LETTING DOWN SPORTING STARS
Heroines ‘get a raw deal from patronising media’
THEY MAY BE athletes who have been at the top of their game, but despite their fame and bankability Yorkshire’s Jessica Ennis-Hill and Nicola Adams may have fallen at the first hurdle.
They and other sportswomen are undermined by condescending media perceptions of what is “acceptable” for female competitors and in some cases by an unhealthy interest in their personal lives, a university report says.
It adds that they are too often portrayed as “smiley, maternal and non-threatening”, and their sporting prowess downplayed.
Last night, the report’s author said the phenomenon could be traced back in part to the glamorous former tennis player Anna Kournikova.
The one-time world number eight, who never won a singles title, was covered “more for the way she looked than the way she played”, said researcher Dr Katherine Dashper.
Her report for Leeds Beckett University suggests that reporters today who do not want to be accused of sexism are erring instead by not covering female sports – especially those they do not understand.
She said the prowess of successful female athletes was being undermined by stories which questioned their performance, the level of their competition and the value of their sport.
Ms Ennis-Hill is singled out in the report, with her retirement last year described by some commentators as the result of her “‘failure’ to win gold”.
Dr Dashper also said the Sheffield heptathlete had been the victim of sexism by the male-dominated sports media, with references to her body “in objectifying ways”.
Ms Adams, the first female boxer to break through into the mainstream media, has also been the victim of demeaning reporting with her first-round bye at last year’s Olympics leading some to “undermine her achievement by questioning the level of competition within women’s boxing”.
The Leeds flyweight, who earned the epithet “the babyface assassin” in some quarters, got off more lightly than some, “because male sports journalists are comfortable with boxing”, Dr Dashper said. In contrast, Charlotte Dujardin, the most successful British dressage rider of all time, who won Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016, had been the victim of the media’s ignorance of her sport.
“The lack of knowledge of dressage by sports journalists was evident in the frequent factual errors in stories about Dujardin, and in the mocking tone of some stories,” said Dr Dashper, who went on to suggest that some reporters were less interested in her performance than in her “long-suffering” fiancé holding up a sign from the crowd proposing marriage.
She said: “Female athleticism continues to be framed as less important, exciting and worthy than men’s – for example, by consistently using the prefix ‘women’s’.”
But the study found attitudes towards women competing in more traditionally masculine sports were changing.
Dr Dashper said that since Ms Kournikova’s retirement there had been “a real kind of awareness not to sexualize female athletes”.
Female athleticism continues to be framed as less important.
Leeds Beckett University researcher Katherine Dashper.
JUST LIKE the end-ofyear sports awards at their Sheffield school when Jessica Ennis upstaged Joe Root, history has now repeated itself.
As Jessica Ennis-Hill, the now-retired golden girl of British athletics, was winning the coveted lifetime achievement award at the BBC Sports Personality of Year celebration, Root and England’s cricketers were surrendering the Ashes so tamely in Australia.
These are testing times for Root. No one expected his team so be so comprehensively outplayed in all four disciplines – batting, bowling fielding and captaincy.
If he’s to avoid the humiliation of his bedraggled side suffering a 5-0 whitewash, he – and his teammates – need to draw strength from the character shown by those sporting role models, like Ennis-Hill, who dug deep when confronted by adversity. For, unless they do, Test cricket – already under threat from the Twenty20 format – will find itself even more marginalised.