From Barbara Walder in New York
What’s the upshot of the so-called Olympics of the Woman for sportswomen in the United States? Surprisingly, not much at all.
Despite Marion Jones’s five-medal star turn, these Olympics are, if anything, a setback for women's sport here. Not that there will be any lasting effect. At this point, women's sport is a cultural bedrock in this country, with an unbreakable hold that will only spread farther.
But during the Olympics and in the run-up, the ignorance and hostility of the press and the calculated commercialism of the advertisers and sports companies embedded by money-grabbing women athletes has set up some awkward role models and hurt their image, diminishing them and to some extent even degrading them. For US women at least, this Olympics did us no favours at all.
It’s the swiftness with which women's sport has taken hold here after the overwhelming success of the women athletes that has caused the problem. While Americans at the grass-roots level are fine with it, the advertising and press guys in their expensive eyries can’t keep up and resist having to try. The press just want to keep up their women’s stories quota and the others want to make as much money as they can, and none of them much care how they do it.
That’s why the United States women's football team, now that we are outgrowing gymnastics and figure skating, has been turned into rock star-like celebrity. These mostly mild, white, middle-class Americans are perfect fodder for the press. Seemingly willing to do anything for money and to go along with any presentation of themselves, however preposterous, they are easy to objectify and patronise. Any kind of commercial can be hung on them in any kind of stories written about them.
It doesn’t matter how good they actually are or how real their accomplishments, or that football has no status here, or for women, around the world. What’s important is that no matter how ridiculous the advertising campaign, or how fawning and inaccurate the story, these adult women - some married, in their 30s, with children, or all three - don’t care. Anything to be the centre of attention and make a buck. Some of them seem to be without much dignity or self-respect.
But Marion Jones is an entirely different story. Black and strutting her stuff, and demonstrably superior in an established, worldwide sport for women, she’s undeniably the real deal - a breakout star with stunning ability and charisma to match that somehow makes her dangerous.
The only American woman who could legitimately bear any kind of comparison to Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, she, too, has become an advertising star. But unlike the other women athletes, she has been mercilessly scrutinised, with her life dissected and exposed in the most personal and disgusting National Enquirer manner.
C.J. Hunter, her husband, may not seem like love’s young dream to us, but he’s her dream and she’s clearly mad about him. Instead of treating her like the 24-year-old, grown up, married, passionate, in-charge woman that she obviously is, there’s a continued effort to infantalise and diminish her into someone in thrall, Svengali-like, to her husband, coach and all the men in her life.
How could it be more evident that this powerful woman is the one in charge in all aspects of her life? Hunter is clearly an important support for her, as is her coach, but it’s the remarkable Jones who is leading the way.
It’s her very strength which might have contributed to Hunter’s doping. With his wife so lionised and Nike-ised, he might have felt the need to keep up, to get his own glory for fear of losing her. While she seems to be on a natural high - what help could she possibly need? - it’s easy to understand how she couldn’t see that it might not be the same for her husband.
But even while Jones is one woman athlete who conspicuously uses the press and money men, instead of the other way round, even she hasn’t been impoverished to their corrosive effect. She was so over-exposed before the Olympics began, done to death like the other American principals, we were exhausted with her quest before it even started.
With track of only momentary interest for most Americans, only if she starts to play basketball, her first love, hopefully in a renegade league instead of the terrible NBA women’s league, will her star continue to shine so brightly.
However, much though the Olympics mean to other women in sport around the world, with our great US sports machine in which women have an increasingly larger place, the Olympics for all sportsmen and women don’t seem to be as important any more. That’s why the embarrassing hagiography of the women’s football team and all the American Olympic women eager to strip for dirty lucre, won’t mean much in the end.
The Olympics, generally, do not seem to matter too much now and that’s a shame. The cumulative effect of years of NBC’s horrendous coverage, the puncturing of Olympic pretensions in the suddenly smaller and smaller role, has changed American sport, while the IOC and NBC have stood still.
They retrenched, in fact, while everything else has changed around them. We’ll just have to take the Olympics back if we are to save them. And who better to do the job than the Olympians themselves? Why not storm that fortress in Lausanne with the pole vaulters, javelin throwers, three-day eventers, and shot putters?
Certainly the IOC folks will turn tail soon enough and scuttle out the back. With Nike as the sponsor, reporters at the ready and Marion Jones leading the way, it's the perfect modern solution.
