Even if you didn’t read my blog post yesterday about the disrespect of the 7-time medal-winning (since 2000) US women’s Olympic hockey team, you no doubt heard about it somewhere on the internet. To recap:
After the US men’s Olympic hockey team won gold, US president T***p spoke to them on the phone, inviting them to the White House, adding he thought he would also have to invite the women, lest he be impeached (for a third time).
The hockey players laughed along with T***p, joining in the mocking of their Olympic hockey teammates.
The US women’s hockey team politely declined an invitation to the White House, issued after the invitation to the men’s team.
Flavor Flav— who, among other things, is the “dedicated hype man” for US Women’s Water Polo, and now apparently, US Women’s Hockey– invited the women’s team to come to Las Vegas for a big party. He has since expanded the invitation to include all female Olympic and Paralympic medalists. You can see for yourself below:
Mr. Flav hasn’t filled out the details of the upcoming festivities, but I can imagine it will be quite the party.
However, I can’t help but think that it would be nice to come up with other ways to express our appreciation for them (and their friends and fellow athletes who also haven’t been sufficiently noticed and feted). Herewith, a few party ideas:
Special axe-throwing events for them to attend, either in person or via Zoom, where the bullseyes have been replaced by, say, images of the faces of politicians who need to learn lessons of respect.
Whose face would look perfect in the middle there? You be the judge.
2. A complimentary tour of the Hoover Dam, since they’re going to be in Las Vegas already and it’s really close. Also, my sister, niece, nephews and I really enjoyed it when we went.
The Hoover Dam is very grand and also a cool educational experience.
3. My friend James, who lives in Las Vegas and knows the local music scene very well, could show them his favorite bars and hot spots. He also has a nice dog named Baxter and I bet he would let them pet him.
This is Baxter, who is an oldie and a goodie.
4. There could be a virtual book swap where we Zoom in to present five of our favorite books from the past year for the women’s hockey team members to choose from, then mail the books to them. No doubt these players have all been busy training and haven’t had much time to catch up on their reading. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I think so.
Olde books, newe books– all books are good books…
5. Maybe we can ask those nice guys from Heated Rivalry to come to a special dinner just for them– oh, wait a minute– that one is just for me. Never mind…
Dearest readers, feel free to share your party ideas in the comments below.
This year at the Milan Olympics, the US women’s and US men’s teams both won gold medals against Canada. Yes, the men’s result was controversial, but I’m not here to talk about that. Although feel free to advocate for your team in the comments.
In this post, I come to bury the 2026 US Olympic men’s hockey team, not to praise them. Well, bury them via outing them for misogynist yucking it up with the US misogynist-in-chief, Donald Trump, who called them to:
congratulate them on their victory;
discuss travel arrangements, supposedly courtesy of the American military;
dangle the prospect of White house swag for them;
mock the US Olympic women’s hockey team, which also won their gold medal match against Canada (uncontroversially), prompting what sounded like near-universal approving laughter from the players.
[After inviting the men’s team to the White House for Tuesday night] Trump added: “I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team — you do know that.” If they weren’t invited, the president said, “I do believe I probably would be impeached, OK?”
Members of the team laughed.
Uh, hold on a minute here.
Nadine from Unsplash wants us to just stop now, for a minute. Let’s do that.
For the record, the US Women’s Olympic hockey teams have the following medal count since 2000:
2026 Milano-Cortina: Gold Medal (def. Canada 2-1, OT)
2022 Beijing: Silver Medal (lost to Canada 3-2)
2018 Pyeongchang: Gold Medal (def. Canada 3-2, SO)
2014 Sochi: Silver Medal (lost to Canada 3-2, OT)
2010 Vancouver: Silver Medal (lost to Canada 2-0)
2006 Torino: Bronze Medal (def. Finland 4-0)
2002 Salt Lake City: Silver Medal (lost to Canada 3-2)
That’s a total of 7 medals: 2 gold, 4 silver, one bronze since 2000 for the US women’s teams.
What about the US Men’s Olympic hockey teams? Here is their post-2000 medal count:
2026 (Milan-Cortina): Gold (6-0-0).
2010 (Vancouver): Silver (5-1-0)
2002 (Salt Lake City) Silver Medal
Adding it up, the men’s teams have won a total of 3 medals: one gold, two silver since 2000.
The 7-medals-vs-3-medals fact is one reason among many for the US men’s hockey team, instead of laughing along with and joining in on the sexist bashing of their fellow athletes, should instead:
Sit down and shut up.Listen for a change.Then do the right thing.
This bears repeating.
Sit down and shut up.
Listen for a change.
Then do the right thing.
Words to live by for all of us. But especially for these US male hockey players right now.
Hope you enjoyed the first half of the 2026 Olympic Games. The 2026 Paralympic Winter Games run March 6–15. I’m looking forward to them.
No this is not a rant about my provincial government and its overreach into municipal affairs, especially in ways that make it less safe for people using active transport such as walking or cycling. Sam Covered that on Monday.
It’s a rant about the fact that far too many men* assume they should be in faster swim lanes and the women** who are obviously much faster assume their place is in a slower lane.
To be clear, I don’t mean the people who miscalculate their speed and move quickly to the correct lane. I’m also not talking about the people who take advantage of empty lanes but move when faster or slower people arrive.
It’s also important to note that most public pools, at least, have signage for fast, medium, slow and leisure lanes. Many also provide instructions on which direction to swim when sharing a lane, how to pass safely, and a reminder to assess your speed against other swimmers and move up or down a lane if you are passing (or being passed) regularly.
It’s not hard to figure out whether you are where you should be, if you are willing to be honest about your abilities.
Occasionally lifeguards will even intervene to sort it out; in my training, this was considered one of the most unpleasant public relations activities because of the egos involved.
Intervention can be necessary because being in the wrong lane makes swimming more dangerous and prone to crashes as faster swimmers try to navigate around the slower ones.
At best, it sometimes minimizes conflicts between the people who are there for a steady workout and those who like to sprint past, only to stand at the end of the lane, blocking space so other swimmers can’t do efficient turns. Or those that see no need to move to a slower lane when working on drills or slower strokes.
This seems to be a common phenomenon. I see it regularly while lifeguarding or lane swimming, and it often arises as a concern in large swimming forums I belong to.
Interestingly, it is much less of an issue in swim club practices – probably because coaches are ruthless about sorting swimmers into the correct lanes. The women I know who refuse to cede the lane to slower men are almost always club swimmers.
My plea to women swimmers is to acknowledge your power and claim your lane. And to those who seem to think those swimmers don’t deserve the space: stay in your lane.
A friend posted this article about the Indian Women’s Cricket team winning the Women’s World Cup.
This AP photo of the women celebrating their World Cup win is from the India Today article linked above.
“Three years before this moment, back in October 2022, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) made a bold and unprecedented move during its 15th Apex Council meeting. They unanimously passed a resolution to introduce pay parity between India’s men’s and women’s cricketers. For the first time, the women who wore the blue jersey would receive the same match fees as their male counterparts.”
“This triumph was not accidental. It was the result of a carefully constructed ecosystem designed to elevate women’s cricket from the fringes to the forefront. The BCCI’s [Board of Control for Cricket in India] equal pay decision was only one piece of a larger puzzle: improved facilities, better coaching structures, and the advent of the Women’s Premier League (WPL), which gave Indian players consistent exposure to world-class competition. The WPL, in particular, provided an arena for rising stars to play alongside and against international icons, sharpening their skills and instilling the poise needed for high-pressure moments like a World Cup final.”
The article got me thinking about other low and middle income countries with powerhouse sports teams. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but discovered that Kenya has a national strategy and several funds (public and private sector) to support women athletes. Jamaica announced a fund to support women’s soccer earlier this year, just two years after the national team had to crowd-fund its way to the Women’s World Cup.
Most seem to rely on non-governmental funding, which is more about empowering women and girls rather than producing elite athletes. That is arguably a far more important goal. But as interest in women’s sport continues to rise around the world, I look forward to seeing other countries and corporate sponsors putting resources into equal funding for women’s sport.
I’m already a fan of the Olympics, where there are serious efforts to ensure gender parity in the competitions and on individual teams. Future games promise to be even more interesting, as the traditional dominance of countries that have (relatively) strong support for female athletes is tested.
The whole “women in men’s sports” and trans women in sports has gotten completely out of hand
A post on social media commenting negatively on a news article about a woman cyclist in Belgium who was stopped in a race because she was catching up to the men who had a 10 minute head start.
Next up, we have Trans women banned from women-only chess. Why do we even have women-only chess? Even if you accepted that women of similar size and training couldn’t compete with men in a physical activity, what is it about chess that is so physically demanding that women need their own category?
But wait, there’s more! Not to be outdone, The World Darts Federation has Banned women from women-only darts. Again, what is the inherent advantage men have over women that means they need their own special category? And why can’t trans women play with the women? What physical advantage do they have in darts?
After reading and thinking about these issues for quite a while, I remain convinced that most of the hysteria (and I have chosen that word deliberately) is because men are afraid they will be beaten by the women. And there is a long history of coming up with ridiculous reasons to keep women out. For example:
A recent episode of “We Regret to Inform You” on CBC radio was about Bobbi Briggs and Kathrine Switzer, the two women who fought to run the Boston Marathon. In addition to being a really good episode, I finally learned where the advice about not running so your uterus won’t fall out came from. It was Switzer’s doctor. For the record, Switzer ran anyway, it didn’t fall out, and she ran the Boston marathon at 70 (her ninth time).
‘As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors,’ warned Roman senator Cato in the 3rd century BCE, as women protested a law limiting their access to certain goods.
Well. The idea that improving women’s status in society is somehow a first step on the road to total female domination clearly has had quite the shelf life, hasn’t it?
Cate’s great post from a couple of weeks ago, combined with the latest over-the-top reaction to a trans athlete who hasn’t even competed since 2022 (aren’t all reactions over the top when people are complying with the rules?) led me down a rabbit hole of the harms gendered sports do more generally.
University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas competing in 2022. On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump suspended about $175 million US in funding for the university over the participation of Thomas in its swimming program back in 2022. (John Bazemore/The Associated Press)
I have written about it before, here, and about Lia Thomas and other trans athletes. As a good analyst should, I am putting my biases on the table: I have trans friends, both men and women, who have gone from being suicidal and afraid to use a public washroom or change-room, to being happy and physically active. But as Cate said, and the “punishment” of the University of Pennsylvania shows, the whole trans athlete garbage isn’t really about trans athletes, especially at the elite level.
So what if we were to fight back by refusing to play along? What if we developed more all-gender sports, like we have already done for ultimate frisbee, mixed curling and many other new team sports, and which has been the standard in equestrian sport for decades? What if we changed the rules so that sports valued artistic merit, endurance and flexibility as much as they do upper body strength? What if women could do throws in figure skating, or compete in pommel horse? What if we then changed uniform rules so that men could wear sequins and women could wear pants (or at least shorts that covered more than most of the crotch)?
China’s Sui Wenjing and Han Cong competing during the Winter Olympics at the Capital Indoor Stadium in Beijing. Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images
What if we simply stopped having men’s and women’s categories for things like shooting or fencing, where gender seems completely irrelevant? What if people like Katie Ledecky could compete against male swimmers? It is entirely possible she doesn’t know for sure just how much she is capable of because she races at different distances than men, and so outstrips many of her competitors that she may never have pushed herself to her absolute limits.
What if these rule changes led to much more equitable funding for sports traditionally segregated to women, or seen as too feminine (gymnastics, figure skating)?
There will undoubtedly be pushback, just like what we are seeing now against the LGBTQ+ community, from men who think they are losing something when women gain something. We will need to keep up the fight for fairness in sport. It’s a fight worth having for men, women, everyone.
Yesterday was National Girls and Women in Sports Day. The Women’s Sports Foundation, which sponsors, partners with and advocates for equity and inclusion in girls’ and women’s sports, had a lovely spread on their website here. And they have a fabulous logo for it, too.
National Girls and Women in Sports Day– two fuchsia rainbows upholding gender equity in sporting life.
Yesterday was also the day that President Donald Trump signed an executive order “prohibiting transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports”, according to an NBC news report.
The Trump administration’s main leverage to try to force school compliance is loss of federal funding. NPR reported that “Overwhelmingly, schools get funding from state and local sources. Federal funding usually makes up less than 10% of public school revenue, according to government statistics.” This suggests that schools may be able to refuse to submit to the administration’s anti-transgender demands without much damage to their budget.
However, one athletic governing body that seems anxious to comply with transphobic and misogynistic executive orders as soon as possible is the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association).
NCAA’s President Charlie Baker issued this statement on Trump’s executive order after a lack of response from the NCAA on demand to change its policies from advocates.
the NCAA is an organization made up of 1,100 colleges and universities in all 50 states that collectively enroll more than 530,000 student-athletes. We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions. To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.
A clearly transphobic and misogynistic standard, you mean.
The NCAA Board of Governors is reviewing the executive order and will take necessary steps to align NCAA policy in the coming days, subject to further guidance from the administration. The Association will continue to help foster welcoming environments on campuses for all student-athletes. We stand ready to assist schools as they look for ways to support any student-athletes affected by changes in the policy.
Charlie Baker, current head of the NCAA, looking chastened. But not chastened enough to stand up to anti-trans bigotry.
Maybe we shouldn’t be super-surprised at this act of contempt for women and girls in sports. After all, this is the same NCAA that has ignored, underfunded and downplayed the importance and excellence of women and girls’ sports for years. Who can forget the teeny-tiny set of weights set aside for the use of women’s college basketball teams during their tournament play? If you have forgotten, check out my blog post (complete with pictures), showing how little the NCAA cared about women’s collegiate sports until their mistreatment went viral on social media? A small victory in a large battle: NCAA women’s basketball tiny weight room gets bigger
If you’d like to make your displeasure known and perhaps offer some advice for Charlie Baker to take back to the NCAA, you can reach him at cbaker@ncaa.org
And if you’d like to support women and girls in sports, you can learn more about and support the Equity Project, run by the Women’s Sports Foundation. I’ll leave you (for now) with this information and graphic.
But we’ll be back. None of us needs to accept inequity, exclusion, endangerment, or abandonment for wanting to express ourselves through physical activity. We won’t accept it. We’ll be writing about ways some of us are working to respond, and we look forward to hearing from you as well.
I recently listened to an episode of Adam Grant’s podcast Rethinking, entitled “Life lessons from sports,” featuring Jody Avigran. Avigran is passionate, fast-talking ex-athlete and sports commentator who has a new podcast called Good Sport. This was one TED podcast boosting the signal of another.
Avrigan’s Good Sport podcast is about the deeper meaning of sports. In the Rethinking episode, he says stuff like this:
You’re telling me that the thing that is really fun to do, that like keeps me in shape, […] will also teach me like, how to be a better human and how to like trust others and how to build teams? And like is a place where I can also like, figure out all these things about the real world, which I’m gonna have to go back to anyway at some point?
I am on board with Avrigan’s idea that sports can teach us about how to be good humans, good team players, and a good supporters of others. It’s what FIFI is also about, in my view.
I also found myself interested in Avigran’s focus on not only the brilliance of top-tier athletes but also the communities that nurture athletes, the supporting role that high-impact coaches play, and those who are the keepers of team culture, which Avigran describes as the “glue guy”:
I’m very fascinated, and I like asking athletes of all stripes: who’s actually the person who, who brings you all together? Who’s actually the star in the locker room? You know, they call it “glue guy” […].
To illustrate, Avigran describes the Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslem, and Grant supplies former MBA player Shane Battier, as another example of a glue guy.
And I started thinking: Glue guy. Glue guy. Glue girl? When are these two seasoned podcasters— who are nerding out on the “life lessons” sports teach us—going to give examples of female athletes, female coaches, women’s teams, and gender (diversity) and sports? Why would a 40-minute episode on what sports teach us about ourselves and our world not reference a single person from over half that world? Did Grant or Avrigan even notice how this podcast advertising another podcast would appear so gender unaware?
I scanned the Good Sport episode titles and found one called The Past and Future of Gender in Sport. Okay, that sounds good. But, in 2023, are female athletes and women’s sports teams only mentionable in the solitary “gender in sports” episode, or can we also normalize gender inclusive examples in every episode?
I realize I am drawing conclusions about the enduring gender unawareness of sports media based on a single episode of one podcast and a quick scan of another. But if I want to learn more about glue girls in team sports (which I do), how many podcasts will I have to comb before I find that information?
@samanthabrennan has recommended to me The Gist, and I also found the Women in Sport podcast. FIFI readers, what other inclusive sports podcasts would you recommend?
Error and Update:
I apologize for including in my post an ableist expression to convey my negative view of sports podcasters who fail to include gender and gender diversity. The expression was disrespectful and has been removed. It’s an important reminder to me, as the author writing about the very topic of inclusion in the media, to be vigilant about ensuring that what we (including me) say and write in the public sphere does not exclude or diminish others.
Today I listened to Adam Grant’s Rethinking episode featuring soccer star, author, and podcaster Abby Wombach, which was brilliant and awesome and everyone should listen to it.
I once called my mother a whore. We were playing double solitaire. A game that, between the two of us at, was a full contact sport. Slapping our cards down with no mind as to whether the other person’s hand might be in the way. In this particular game, we were neck-a-neck, cards piling up in the center at the speed of light, then we were both going to the same stack with the same card and my mum’s hand was quicksilver, hitting the mark before me. You whore. I shouted loud enough for the house to hear. She laughed with gleeful satisfaction. I wasn’t even grounded. That’s how complicit we were in our intensity. Even calling her a whore was allowed. I don’t know why, but that was one of the insults au-courant between my best friend and I. We felt very dangerous and risqué when we used the word.
Now, I hate the word. I hate all its implications. Of women demeaned. Of the judgment reserved for women and never their client-suitors. So, when a Soul Cycle instructor used the word the other day in class, my whole body snapped to angry attention. Here’s the context. Into the third song of the 45-minute workout he asked, Are you all sweating like a whore in church? ‘Cause if you’re not, you should be working harder.
First, it took me a minute to figure out what the expression even meant. The word whore had sidelined my reasoning capacity. Then, as my mind picked back through the expression, it dawned on me. Oh. She’s sweating, because her work is deemed a sin according to the doctrine of the religious institution, whose pews she’s seated in. Sweating because she has too much to repent. Judgment Day is coming for her. Sweating because she’s a woman who leverages her sexuality. Sweating because the lord on high will be displeased by her presence. Maybe he will smite her.
Why (oh why) would someone use that expression in a room full of strong, modern women? A young gay man, no less. He could have substituted himself into the expression, the implications are the same. And he would, at least, have been making a joke on himself (still not a nice joke, though humor is more excusable when we make ourselves the butt of the humor). Instead, he regurgitated what was, no doubt, an expression he heard in his childhood. Perpetuating values infused with religiosity and thus with patriarchal misogyny. I’m going to hazard a guess that the largest proportion of the women spinning that day did not look to the church as their arbiter of moral values. I doubt that even the instructor looks to the church as his moral beacon. Yet, there he was quipping in support of organized religion’s apparent mandate to control women and their bodies.
Sweating bottles (I chose this image because it is beautiful, IMHO, and I wasn’t keen on putting an image of a sweating whore), by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
I contemplated speaking to him afterward. Trying to make light, yet still make clear what I’d found disturbing. I reasoned that he probably was not even aware of what he was saying, even that he might appreciate me pointing out the dissonance. Then I worried that he’d dismiss me as a cranky older woman. Then I worried that I was a cranky older woman, too easily triggered because my current life circumstance is high stress. And the result is that I have zero tolerance for any demeaning treatment of women.
What did I do? Nothing.
Except canvas various of my friends about their responses. Everyone, except me, had heard the expression before. While they all agreed it was offensive, when considered closely, they were split on whether I should have said something or not. Some agreed with my do nothing approach and others thought it was important to call such things out.
And, in case you think that calling women whores is a relic of church jokes, this happened to me and a woman friend the other day. We were out for a brisk morning walk together in a mixed-use bike-walk lane. Or so we thought. Until a cyclist zipping by said, Slut!
At first, as with the whore joke, we were both perplexed. We verified with each other that we’d heard correctly. Never mind that I was confused by the singular, when there were two of us. Was only one of us a slut? If so, which one? We deduced the angry cyclist thought we were infringing on the bike lane, after studying the available lanes more closely and noticing there was indeed a walking lane further over. I wonder if the insult applies only to women walking in bike lanes, or if it’s any woman doing an activity in an unsanctioned location. Push ups on a tennis court. Cycling in a walking lane. Is any unsanctioned activity by definition slutty? Does slut retain any sexual connotation? Or is the unsanctioned activity viewed as an indicator of loose morals? A gateway to turpitude.
What I’m sure of is that the cyclist wasn’t having a good morning.
There’s no true equivalence for whore and slut to describe a man. They are words with ugly intent. Normally I like to reclaim words and expressions and transmute them into a feminine power expression. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet with these words.
Currency, a display of wealth, and a way to store things,
Making clothing functional (such as jeweled clasps, pins, and buckles)
Symbolism (to show membership, status, political affiliation, or relationships)
Protection (in the form of amulets and magical wards), and
Artistic display (personal style, fashion, etc.)
I normally wear at least some jewelry for most of these reasons. When I exercise, I wear my fitness tracker ring (to “store” data?) and my wedding ring when I want to reduce the likelihood of being approached (a magical “protection” amulet?).
I’ve noticed that my (semi-) regular exercise has had an impact on the jewelry I wear these days: thin, flat, light rings and an equally thin, light, and short necklace that I don’t have to remove. However, I do replace big earrings with small sleeper hoops when I bike or curl or whatever. I don’t normally wear bracelets or anklets, and I have no other piercings (other than a tongue ring, which stays in).
You may have a different approach–you don’t wear jewelry of any kind, or you take take off some or all jewelry then put it back on after exercising. And, of course, it depends on the sport! But there aren’t any sporty people I know who leave on all their regular day-to-day jewelry on while exercising.
I wear some jewelry when I exercise because I like the jewelry I have and I lose what take it off. Also, the jewelry I wear allows me to exercise unimpeded. If I’m honest, I might also keep jewelry because I think it communicates that I am a recreational athlete.
My assumptions about exercise and jewelry
“A quick shot after getting wrapped for the boxing gloves, before the ring comes off and the gloves go on.” Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash
Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that exercise and jewelry do not go together, that the more competitive the athlete the less jewelry they wear. Where did this idea come from? Practically speaking, jewelry can hinder performance and even increase injury risk. But I have also assumed that “serious” athletes care more about performance than appearance.
I admit to holding the converse assumption as well: the more jewelry, the more the exerciser cares about appearances. For sale these days is a bevy of “exercise jewelry” that is advertised as waterproof, sweatproof, and non-tarnishing. But do serious exercisers really go for these? The workout jewelry and charms on Etsy are cute but not all practical for the exercise they represent.
While I do not want to police what people wear, my immediate thought about the “strong AND pretty” message of workout jewelry is that it reflects what Andi Zeisler (2016) describes as “marketplace feminism”–reducing social movements and personal empowerment to beauty and fashion items for purchase.
Challenging my assumptions
Then, recently I saw a web news article whose accompanying image made me question these above preconceptions.
I was struck by the size and amount of jewelry worn by track and field athlete Sha’Carri Richardson in recent photos on the Yahoo news site. Richardson is photographed while competing at the 2022 USATF outdoor Championships at Hayward Field wearing multiple hoop earrings, nose rings, a necklace, a bracelet, and a belly piercing with a full chain (not to mention flowing hair, false eyelashes, and long fake nails). She did not qualify at that event, but later at a different international event, wearing similar jewelry she did qualify.
Recently, jewelry wearing, jewelry design, and jewelry store ownership have all gained attention for their historical and cultural meaning and significance for African North Americans. I do not claim to know why Richardson wears what she wears, but I imagine her exercise “look” might go beyond personal beauty and fashion choices to deeper personal and cultural symbolism. A recent article on Serena Williams mentions her wearing Love earrings in her very last tennis match as a tribute to the game, and braids with beads she wore early in her career to honour African cultural traditions.
One of the only fitness activities that stereotypically show athletes with jewelry-like “accessories” in North America: yoga practice. But appropriating prayer beads is for another post. Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash
Perhaps Richardson, Williams, and other non-white athletes wear their jewelry styles precisely to challenge dominant white-centric stereotypes of competitive athletes as de-jewelled and unadorned. Their accessories lead me, us to realize there is in fact a whole world full of athletes engaging in various types of sports and exercise while wearing jewelry and other body adornments.
Old habits, but some new thinking
I probably won’t change my own minimal jewelry-wearing habits while I exercise. But, this reflection has given more insight into what drives my current jewelry-wearing choices. Some of it is fashion, but mostly it is simplicity and convenience.
It has also invited me to confront the narrow range of imagery that reinforce what is “normal” for athletes to wear (or not wear) when it comes to jewelry. I’ll think twice about my ideas about the relationship between jewelry and exercise. Some competitive athletes wear jewelry for its social and political meaning, not (or not only) to make a fashion statement.
