Anna Kessel
A note from our Women’s Sports Editor
The first time I saw Alex Rotas’s photographs of older sportswomen, my jaw dropped. I had never seen bodies in their eighties and nineties sprinting and jumping.
Societally, we hide old age away like a disease. On red carpets, women of a “certain age” wear dresses that cover their upper arms. In TV dramas, older women are restricted to a limited number of storylines – stuck at home in an armchair, debilitated. Or knitting and jolly, patient grandmothers endlessly smiling.
Rotas’s imagery disrupts the stereotypes. While in sport we idolise prodigious youth, here she is turning her camera to sprinting centenarians, women slaying at their age. She refuses to be sentimental in her portrayals, showing us gritted teeth, a triumphant roar, jubilant relief at crossing the line, and careful concentration.
At the other end of the spectrum lies the fallout of a cultural obsession with prodigious young talent. In our opening feature, American swim star Missy Franklin reflects on how she lost her self-esteem to sport, retiring at the age of 23 last year.
TWS is ageing, too. This week we celebrated six months since our launch in March. In our manifesto, we pledged to increase coverage, champion women’s voices, and campaign for change. We’ve done all of that, and more.
Over the summer, 45 per cent of the lead stories on our Sport homepage were about women’s sport – up from 2 per cent coverage across newspapers in 2013, that’s quite some trajectory. And there is appetite for it:
3.5 million page views during the football World Cup.
We wanted to help create societal change, too. Just
8 per cent of teenage girls are doing enough exercise, a stat we sought to improve through our Girls, Inspired campaign which the Government credited with influencing its School Sport and Activity Plan to close the gender gap in PE.
Closer to home, we were delighted that Telegraph staff voted TWS as the initiative they are most proud of this year. And we’ve been excited to showcase sportswomen’s voices through a stellar roster of columnists, as well as developing new women writers in our dedicated department.
Here’s to the next six months being even bigger and better, thank you for supporting us along the way.