the other hand, to be masculine is to be sporty and males who don’t conform to this stereotype, who are not good at sports are labelled as, you guessed it, girls.

Netball Australia’s recent media campaign released for the World Championships was called “Facets of a Gem” and featured pictures of the players glammed up and text which said, “Off the court, they're full-time students, professionals, entrepreneurs, daughters, friends, wives and girlfriends". Picture an ad for the AFL featuring Barry Hall in a tuxedo with the words, “off the field he’s a boyfriend, an uncle, a son, a friend and he loves gardening” and you see gender stereotypes being reinforced in Netball Australia’s campaign.

We’re bombarded with sexist messages like this from a very young age, leading us to believe that women’s inferiority is natural. Rarely do we hear about the evidence showing that in endurance sports, women can outperform men.

Eileen McDonagh and Laura Pappano have recently published a book titled "Playing with the Boys”. In it they argue that gender separation in sports will never provide equality for women. To bolster their argument they list countless examples of women competing with men and outperforming them. Annika Sorenstam competed in a PGA Tour event in 2003 and outperformed dozens of the male pro-golfers in the tournament. The authors of the book argue that women’s greater percentage of body fat can be an advantage in extreme temperatures. They also point to a 1996 study which showed that equally trained males and females performed identically over a 42 kilometre run but women outperformed men over 90 kilometres.

Generally scientists point to testosterone to explain the superiority of males’ physical performances, but some do admit that the largest influence on the differences between men’s and women’s sporting abilities are still societal. Studies show that girls are coached differently – corrected less and overlooked as children, not to mention the lower participation rates due to pressures on women to conform to the aforementioned stereotypes.

Between football cheerleaders, strippers at AFL club parties and the abnormally high numbers of sexual assault allegations against football players, you could safely claim that the sports domain is one of the most sexist sections of society today. It reflects the sexism in broader society on the one hand and on the other hand sport actually helps shape sexist ideas in society by giving justification for these inequalities.

Precisely because sport is such a charged and visible arena for sexism it can be an important platform to challenge these types of oppression.

In 1973 Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis battle of the sexes in front of a massive audience which was a symbolic victory for women in earning respect for not only women’s physical abilities but also against the commonly held idea at the time that women didn’t have the nerves to cope with high pressure situations like men did. In that same year Billie Jean King and the women’s players union she helped create threatened to strike during the US Open and subsequently won equal pay for women at the US Open. Today, tennis is one of the only sports in the world with equal pay for women at its major events the Australian, US and French Opens.

In the hope of expanding their ability to profit by objectifying women’s bodies, Mortaza’s company has recently established the Lingerie Basketball League which is taking off in leaps and bounds in the US. I shudder to think about how far the lingerie sports leagues can spread. At some point the players involved have to take a stand. Instead of obediently donning their pants and bras week after week, they can fight, just like Billie Jean King and others did in a way that changed women’s tennis forever. They can be part of making history - break down stereotypes and inspire other exploited sections of society to do the same.

In the mean time, the rest of us who aren’t built like avatars but who are exploited and oppressed, need to keep resisting so that when the time comes for athletes to take a stand, they are able to find support and ultimately win.

Supporting the Players in AFL Pay Negotiations

They’re seemingly undeserving – overpaid young men with reputations as misogynist boozers who need a pay increase about as much as Ricky Nixon needs a job at Melbourne Girls’ Grammar. As a result, footballers fighting for higher pay can struggle to evoke sympathy from even those who would miss their mother’s funeral to link arms on a picket line.

However AFL players do deserve our support in their Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations. They might not care for our health the way nurses do, or build our bridges like construction workers, or educate us like teachers. But they are similarly exploited, for entertainment, instead of something more tangible. And their working conditions are often grim, just like the rest of us.

The stereotype about high earning, fast living footballers does not accord with the reality for most players. The majority come from working class backgrounds; pay to train outside of school for years on end in the hope of getting drafted. If they do get a place in the AFL, only a few will earn enough to sustain them after retirement. In fact only a tiny 25 players earned more than $500 000 last year, while the rookies on the minimum wage took home only a $49 400 base payment plus $2800 per match.

The mean wage of an AFL player is around $180 000 and the average playing career lasts three years. Do the math and you’ll see that $540 000 is not enough to set you up for life.

The occupational health and safety risks of their profession are high - it is certain that they will suffer an injury at work and this often cuts short their careers. For those lucky enough to avoid injury, retirement by 35 is the norm, most leaving with no prospect of earning income from the skills they’ve spent all their lives developing.

Given all the facts, it’s hardly too much for the AFL Players’ Association (AFLPA) to ask for football players to be better looked after.

Their claim in this year’s negotiation includes player pensions to kick in 10 years after retirement until the age of 65 which would be the first of its kind in Australia. They also want a comprehensive post-career compensation scheme for injuries which is pertinent considering the issues with long-term brain damage seen increasingly in footballers here and in the United States.

Altogether the claim submitted by the players is for 25 to 27 per cent of the game’s overall turnover to be allocated to players over the three years of the deal. This is $200 million more than the AFL's offer.

The percentage requested by the AFLPA is reasonable, and, if anything, a relative pay cut from 2001, given the players received 27.5 per cent of overall turnover that year. If the AFL could afford it then, they can certainly afford it now with the $1.25 billion record TV rights deal signed, sealed and delivered.

But CEO, Andrew Demetriou (who earned a cool $2.2 million in 2010) is refusing to budge on the AFL’s offer, pitting fans against the players with assertions that ticket prices will have to rise to pay for any such increase in wages. Although I wasn’t invited to the meetings, I’m pretty sure Demetriou didn’t make the same arguments while receiving a 275 per cent increase in his pay since 2004.

Similarly, none of the AFL’s 11 executives who were paid a total of $6.2 million last year publicly announced their concern about rising ticket prices as a result of their exorbitant packages.

If Demetriou looked outside Australia he may be grateful that the AFL players have such low expectations. European soccer players’ wages constitute around 65 per cent of their game’s total revenue and similar figures can be seen in the US.

Within Australian sport, the story is very different. Athletes here receive a much smaller slice of the sports pie - generally 18 to 30 per cent of total revenue for team sports. Luckily Bonds have helped put food on the table for Stephanie Rice as swimmers receive only around 10 per cent of the total revenue that sport brings in. The athletes in more penurious sports will be watching the AFL dispute closely in the hope that the AFLPA’s campaign manages to raise the bar to help improve this situation. Solidarity has already come by way of Paul Marsh from the Australian Cricket Players’ Association who has publically contradicted some of Demetriou’s arguments. Let’s hope other athletes show their support as the campaign progresses.

For now, the AFLPA have all but ruled out strike action but have taken the unusual step of mobilizing their members for an all-in meeting to show that they serious about taking on AFL management. And, in what must be immensely annoying for the unprepossessing Demetriou, some of the most popular players in the League have come out publicly swinging, a move bound to rally public support. Dale Thomas, arguably the League’s most entertaining player told Nova radio, “The players and the players association have decided that if we have to play hard ball, we will.” In the same interview he also managed to put some important pressure on the AFLPA, “We won't be bullied around, I think in the past we've been bullied around.”

If they do play hard ball, the AFL players will need their fans support and may even call upon it. And if this happens, anyone who supports workers rights should support the footballers in this campaign.

Players take tackling homophobia into their own hands

Hanging up the footy books for the rainbow flag isn’t the norm in 2011 but Ben Cohen isn’t your normal international rugby player. He's proud of the fact that he’s a popular figure in the gay community all over the world even though he’s openly heterosexual. He also takes homophobia very seriously, so seriously in fact that he retired from his English rugby club earlier this month to spend more time concentrating on his anti-bullying foundation, StandUp. Less than a week later he jumped on a plane and embarked on an ‘Acceptance Tour’ of the US in which he has visited four cities over the last two weeks to speak at events hosted by gay and gay-friendly rugby clubs.

Cohen’s tour is a response to the overwhelming number of suicides linked to homophobic bullying in the US over the last few years including five young men in one week in October 2010. He believes that a lot of work needs to be done to stop young people taking their own lives.

Cohen expresses his opinion with eloquence on his website, “As athletes, it is not enough just to have strong bodies. We must have strong characters and use our voices to support those who need and deserve it.”

Contrast this with the damaging ramblings of Jason Akermanis on the Today Show and in the Herald Sun in May last year. The AFL and the football community rallied against Akermanis’ comments, embarrassed that the player chosen to write an article in the paper about International Day Against Homophobia could stuff it up so badly. The AFL has since managed to rid itself of Akermanis entirely but since the incident has done very little to promote an anti-homophobia message throughout the league.

The AFL's CEO Andrew Demetriou is extremely proud of himself for leading the only sporting body to update its racial and religious vilification code to "prohibit vilification on the basis of...sexual orientation, preference or identity" and uses this to combat accusations that the AFL has been dragging its feet on the issue of homophobia. However the changes to the code were done in 2009 and Akermanis clearly didn’t get the memo.

Ben Cohen shows up sporting organisations all over the world for how little they are doing to address the issue. If one rugby player can launch a foundation with international notoriety and conduct a successful speaking tour of the US, then imagine what a wealthy and powerful organisation like the AFL could do in Australia.

As is often the case, the union (in this case the AFL Players' Association) is currently taking the lead on this issue within the AFL. Unions have a strong history of fighting homophobia - even the Builders Labourers Federation have taken industrial action against homophobia.

The ALFPA have organised for three AFL players - Nick Duigan (Carlton), Daniel Jackson (Richmond) and Bob Murphy (Western Bulldogs) to link up with Headspace to promote the issue. Amongst their various media appearances, the players participated in a panel discussion on Joy FM, Melbourne’s gay and lesbian radio station. Jackson also spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about his desire to see a diversity round in the AFL. Let’s hope he continues to ignore AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou who told 3AW his views on having such a round, “We don't have a round for cancer, we don't have a round for homelessness but we do things. We know very well what our views are about discrimination…Next we'll be sorting out the pygmies in Tanzania." It seems Demetriou studied at the Akermanis school of public relations.

Demetriou’s “pygmies” comment insinuates that homophobia has little to do with AFL. However, despite Demetriou’s belief, homophobia is a major issue in sport. In Australia a 2010 study found that 40% of gays and lesbians surveyed had experienced homophobia in the sporting environment and the experiences of the respondents showed that AFL is the most homophobic football code.

In the US homophobia in sport has jumped into the spotlight this month. In addition to Ben Cohen’s tour, the US chef de mission for the 2012 Olympics, Peter Vidmar was forced to resign after it was revealed he had supported the anti-gay marriage campaign. One week later NHL ice hockey player Sean Avery publicly announced his support for the gay marriage campaign in New York.

In Australia today the political battleground over homophobia also manifests in a fight to change the Marriage Act. Although it’s hard to see Demetriou stepping off his pedestal to lead an Equal Love march down Swanston Street, let’s hope we see some of the AFL players from the AFLPA follow Cohen and Avery’s lead in extending their reach and showing their support for the same sex marriage campaign in the coming months.

ANZAC Day's Sporting Connections

“Sport is to war as pornography is to sex.” This (rather crass) statement belongs to Jonathan Haidt and although Haidt is a political psychologist in the US, you’d think for sure that he’d been in Australia for the lead up to ANZAC Day this year.

New TV ads featuring Australian netballers and footballers telling us to text our support to the troops is just the latest way that sports are being used to promote ANZAC Day. We already have the “traditional” ANZAC Day football clashes between Collingwood and Essendon in AFL and the St George Illawarra Dragons and the Sydney Roosters in NRL. Not to be out ANZACed, this year netball is promoting the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever match as its contribution. Growing up I never understood how these were “traditional” ANZAC Day matches since none of the teams were from New Zealand or Turkey and it’s certainly not like those games have been played since 1915. (As it turns out all of these “traditions” are less than 20 years old). Very strange indeed.

Even though I studied the sociology of sport at university, no one ever explained that sport and war go together, well, like porn and sex. In many societies over the course of history sport has been used as preparation for war. The Aztecs, the Kingdom of Castile in Spain and the Native Americans are just a few of the recorded cases.

Set your time travelling machine back to today and it’s not difficult to see the connections between modern sport and war. Picture rugby league teams running at one another on a field and compare it with the image of opposing armies on a battlefield. We’re told that qualities like mateship, courage, teamwork, leadership, loyalty and physical prowess are required in our athletes and our soldiers. How many times have you heard Ray Warren speak of Darren Lockyer “marshalling his troops” or the State of Origin teams “going into battle” or Jonathan Thurston "putting up a bomb"? In addition, the skills and fitness acquired through playing sports is an asset to all armies during war. Sheffield Shield cricketer Frank Lugton was killed in the First World War but his Commanding Officer said that his cricketing skills made him a fine grenade thrower.

During World War I sportsmen were a particular target for recruiters. The army set up Sportsmen’s Battalions – special units manned entirely by sportsmen. One recruitment poster appealed for sportsmen to “Join together, train together, embark together, fight together. Enlist in the sportsmen’s thousand, show the enemy what Australian sporting men can do.” Other posters called on sportsmen to enlist in the “Greater Game”.

Don’t think that this means that between world wars ANZAC Day is a time for everyone to get out and compete in your local fixture though. In many states including Victoria there are Acts which prohibit any organised sport until after midday to encourage everyone to go to ANZAC marches. The Acts also force sporting bodies to hand over profits made by any sports events on this day to the various ANZAC Trusts. These trusts fund support for returned service men and women – a job that the government should already be doing.

ANZAC Day was first celebrated in 1916 at a time when the First World War was becoming an increasingly unpopular blood bath. Since its inception the day has played a large role as a recruitment and PR exercise for the military.

Today, the ANZAC Day message promoted by politicians, the media, culture and sport is not overtly about recruitment. You will hear speeches repeating the familiar mantra, “They died for us”. Never will you hear, “They killed for us”. Killing provokes distasteful images whereas dying is much more savoury. Who is this “us” they’re dying for anyway? The troops in Afghanistan certainly aren’t there for me or the 61% of Australians who are against the war.

And when Bec Bulley from the Australian Diamonds tells us to support our troops and “let them know you’re proud of what they’re doing”, despite the fact that most Australians are against the war, no one is going to send a message saying, “I think you’re carrying out an imperialist intervention in the Middle East which will only lead to death and destruction for Afghan people. Instead, I think you should be at home with your family and friends.” For some reason, supporting our troops always means sending them off to the perils of war and never means keeping them safe at home.

In some ancient societies sport was used to decide disagreements as a substitute for war. Of course, capitalism would never allow for that today. While we live in a system where a small minority at the top of society get to send others off to kill and be killed with no consequence to themselves wars will continue. However, if the majority of the population including the workers who are most likely to become front line soldiers got to vote about how to settle disagreements, it may be a different story. Let’s hope such a world exists one day.

Violent injury: just ‘part of the game’?

‘This is a barbaric game, this game is not for the weak. You play football, you understand that.’ Former gridiron player Marshall Faulk is blunt in his assessment of the violence involved in American football.

This year, for the first time, AFL players are banned from returning to the field if they are diagnosed with a concussion. The rule was rushed in three days before the season opener and it didn’t impress players like Carlton captain Chris Judd who rebuffed, ‘You'll just never get anyone concussed anymore.’ He’s probably right – players may get concussed, but the new rule will be a disincentive for doctors to diagnose it. The rule isn’t accompanied by any guidelines for diagnosis or independent doctors’ rules to keep team physicians accountable. But nonetheless, it’s clear the AFL felt it had to do something.

News coming out of the US on the long-term effects of football head injuries is horrific. Former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest last month after he suspected he was suffering long-term brain damage. He left behind clear instructions for his brain to be donated to the NFL’s brain bank for research purposes. Duerson’s death sent shockwaves through the NFL and was a wake-up call to football codes all over the world to take brain injuries more seriously.

Unfortunately Duerson was only the latest in a long line of NFL players who have suffered from the effects of a brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The disease is caused by repetitive head trauma and displays symptoms such as depression, erratic behaviour and premature memory impairment. In 2008, Tom McHale was found dead at forty-five from a drug overdose after battling years of addiction. Before him Andre Waters and John Grimsley both died of suspected suicides. The symptoms of CTE eventually progress into full-blown dementia. It can only be diagnosed posthumously and so far, almost all NFL players examined in the NFL brain bank study at Boston University had the disease.

A separate study of retired NFL players found that 6.1% of retired players over fifty had been diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease or other memory-related disease – five times more than the general population of men over fifty.

Such controversy has meant that the NFL leads the world in rules changes to prevent head injuries. Not only do players in the NFL have to sit out the game if they are concussed but also if they have less serious head injuries and can’t pass the NFL’s health test. The NFL also provides independent neurological consultants to examine players with suspected head injuries to prevent the issues of under-diagnosis that concern Chris Judd. Some states in the US even have laws which force coaches to refer young players to a doctor if they have suspected head injuries. Recently the NFL has introduced harsher penalties for helmet-to-helmet hits.

In Australia, the AFL, ARU and NRL have made a number of rules changes to minimize head and neck injuries. Before the concussion rule, they tried the ‘head down over the ball’ rule in AFL, the spear tackle and head-butting rules in NRL, banning gang tackles and shoulder charges in rugby and tougher penalties in all codes. The AFL is the first to try the concussion rule and reduce the number of interchanges to slow the game down. Rugby codes are already discussing the concussion rule and expected to follow suit.

Adrian Anderson, the AFL’s General Manager of Football Operations, says that rules changes are working and that head and neck injuries are at the lowest on record. But after watching the five concussions or serious head blows which occurred in Round 1 and considering that at time of writing, 116 AFL players are on the injury list, I find this very hard to believe.

The truth is that football is still as violent as ever. While the rules changes are attempting to slow down the play, players are encouraged to get bigger and hit harder. It’s these big hits that get replayed and used to advertise the game, especially in rugby league.

Players do what they’re told by coaches and are under pressure to win by brute force when necessary. As a result, football continues to be extremely dangerous despite the rules changes.

According to Manly hooker Matt Ballin who suffered a concussion in his first NRL game this year, it’s all in a day’s work. ‘It’s a tough game, you’ve got to expect a few hits and injuries. It’s a contact game and you don’t want to go out and injure players but we always know it’s going to happen from time to time.’ So is it just all part of the game? Or is it possible to have a game that is both entertaining and enjoyable to play without using young people’s bodies as consumer products, to be tossed away when they are broken at the end of the season?

Sean Gregory from Time magazine thinks that ‘the boxing analogy is fitting’. Gregory’s argument is that (American) football can’t be steered off its violent course. He believes that eventually it will be up to fans and parents to decide for themselves whether football is too violent for the mainstream. They’ll have to consider whether the average 950 blows to the head that a college footballer takes in a season is a good investment in their child’s future and fun Friday night entertainment.

Players and parents who register their children with a football club generally do understand the risks, though more could be done to make the effects of brain injury explicit. In addition to this, football administrative bodies and team owners have a responsibility to look after their players.

At the moment, players’ bodies are thrown around for all their worth and then delisted when they’re not useful to win football games. Daniel Bell, who is only 25-years-old, is already seeing the effects of multiple head injuries during his years playing Australian Rules football. He is entitled to claim half of his last AFL contract salary in compensation and is doing so at the moment with the help of the Players’ Association. The amount he is claiming will be under $100 000, according to the Age.

The process for claiming compensation is strict and claims must be lodged within six months from the player’s final contract. But it’s worth noting that symptoms of CTE develop over time and can be degenerative, so players may not realize the seriousness of their injuries until it is too late.

Bell suffers memory loss, poor concentration and blurred vision. The amount he has lost by not being able to perform at his peak on the football field and in other workplaces will almost certainly be more than $100 000. In any other workplace, an injury such as this would attract higher compensation, especially if Bell suffers an ongoing problem with his work capacity. But as is so often the case in sport, players walk a fine line between being professionals and being expected to accept poor treatment because they are apparently lucky enough to be doing what they love.

According to a recent Age newspaper poll, 88% of respondents thought that AFL players who suffer severe concussion should be banned from playing the following week. Fans care about the players they watch and it looks like Gregory’s boxing analogy may be coming true. But football administration bodies can be doing much more to look after their players. A national insurance scheme that properly compensates injured players at any time their symptoms present would be a good start.

This article was first published at Overland

New cricket captain has more to do than win

We may never know whether Swisse Ultivites have side effects causing irritibility and obnoxiousness or whether Ricky Ponting was just cracking under the pressure of being a losing captain in a batting slump. Either way, the arrogance Ponting displayed over the last few years lost him and the Australian cricket team some of their biggest fans, including me.

Statistically, Ponting is possibly the greatest Australian cricketer ever – he has made the most Test runs and the most One Day International (ODI) runs of any Australian. He has the most ODI centuries of any Australian and the most ODI catches of any Australian. He is widely accepted to be the best fielder ever (perhaps second only to South African legend Jonty Rhodes). Under Ponting’s captaincy, Australia equaled the record of 16 straight Test wins. And he has won more Tests as captain than anyone, ever.

Yet the tears haven’t flowed for his resignation as they should for a cricketer with such an outstanding record. The way the Ponting led Australian team intimidated umpires by over-appealing and prolonging appeals has bought bad blood from opposing teams and fans. They maintained (and some say increased) the level of sledging on the field even after Darren Lehmann took it to its racist conclusion against Sri Lanka in 2003 and was banned for five matches. As captain, Ponting would hypocritically call foul on opposing teams for sledging or general bad sportsmanship and then allow his team to sledge and stand his ground when he knew he was out. Alan Border was quoted in the Herald Sun today saying that Ponting, “wears his heart on his sleeve”. Although Ponting was an incredibly exciting cricketer and a joy to watch, the belligerent captain hasn’t served the game well and shouldn’t have been selected for the captaincy in 2004.

To be fair, Ponting’s judgment was not always wrong. He did clearly demarcate himself from the racist outbursts of Perth cricket spectators in 2005, stating, “there’s no room in sport for racism whatsoever”. After a call from the Federation of Indian Students, Ponting shot a video expressing his opposition to the attacks on Indian students. With International cricket’s ability to rabidly breed nationalism and racism, cricketers have a responsibility to stand up to racism wherever they can have an impact. The entire team should have been a visible part of the campaign in support of the Indian students and fell short of their responsibilities.

New captain, Michael Clarke, has his work cut out - most obviously to turn around Australia’s fortunes with the bat and ball and try to re-build a young Australian team. Critics say Ponting was no tactician but Clarke should attempt to look beyond innovative field placements in his role. He should have the courage to change the polluted culture of the side. Reject the old traditions of intimidation and sledging (and beer races on board Qantas flights to London if they haven’t already) and lay the foundations for a serious cricket squad that can set the anti-racist, anti-bullying tone for junior cricketers around the country.

Gambling On Sport With Tax Payers’ Money

Despite the fallout, the “can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t run between wickets” Ashes debacle was not the worst disaster in Australian sport over the last twelve months. That title goes to the losing “one vote wonder” World Cup Soccer bid.

Unlike the soccer bid, a number of bona fide explanations can be held up for the 3-1 Ashes loss to England. These include poor scheduling resulting in an overplayed Australian outfit, a team discipline regime involving drinking with the Barmy Army in the middle of the test match, lack of money in development of state players and the normal boom slump cycle occurring after Australia’s golden era of the late nineties/early two-thousands. Quite simply put, being trounced so spectacularly on pitches that we should have had an advantage on was embarrassing and unexpected. But in terms of sporting travesties, it just doesn’t compare to recklessly pouring $45.6 million of tax payers’ money into a perilous campaign to win the favours of the notorious FIFA Executive Committee.

The FIFA bid was the brain child of Australia’s richest man, Frank Lowy. Worth a whopping $5.04 billion, Lowy is co-founder of Westfield Shopping Centres Group, a former Reserve Bank board member, founder of the Lowy Institute, chairman of The Institute for National Security Studies and chairman of Football Federation Australia. It’s a resume that lends itself to pushing two ambitious World Cup bids in the space of 12 months without a care for the millions of tax-payer dollars that would be wasted. Lowy knows that his fortune certainly wouldn’t be dented in the push. In fact, quite the opposite. If Australia won the bid, Westfield Shopping Centres would be more than happy to provide over-priced goods and services to thousands of World Cup spectators from around the globe and investors would come flooding in.

A number of exiguous explanations for the lost bid were bandied around in the post mortem commentary. Was the video presentation too childish? Maybe we should have promised to air condition Queensland? More than one commentator argued that Gillard’s accent must have grated on the FIFA Executive Committee’s ears during her introductory monologue which caused them to switch their vote! Many wanted to believe that Qatar played dirty whereas Australia’s bid was squeaky clean. The Australian bid team did nothing to quash such suggestions. In fact, Australia’s campaign was not squeaky clean and included gifts to FIFA Executive members. This is a common feature in any World Cup bid. Some are even allowed under FIFA’s rules.

FIFA’s world of ticket scandals, bribes and vote riggings are well-known thanks to the investigations of British journalist Andrew Jennings. According to Jennings, FIFA Executive Committee votes are bought and sold in deals involving hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of bribes, not to mention the cost of wining and dining the members if you want to have a chance of winning any World Cup bid or elected position. Relationships between FIFA heavies are built over decades. In 1998 Sepp Blatter’s presidential bid was financially backed by the very wealthy Mohamed Bin Hammam from Qatar. Mohamed Bin Hammam is now President of the Asian Football Confederation and played a large role in the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid.

Lowry and the FFA were perfectly happy to play this grubby game and spend millions Australian tax payer dollars as well as FFA funds. They hired lobbyists Fedor Radmann and Peter Hargitay for $1.35 million and $3.91 million respectively to mastermind the deals. According to The Age newspaper they canvassed giving Blatter’s daughter a job if the Australian bid was successful. The Aussie bid team gave FIFA Vice-President and Executive Committeee member Jack Warner’s wife a necklace worth approximately $2000. They also paid tens of thousands of dollars for Warner’s Trinidad and Tobago under-20 team to travel to Cyprus. If the bid was successful they promised to give $6.5 million in taxpayer funds to football bodies in Africa, Asia and Oceania. This may not even be the end of the dirty dealings given that The Age obtained a confidential FFA spreadsheet from 2009 which showed a $12 million variation in how the FFA internally accounted for its spending of a $45.6 million grant and what the Government was told about this spending.

“Can anybody actually think of a population on earth less deserving of the World Cup than Qatar?” tweeted Ned Boulting, journalist for The Telegraph in the UK. There are racist undertones to Boulting’s comments given that Australia’s soccer team is almost as hopeless (we’ve qualified for only three of the nineteen World Cups compared with Qatar’s none). Surely Australia is just as undeserving since we play very similar games on and off the pitch.

The bid was a disaster of epic proportions and makes the Ashes loss look almost dignified. Gambling $100 would make most Australian workers nervous. Frank Lowy, Julia Gillard and then Sports Minister Kate Ellis shamelessly gambled $45.6 million of tax payer’s hard-earned money on a campaign which was unwinnable from the start. The scary thing is that governments and national sports organisations all over the world have been doing the same thing for decades with little accountability for them or the FIFA Executive. Bidding for the beautiful game is the dirtiest game of them all.

Nixon proves AFL's got the "issues"

The release of a nude photo of St Kilda Captain, Nick Reiwoldt and two team mates helped bring in 2011 with all the class we’ve come to expect from Australian footballers. And all the sexism we’ve come to expect from those commenting on them. The 17 year old woman who released the photos accessed them while having a sexual relationship with another St Kilda player, Sam Gilbert. She was then subjected to a barrage of abuse and told by the AFL that she “has issues” (unlike Reiwoldt in whom they stated they had great faith in as an individual). Now Reiwoldt’s 47 year old manager has admitted to having inappropriate dealings with the young woman while she was holed up in a hotel room paid for by the St Kilda football club. It’s a series of events that make Sam Newman’s crass blowup doll scandal look like Disney On Ice.

Player manager, Ricky Nixon, admitted to seeing the young woman on Valentine’s Day this week and the Herald Sun claims they saw him leave the woman’s hotel at around 7.15am the following morning. The young woman alleges he also provided her with alcohol during their relationship which lasted several weeks. Nixon is player manager to three players involved in the original naked photo scandal – Reiwoldt, Nick Dal Santo and Sam Gilbert. Dal Santo was naked in a separate photo released and Sam Gilbert was the player who took the photos and had the relationship with the then 16 year old woman.

Nixon denies having sex with the teen and providing her with alcohol but admits he made a series of bad decisions by visiting the woman to try to help her. This isn’t the first spectacularly bad judgment call by Nixon. He is notorious for his rash actions which have included drink driving his Alfa Romeo into a tram on his way home from work in 2009, getting arrested for public drunkenness at the Caulfield Cup in 2002 and escorting his client Ben Cousins to Riva nightclub while Cousins was at the Tigers trying to recover from his drug addiction. He also represented Wayne Carey from the time Carey was 18 through to 2002 when news broke of Carey’s affair with his best friend’s wife.

Nixon proclaimed repeatedly on radio this morning that the teenager “needs help”. It’s Nixon who needs help and so does the game. Just at the time when the AFL should be encouraging more women to be involved in the sport to try to curb its sexism issues, the double standard applied to the young woman compared with the St Kilda players and Nixon proves that sexism is alive and well in the sport. Channel Ten has also fumbled their opportunity to contribute to a culture change by recently demoting the game’s only female commentator, Kelli Underwood, after a two year trial at the commentary desk.

The question must be asked, where are the players and members of the football community who oppose these grubby goings on? We know that not all players are misogynist, nor do all have tiny enough brains to treat a 16 year old so badly and take photos of their team mates naked. Harry O’Brien has rightly spoken out against the focus on women’s fashion at the Brownlow Medal awards night. More players need to join him in speaking out about sexism and condemning personalities like Nixon who have obviously been a toxic influence on the game’s culture and useless in mentoring young footballers to become decent and respectful human beings.