Across the pond

Author: Adam Clayton

Danica Patrick made sporting history Sunday, April 20 by becoming the first female winner in IndyCar history by winning the Indy Japan 300, and one of the first women to win any sporting event that allows mixed gender competition.

As my distant ancestors would undoubtedly have told me, athletic competition used to be regarded as an exclusively masculine affair. Most popular sporting competitions still remain exclusively male, and most of the entertainment industries today remain dominated by male figures.

To put Danica Patrick's victory in perspective, it should be noted that the largest exporter of the very thing that makes high-speed motorsports possible - Saudi Arabia and oil - still does not allow women behind the steering wheel of a car, and its citizens are more awed by the fact she was in the car to begin with than by the victory. The title of Patrick's biography, "Crossing the Line," alludes to the problems women face in sports, and the complex history that has prevented women from achieving success in professional sports.

I must profess, however, that the personal reaction of myself and my friends to this success had absolutely no impact on my perception of sports being a male enterprise. My interest in Danica's victory was minimal, at least until I saw that she was, well ... kind of hot. The first comment of my friends upon seeing her lift the trophy was that "she's attractive," and upon reaching this consensus we academically discussed which female athlete we'd most like to wake up to in the morning, which was a decidedly harder consensus to reach.

The path of recent famous female athletes is familiar. Anna Kournikova, Mia Hamm and Maria Sharapova have all achieved sporting success, but this success often dwarfed by their commercial value as very appealing people, in several cases leading them to abandon the sport altogether. Kournikova will go down in history for her tennis ball commercials, a thin metaphor for her extremely well-rounded, non-sporting qualities. So what can we make of this? Is this merely another instance of unresolved gender inequalities from previous societies, and do women sporting stars deserve more recognition and coverage?

To grossly reflect some existing sentiments, some men might point out that Danica's success in coming first - a result of having the best fuel strategy - was achieved because women are better at rationing, and she wasn't afraid of committing to long-term decisions. In tennis, where female tennis is arguably more popular than its counterpart but still grossly unequal in terms of prize money, men's tennis has perhaps become victim of its own success - the players have simply become too good. Only in a select few sports such as figure skating can women claim absolute superiority over their male counterparts.

Personally, I'm excited by the increasing role of women in traditionally male-dominated endeavors. Italian football has already experimented with putting a woman on an all-male team, and it can only get more common. Many of the differences aren't merely physical or athletic, but stem from the fact that boys are encouraged to play sports at a young age, and it hasn't been seen as a legitimate path to success for most females. Overcoming those childhood factors and hesitancy on the behalf of parents would remove a lot of the difference in quality and allow women athletes to grow in fame and ability, leaving it even harder for us to reach academic consensus in those questions that concern us most.