IOC Women’s Conference concludes with issues of women in leadership . . . and democracy
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 18, 2012 – The fifth International Olympic Committee World Conference on Women and Sport concluded today at the elegant J.W. Marriott Hotel at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles on an upbeat note after three days of ceremonies and discussions. Beyond the summary press release, the program reached two key conclusions:
(1) That women have essentially – but not completely – reached equality on the field of play at the Olympic Games, and
(2) That the focus for the future must be on electing more women to the governing bodies of sport at the national and international level.
On the point of equality on the field of play, the point was raised repeatedly that with the inclusion of women’s boxing, all of the sports in the 2012 Olympic Games will have both male and female participation, and that women competitors will comprise about 45% of the total. This seemed to be a satisfactory ratio for most of the conference leadership, with the idea that the totals will get closer to 50/50 over time.
On the issue of including more women on commissions and executive boards of national sports federations, National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and International Federations, the progress has been much slower. A survey by Loughborough University (Great Britain) – commissioned by the I.O.C. – showed that among 110 respondent National Olympic Committees:
• An average of 26.2% of the NOC Executive Committees in Oceanian countries were women (meeting the I.O.C.’s 20% goal for 2005);
• An average of 20.5% of the NOC Executive Committees in the Americas were women (meeting the I.O.C.’s 2005 goals);
• An average of 14.1% of the NOC Executive Committees in Europe were women (below the I.O.C.’s target);
• An average of 12.6% of the NOC Executive Committees in Asia (including the Middle East), were women (below the I.O.C.’s target).
• The International Sports Federations weren’t much better, with female participation on Executive Committees totaling just 12.4% for the Winter Olympic federations, 16.6% for the Summer Olympic federations and an I.O.C.-compliant 22.6% for federations of non-Olympic sports.
The Conference’s opening ceremony at the Club Nokia on the L.A. Live “campus” struck an upbeat note, following the program theme of “Together Stronger: The Future of Sport.” The key comment came from tennis legend Billie Jean King during a short panel discussion toward the end of the ceremony when she noted that men and women must work together to achieve more inclusion and more equality across the board.
The presentations over the following days did not necessarily stick to that script.
For me, the key discussion session came on Friday, entitled “Government, Legislation and Attitudes” chaired by I.O.C. member Lassana Palenfo (Cote d’Ivoire, formerly known as the Ivory Coast). During this session, four speakers discussed how women might become more involved in sports governance: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, the great Olympic swimmer of the 1980s who is now a law professor and prime advocate for Title IX enforcement for the Women’s Sports Foundation; Marit Myrmael of Norway, a member of the I.O.C.’s Women and Sport Commission; Danish N.O.C. president Niels Nygaard and Paralympian Ann Cody, who spoke specifically to the issues faced by physically challenged athletes.
Their answers?
• For Hogshead-Makar: “it doesn’t happen without a mandate” as in Title IX.
• For Myrmael: quotas.
• For Nygaard: no quotas, but “women in executive positions must reflect the number of female athletes” according to their membership or other participatory measurement in sports in each country.
• For Cody: also a required mandate for women, as well as the disabled, in governing bodies.
It was interesting that of the four panelists – all from first-world democracies – the three women argued for laws forcing their inclusion and the one male rejected quotas.
Hogshead-Makar, one of the nation’s most emphatic proponents of Title IX’s virtues who rejects any suggestion that it has had any negative impact on men’s collegiate sports programs, showed a series of slides which demonstrated that the number of men participating in NCAA sports programs has increased at the same time that women’s participation has also zoomed (therefore, no negative impact). She was about to launch into a tirade against those who blame Title IX for killing men’s collegiate programs when she ran out of time and was cut off by Palenfo, who happens to hold a black belt in judo. But she was absolutely certain that the only way to get women into Executive Committee positions was to require it.
Myrmael prefaced her remarks by noting that she was challenged to be “provocative” and used the experience of her own country – Norway – to showcase that quotas can work. According to her presentation, the country adopted a rule requiring that public corporations must have a minimum of 40% of their boards of directors be comprised of women, and that such change must be adopted within five years. The sky didn’t fall and the results have not been calamitous as were predicted by some. Her conclusion: “We must agree today to implement a quota for tomorrow.”
These comments were not too surprising coming from women that (a) advocate for women’s rights for a living, in Hogshead-Makar, and (b) from a country with a very high degree of educational and genetic homogeneity in the population in Myrmael. The latter’s tone-deafness to the impact of diversity in culture was revealed in a question from a Portuguese delegate who asked how quotas might be proposed in a Latin country, where the cultural roles of females is different than in Scandinavia. Myrmael’s reply was that she didn’t see any reason why it should be a problem to impose quotas there, any more than in Norway.
I guess the whole world looks like Norway today.
King’s remarks at the opening ceremony become more curious, and less meaningful as the conference wound on. Her encouragement to both genders to work together gave way to calls from these speakers for laws, regulations and requirements.
Hardly a constructive way to move forward. One interesting suggestion from the floor at the end of the Government, Legislation and Attitudes session was to penalize NOCs and International Federations which do not comply with the I.O.C.’s mandates for female participation with reduced funding. This sounds tempting, but also won’t solve the problem, since in every country except the United States, the national government funds the sports programs and the I.O.C.’s Solidarity grants are usually for single-program add-ons.
More likely to succeed might be concepts modeled around aspirational ideas:
• If National Olympic Committees wish to compete in the Olympic or Olympic Winter Games, they must – at a minimum – include both men and women on their teams and must have the participation of both men and women in their Executive Committee and officer ranks. (There might have to be waivers for Winter Games participation by women due to the small number of events, but over time this would not be necessary.)
• The I.O.C. could reform itself by expansion, creating a new form of membership which would include two delegates from each National Olympic Committee – one man and one woman for a 410-person “Olympic Assembly” – which would be responsible for conducting I.O.C.-funded programming in their country to promote sports and sports leadership, and who would automatically be part of the country’s National Olympic Committee, ensuring female representation.
In reference to the American system of government, this would be the “House of Representatives” while the existing I.O.C. membership of 110 directly-selected members, NOC, IF and athlete representatives would function as the “Senate.” This larger body would create a new level of activism worldwide for the I.O.C. and have the potential to substantially increase its reach and prestige. Thanks to the careful work of current President Jacques Rogge, the I.O.C. has enough funding to do this and would be able to engage more sponsorship partners in each country through these Olympic Assembly programs.
In this way, a new generation of male and female leaders in sport will be created, instead of mandated. That really would be “Together Stronger.”
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Ready for the International Olympic Committee as the world’s “moral arbiter”?
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 15, 2012 – “One of the things we’re looking at is how you tackle some of these bigger questions in the future and how you create a framework that allows some of these bigger judgments. The whole question of corporate ethics has moved on considerably.”
That’s Shaun McCarthy, chairman of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012, in an interview with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper on February 9, noting that he will push for the International Olympic Committee to “appoint an ‘ethics champion’ for future Games.”
McCarthy’s specific comments came in the continuing row over Dow Chemical’s sponsorship of a decorative wrapping to be placed around London’s Olympic Stadium for this summer’s Olympic Games and Dow’s continuing sponsorship relationship with the International Olympic Committee. Dow is being tarred with continuing blame over the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster, even though it purchased the company actually responsible – Union Carbide – until 2001, 12 years after a settlement with the Indian government was reached.
So what if the I.O.C. created an “ethics champion”? If so, he/she/they would necessarily be obligated to look beyond just sponsorship contracts and examine – in detail – the moral aspects of all of the I.O.C.’s activities and decisions.
This week’s turn of events, especially in Rome, outline what could be at stake for the I.O.C. if it undertook such a mandate with the vigor that McCarthy suggests. Consider:
• Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti yesterday decided that the government would not provide the financial guarantees necessary for Rome’s bid for the 2020 Olympic Games to go forward, ending the bid effort. Said Monti in a statement, “Because in this critical financial situation, our country could not take any responsibility in order to guarantee any deficit in the budget as it is requested by the I.O.C. For us, the bid is too big a risk at this stage due to the fact that Italy has accepted the requested from the [European Union] to cut the deficit in the next 20 years.”
• On the same day, bid documents were presented to the I.O.C. by the cities of Baku, Doha, Istanbul, Madrid and Tokyo.
• On the same day, a short story from the Associated Press noted that both Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings had downgraded a combined 15 financial institutions in Spain in the aftermath of both firms having downgraded their ratings on Spain’s government debt. Fitch “painted a gloomy picture of Spain’s economy . . . [expecting] no growth in Spain’s gross domestic product in this year and 1% growth in 2013.” In view of this and Spain’s financial problems – similar to Italy’s – could the I.O.C. ethically allow Spain to bid for the Games, knowing the cost explosion and confused post-Games legacy issues that have plagued Athens 2004, Beijing in 2008 and even London in its run-up to 2012, where the projected government support of £2.4 billion (~ $3.8 billion U.S.) in its bid has ballooned to £9.3 billion ($14.6 billion U.S.)? No, of course not.
• By the same token, how can the I.O.C. ethically allow Japan to pour billions of yen into an Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020 when the northern end of the country will take much longer to recover from the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011? It can’t.
• How can the I.O.C. ethically allow more than 10,000 athletes to compete in summer-like heat of Doha, Qatar even if it grants the city late-summer dates of September (average daily high of 101.5 degrees F) and October (average daily high of 95.4 degrees F)? It can’t.
• How can the I.O.C. ethically allow the Games to be placed in Istanbul, in view of the continuing unrest in Syria on Turkey’s southern border, the unknown risk of uprisings throughout the Middle East and the constant undercurrent of conflict with its minority Kurdish population? It can’t.
• That leaves only Baku, Azerbaijan, a former Soviet industrial center which has suffered from severe pollution problems. Named for the fierce winds which run all year round, can the I.O.C. ethically allow outdoor competitions in such conditions? It can’t.
So the logical end of McCarthy’s suggestions is to cancel the 2020 Olympic Games. Thanks a lot.
The I.O.C. has plenty of faults; there are shelves full of books in many libraries which list the issues. But with apologies to Mr. McCarthy, this is no time for the I.O.C. to get into the business of finding fault all around the world. Let’s try to get a few more people exercising a few more times this week instead.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Maybe athletes don’t have the time to care about their sport?
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10, 2012 – In today’s Los Angeles Times, its award-winning sports columnist, Bill Plaschke, wrote an illuminating piece headlined Game is just a day at [the] office, which included this provocative comment:
The players don’t care as much as you do.
In my 30 years of covering professional sports, I’ve found barely a handful of players who care as much about winning as the most fervent of fans. We’re spoiled around here because we’ve watched Kobe Bryant hate on losing for the last 16 years, but Bryant is the exception.
Professional athletes care about their salaries. They care about their security. They care about their health. They care about the same things we care about in our jobs. They like winning and dislike losing but are generally unaffected by the daily successes or failures of their company, and really, what right do we have to demand otherwise?
Certainly, pro athletes with integrity instinctively give their best effort, are at least momentarily devastated upon suffering a tough loss, and are jubilant after a big win. But on a daily basis, the average pro athlete views the average game as another day at the office.
Plaschke’s column got me to thinking about the plight of those Olympic-sport athletes who compete in sports that are commercially viable enough to allow them to make a living, notably track & field, skiing, skating and gymnastics.
These are individual sports and these athletes certainly care – a lot – about how they do. But perhaps it is also true that they are too busy making a living to be able to care about all of the off-the-field failings of their sport’s marketing and presentation.
Track & field is as illustrative of this as any of these sports. Certainly the sport’s athletes care about how their sport is marketed and presented, but there are awfully few of them who are out in front about it. Shot putter Adam Nelson and 800-meter star Nick Symmonds come to mind, but the high-pitched discussions at last December’s USA Track & Field Convention about the ability to sell commercial “signage” space on personal uniforms point to the core of the issue.
Athletes such as American 5,000-meter ace Lauren Fleshman cared a lot about the logos-on-uniforms issue because it directly affects her ability to make a living. She certainly does not get the kind of salary that a major-league baseball, football, basketball or hockey player does and her earning ability is much more tied to performance, a la those in golf and tennis.
So unless being involved in the sport’s politics has a direct and immediate bearing on her earning power, how can she afford to get deeply involved? She and her fellow competitors can’t change their sport’s standing and schedule instantaneously; the more involved they get, the less time there is for training, traveling and competing, or getting ready to compete.
And they had better be ready, because they don’t have that many opportunities. For American sprinters, throwers and jumpers, there are a few indoor meets available, a pitiful few U.S. outdoor meets with paydays attached and then the all-important Olympic Trials in July. Distance runners are better off thanks to the busy American road-running circuit, but even there athletes have to pick their spots to ensure strong, money-earning finishes against quality competitors from Kenya, Ethiopia and elsewhere.
How can they care about what might be off in the future, when they have to earn a living now. Plaschke is right, but in the Olympic-sport context, perhaps the correct phrase might be “The players can’t care as much as we do.”
This raises the question, of course, of who should care. If athletes expect USA Track & Field to play the role that Major League Baseball, the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and the golf and tennis tour agencies do, then the national governing body has to be the one to create more opportunities for more money.
If USA Track & Field is not correctly situated, or is unable to do this, then another entity has to be formed to create a track “circuit” or “league” that can provide new possibilities. Looking at the unchecked rise in rights fees being paid for live sports programming nationwide – with more coming – has there ever been better timing to market a sport in which the United States is unquestionably the world leader?
I think not, but then again, Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) announced on January 30 that it was suspending operations for the 2012 season after three years as the second try at a high-end women’s pro soccer league in the U.S. And the American team continues to be considered as one of the best – if not the best – in the world. It won’t be easy.
There is opportunity afoot for track & field (and also, perhaps, for skiing, skating and gymnastics) in the U.S., but let’s not expect our elite athletes to be at the center of any organizing effort. Especially in this Olympic year, they don’t have time, and as Plaschke noted, we have no right to demand otherwise.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Pity the Whining College Professor: Where’s the ESPN for Physics?
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 27, 2012 – The New York Times ran a long article by author Laura Pappano a week ago entitled How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life, which included these missiles from a couple of midwestern academics:
Ohio State boasts 17 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner. But sports rule.
“It’s not, ‘Oh, yeah, Ohio State, that wonderful physics department.’ It’s football,” said Gordon Aubrecht, an Ohio State physics professor.
Last month, Ohio State hired Urban Meyer to coach football for $4 million a year plus bonuses (playing in the B.C.S. National Championship game nets him an extra $250,000; a graduation rate over 80 percent would be worth $150,000). He has personal use of a private jet.
Dr. Aubrecht says he doesn’t have enough money in his own budget to cover attendance at conferences. “From a business perspective,” he can see why Coach Meyer was hired, but he calls the package just more evidence that the “tail is wagging the dog.”
Dr. Aubrecht is not just another cranky tenured professor. Hand-wringing seems to be universal these days over big-time sports, specifically football and men’s basketball. Sounding much like his colleague, James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan and author of “Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University,” said this: “Nine of 10 people don’t understand what you are saying when you talk about research universities. But you say ‘Michigan’ and they understand those striped helmets running under the banner.”
I think Pappano has it all wrong. Aubrecht is another cranky, tenured professor. In fact, his comments epitomize the crankiness of academics whose inability to adapt to today’s culture, media environment and the vast opportunities attendant to them and dooms them to local, regional, national and international invisibility. That is, of course, outside of their own field of study and the students who are unfortunate enough to have to take their classes.
How so? Consider:
• The enormous expansion in coaching salaries, ticket prices and national television (and other media) exposure is a fairly recent phenomenon. It has been fueled in significant part by deregulation of the television industry and the enormous expansion of cable television and, now, the Internet. As long as advertisers and viewers support a channel, it will prosper. That’s what is driving increased revenues in college sports and increased spending.
• Noting this trend, universities have tried to cash in . . . some of them quite stupidly, with the resulting loss of monies that could be spent elsewhere on campus. That’s a local failure, not a failure of colleges as a whole, and chancellors and university presidents should be held accountable. But the trend is unmistakable.
Even the Ivy League, about which Pappano refers to its founding agreement that its student-athletes “enjoy the game as participants in a form of recreational competition rather than as professional performers in public spectacles,” has recently entered into an agreement with Versus (now the NBC Sports Network) to televise multiple football games each fall. The Harvard -Yale game is still a spectacle: 55,137 attended the 2011 edition in New Haven.
• If whiners like Aubrecht are unhappy with the exposure they receive, where are their plans to increase revenues? Where is his plan for a Physics Channel? Or an Ohio State academic channel? Are there not television facilities on-campus and in Columbus, Ohio?
And if his classes and field of study are so uninteresting as to draw no interest, why is he in a tenured position? Shouldn’t he be excused and replaced with lower-cost lecturers in the topic . . . if it is to be taught at Ohio State at all?
• One more aspect to consider: some of the more entrepreneurial university professors are now being expensively recruited by campuses because of the research funding they attract, often from public institutions such as the U.S. Government. How much of their income is from grants and other non-university-provided funding, and where is the public posting of their contracts? How many hours per week do they spend teaching and how many hours in for-profit research? Urban Meyer’s deal with Ohio State is quite public; what about Professor Aubrecht?
In any case, Aubrecht especially shouldn’t be complaining, but praising Ohio State’s financial approach to athletics. OSU is one of only eight schools out of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision institutions which in the 2009-10 school year (a) took in more money than they spent on intercollegiate athletics and (b) received no subsidies from their university’s general fund or student’s fees. These schools are (in alphabetical order):
• LSU
• Nebraska
• Ohio State
• Oklahoma
• Penn State
• Purdue
• Texas
• Texas A&M
These schools deserve our congratulations on being both self-sustaining, and in the case of Ohio State, giving money to the university annually in the form of scholarship funds!
The USA Today list which noted the eight schools that had surpluses without subsidies also noted another 22 schools which had a surplus from their intercollegiate athletic programs, but which received at least some money from the university or its students (alphabetically):
• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Georgia
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Kansas State
• Michigan
• Michigan State
• Oklahoma State
• Oregon
• Virginia Tech
• Washington
• West Virginia
There were a number of other schools with balanced budgets that were not noted, but it is also true that only 22 out of 228 NCAA Division I schools showed a surplus of revenues over expenses in intercollegiate athletics for the 2009-10 academic year.
In my view, that’s what should be looked at. If an intercollegiate athletics program balances its budget, or makes money, without the use of university funds, criticism rings hollow. Where university funds are used, the question of priorities is open for discussion.
But envy solves nothing. In a country where there are many all-sports networks, but also dozens of quite profitable channels given over to news, finance and even government and history (not to mention the three excellent non-profit channels of C-SPAN), the energy wasted on whining would be much better spent in developing new ways of bringing science, literature and philosophy to the public.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Meb Keflezighi atop the Pyramid of Success
Filed under: College Basketball, Olympic Games, Track & Field
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 15, 2012 – UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden created one of sport’s greatest dynasties, winning 10 NCAA championships in 12 years from 1964-75. His legacy as a teacher and winner has continued and enlarged, but it is still felt most strongly on the UCLA campus, where he coached for 27 years.
The most tangible aspect of his legacy is his “Pyramid of Success,” which he developed to encapsulate the elements he felt contributed most to what he considered success to be; a copy is posted in almost every coach’s office at UCLA today. At the very top is “Competitive Greatness,” which he defined as:
Perform at your best when your best is required. Your best is required each day.
So it was for a 5-foot, 7-inch tall, naturalized American citizen and UCLA alumnus named Meb Keflezighi, who won the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Houston last Saturday. (Photo courtesy Basil Honikman/SBPhoto Co.)
Given his achievements – Olympic silver medalist in the marathon in 2004, former American record holder in the 10,000 m, four-time NCAA champion at UCLA and more – his victory in Houston was not much of a surprise.
But it should have been.
In a time when the marathon record book is being rewritten, and Keflezighi’s then-lifetime best of 2:09:13 ranked only in a tie for 94th place on the IAAF’s year list for 2011 – five and a half minutes behind new world-record holder Patrick Makau of Kenya’s 2:03:38 – he confidently finished 22 seconds ahead of Ryan Hall (who ran 2:04:48 in Boston in 2011) and 39 seconds in front of Abdi Abdirahman (2:08:56 in 2008).
Moreover, Keflezighi’s 2:09:08 – a very modest time that would have placed him 90th on the IAAF’s 2011 world list – was a new lifetime best.
His win was no fluke. As Amy Shipley of the Washington Post wrote of Keflezighi and women’s winner Shalane Flanagan:
The pair ultimately took charge in two professionally executed, respectably paced, coolly run races that rewarded the athletes that pushed hard from the start and left no doubt about who deserved tickets to this summer’s London Olympic Games.
That bodes well for Keflezighi going into London, where the circumstances will be much different than the speed courses which make up many of the world’s most famous marathon routes today:
• The 2012 Olympic Marathon route will be a four-lap race on a course considerably different from the annual London Marathon, even though both finish in central London. Tactics will be at a premium rather than speed.
• Unlike the World Marathon Majors races, there will be no pacesetters; the Olympians themselves will have to set the pace. That leads to all kinds of unpredictabilities in the race, a plus for tacticians like Keflezighi.
• Perhaps most important are the limits on national participation. Unlike the world’s other big marathons, the Olympic race will be limited to three per country. So only three Kenyans will be in the field, a considerable advantage for those from other nations since Kenya accounted for 25 of the top 26 places on the IAAF’s 2011 world list. And there will be only three Ethiopians in the field, which will also include contenders from Bahrain, Brazil, Eritrea (Keflezighi’s birth country), Japan, Morocco, Qatar and a few others.
All of these elements open the door for Keflezighi and coach Bob Larsen (also his coach at UCLA) and his teammates Hall and Abdirahman. Happily, no one gets a medal for just running fast at the Olympics. You get a medal for finishing in the top three.
Competition is the essence of the Olympic Games, just as it was for Wooden. His teams always seemed to play their best in the biggest games; perhaps his most astounding record was not the 88 straight games his teams won in the early 1970s, but the 38 straight NCAA Tournament games that his Bruins won between 1964-74. That’s performing under pressure.
For Keflezighi, he will train and plan with care and if he feels fit on August 12, no one will be all that surprised if he finishes in the medals once again. Because, as they say at another kind of track, he’s a race horse and not a show horse.
Just the kind Coach Wooden appreciated most.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
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