Women’s boxing: Adams’ gold of the ring packs a punch for equality

News for Friday 10 August is taken from The Guardian

When Nicola Adams first put on boxing gloves at her local gym as a tiny schoolgirl of 12, bouts between two women were banned by the British Boxing Board of Control. They were too unstable, went the reasoning, on account of their menstrual cycles, and besides no one wanted to see a pretty girl get hit.

On Thursday, 17 years later but not a great deal taller, Adams finally gave her response in the ring, emphatically defeating the Chinese world champion flyweight Ren Cancan to become the first woman ever to claim an Olympic gold medal in boxing.

She had only gone to the gym that day because her mother had an aerobics class and could not find any childcare.

Britain may be getting accustomed to gorging on medals, but the country’s 24th gold, courtesy of Adams, is more significant than most.

When the IOC ruled in 2009 that women’s boxing would be in the London Games, 11 years after the BBBC was obliged to lift its unequal ban, the former world champion Amir Khan said he was against the move, saying: “When you get hit it can be very painful.”

On Thursday he was ringside, paying lavish tributes, with everyone else, to the skill and dexterity of the female fighters.

Once London’s festival of sport has come to its conclusion, there is little question women’s boxing will be reckoned one of its great successes. It is not merely the ferociously supportive crowds the sport has drawn – even if the most vocal bellows have been reserved for Ireland’s Katie Taylor, who took lightweight gold shortly after Adams’s bout – but the respect the competitors have commanded, among boxing ingenues and experienced sports devotees alike.

As recently as March this year, the International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA) was threatening to force women boxers at the Games to compete while wearing skirts “to help distinguish them from the men”.

Immediately before Adams’s bout, Ching-Kuo Wu, the AIBA president, said the Rio Games would almost certainly see the number of divisions at which women could compete at the Games double from three to six. London’s women fighters, he said, were “heroes in boxing history”.

As Adams stood on the podium to claim her gold, four days into women’s Olympic boxing history, the exclusion before now of women from the sport already seemed as ridiculous as the bar, until 1984, on their running the marathon. Did she think she had answered the sceptics, she was asked later?

“It’s not me that’s answered them, it’s the crowds. They have been cheering as much for us as they have for the lads.”

If she could inspire young girls to think boxing was also open to them, she said, “that’s amazing”. She added: “That’s what I want to see. More girls getting into boxing and participating.”

The martial metaphors, already tiring 13 days into these Games, are inevitably over-exercised when it comes to women’s boxing, but in Adams’s case, talk of punching through glass ceilings and battling her way out of adversity seem particularly apt.

After her first bout at 13, she did not compete again outside her Leeds gym for four years thanks to a lack of opponents. There were no women’s clubs when she started, and when two teenage girls tried to compete in a bout in 1997, Lennox Lewis called it a freak show; the Daily Mail, inevitably, a “bout of madness”.

She was first introduced to the sport by her boxing-mad father, Samuel, watching the Rumble in the Jungle and other legendary bouts on VCR and becoming entranced by Ali.

She didn’t really stop to think that girls didn’t box. “I was so young I wasn’t really into the politics,” she said after her bout. “All I saw was Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, and I just wanted to do what they did.”

She turned pro at 18, became the first woman boxer to represent England, and went on to win two world championship silver medals and become European champion in 2011.

It was the more impressive given a catastrophic injury three years ago, when she fell down stairs while walking to the ring before a bout, and cracked her vertebra. She went ahead with the bout, and won, but was so badly injured she was confined to bed for three months and unable to fight for a year.

“When I had my injury it was really hard to think I was ever going to get up to boxing speed, to be able to go as quickly as I did before. But I have improved on how I did before, and come back stronger.” How did she account for that? A shrug. “I was always determined that I would succeed.”

Described by her mother, Dee, as gentle and a “mummy’s girl”, Adams is just 5ft 5in, and, to fight in the 51kg category, weighs less than eight stone. She is also an irrepressible smiler, beaming as she entered the arena to huge cheers from the crowd.

At their most recent encounter, in the world championships in May, she was defeated by Ren, but her victoryon Thursday was emphatic, at one point knocking her to the floor, though her Chinese opponent was quickly back on her feet.

The Brits, waving union flags, chanted her name, and in perhaps the greatest mark of respect, the Irish crowd, expectant for Taylor’s bout immediately after hers, even lent her a chorus of “Ole! Ole! Ole! Ole!” in the second round. As the final bell sounded she was still throwing punches, a tiny ball of energy.

Adams’s hopes that more women will go into boxing will almost certainly be helped by her success at the Games – and the visibility of Britain’s other competitors at these Olympics, Natasha Jonas and Savannah Marshall. British women received £1m of funding in 2009 and Adams had a generous living allowance and the full support of the boxing set-up at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. Her success is likely to mean that funding is increased.

She said: “There’s an option of going professional, but I’m happy with the amateur game. Rio is definitely an option for me. It would be nice to see their opening ceremony.” Besides, she said with a smile, “We haven’t yet had a double Olympic champion in boxing for the females. There’s definitely some motivation there.”

Related articles

• Historic first ever Olympic gold for British boxer (itv.com)
• Nicola ‘Babyface’ Adams makes history with boxing gold medal (standard.co.uk)
• GB’s Adams secures historic gold (bbc.co.uk)

Larisa Latynina: An unbeaten Olympian for 48 years – until now

Larissa Latynina, Russian-Ukrainian and former Soviet gymnast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

News for Sunday 29 July is taken from The Independent

As the legendary gymnast waits to see if her record will fall this time, she tells Emily Dugan about her life, struggle … and Nadia Comaneci

For 48 years Larisa Latynina has been untouchable. The former Soviet gymnast’s record haul of 18 Olympic medals put her far above the reach of any other Olympian.

But this week the 77-year-old is prepared to make way for a new all-time top medallist. Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who already has 16 medals, 14 of them gold, is expected to trump the record she has held on to for nearly half a century.

Pundits believe Phelps should do that comfortably by the middle of this week, because despite competition for gold from his team-mate Ryan Lochte, Phelps only needs to win a medal in three of his seven events during these Games to better Latynina’s record.

She is in London for the next fortnight as the International Gymnastics Federation’s guest of honour, and will be at the poolside for Phelps’s potential record-breaking swim. “I’ll be happy for him if he does it, because he deserves it,” she says, adding an aside that gives a glimpse of the old Cold War rivalries their countries held: “The only sad part is that he’s not from Russia.”

Latynina met Phelps for the first time earlier this year in New York, and proudly shows off a photo in which she is giving a Russian doll to the grinning swimmer. “He impressed me a lot because he was very smiley and charming. I think he’ll get it and I’ll cheer him on,” she says, pausing to consider further. “Of course, if [the Russian swimmer] Evgeny Korotyshkin and Phelps compete, then I’m sorry Michael, but I’ll cheer for Korotyshkin.”

She asked the International Olympic Committee if she could be the one to present his record-breaking medal, but was told it was unlikely. “It would be a real pleasure, really great to give him his 19th medal. I suggested it to the IOC, but I don’t think they want me to. The IOC has got many honoured people and everybody wants to do that.”

Born in 1934 in the Black Sea port of Kherson, when Ukraine was still under Soviet control, Latynina went on to make her Olympic debut in Melbourne in 1956, when she took home four gold medals, one silver and one bronze. The winning streak continued, with another six medals in Rome in 1960 and in Tokyo in 1964. She still wears her Olympic past with pride and is dressed in the Russian team tracksuit.

Latynina heralded an era of Soviet dominance in sport at a time when athletic prowess was used as a propaganda tool for the country’s Communist ideology. These days, her family’s lifestyle is more typical of a capitalist modern Russian elite. Ordinarily she lives on an estate in the countryside outside Moscow, but I meet her at her daughter Tatyana’s mansion in Sevenoaks, Kent. Tatyana moved to Britain two years ago with her husband, the Russian billionaire restaurateur Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco, to be closer to their son, at school nearby.

Sitting in her daughter’s opulent water garden – stocked with fat koi and tended by hired hands – she has come a long way from the struggle of her childhood. Resistance to Stalin’s collective farming had left widespread famine in Ukraine and things became even tougher when her father was killed at Stalingrad in 1943. Athletic success was one of the few ways to rise in society, and her mother did two jobs to scrape together the money to send her daughter to choreography school, to study ballet. It was only after the school closed that Latynina discovered gymnastics and transferred to Kiev for specialist training.

She was so dedicated to her sport that she even competed at the 1958 World Championships in Moscow while four months pregnant. She took home five gold medals. “I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even say to my coach, Alexander Mishakov, that I was pregnant,” she says. “Even now when I see those medals, I think they’re hers, too. When journalists used to come to our house and she was little, she’d take out the medals and say, ‘These are the ones I won with Mummy.’ “

Her success, she says, is partly down to the fact that she was always ruthlessly competitive. This was even evident as a small child running races in the playground. She recalls: “When I was about six, we wanted to find out who was the fastest runner, so the boys drew a finishing line on the pavement in chalk. We started to run and I realised about two seconds before the finish that I wasn’t going to be first. I decided to jump and dive forward with my hands outstretched, so they crossed the line first. There was glass on the pavement and I cut my hands to shreds,” she says, gesturing to a deep scar still on her finger. “My finger was bleeding, but I was jumping around shouting, ‘My hands were first, I’ve won, I’ve won.’ “

Despite giving Phelps her blessing, her competitive spirit has not gone away. In 1992, there was an award for the greatest gymnast of the 20th century, which went to the Romanian Nadia Comaneci, who in 1976 became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 out of 10 in an Olympic event.

The rejection still smarts. “When they were deciding who it should go to, Comaneci had a very good PR. She only had four gold medals. Gymnastics is a very subjective sport. If a runner runs fastest, he gets the best time – that’s objective, but in gymnastics it’s just decided by judges. To be honest I was upset. These were the awards for the best gymnast and I was surprised because I was expecting it. The results were unfair, but at the time of the award I congratulated her.”

Now, though, she wants to let the medals do the talking. Pointing to a London 2012 brochure which has a picture of her at the top of a list of the biggest medal winners of all time, Latynina says mischievously: “See, there’s no Comaneci there.”

Related articles

• Nick Zaccardi, Gennady Fyodorov: With her all-time record set to fall, little-known Latynina looks back (sportsillustrated.cnn.com)
• Phelps having more fun this time around at Olympics (nypost.com)

London Games are first to include women from every country

Olympic Games Message (Photo credit: chooyutshing)

News for Friday 27 July is taken from Women’s Views on News

In the London 2012 Games there will be, for the first time in the history of the Olympics, a female athlete sent from every participant nation.

The last few nations to abstain from sending sportswomen were Qatar, Brunei and, the most publicised of the three, Saudi Arabia.

As has been pointed out on WVoN, however, the matter of Olympic equality is all but resolved. The IOC’s (International Olympic Committee) threat to ban Saudi Arabia from the Games entirely unless they included women has been mollified, but this does not mean that the state will now encourage women to participate, or work to diminish the stigma put upon women athletes.

Qatari swimmer Nada Arkaji has benefited from the use of Doha’s substantial sporting facilities. Qatar is seemingly now doing its utmost to include women, since establishing a Women’s National Sports Committee in 2001.

Saudi runner Sarah Attar, on the other hand, trains in California, where she lives and grew up, and covers her hair and limbs only while representing her country. She has spent only a small amount of time in Saudi Arabia.

She may be an example of an impending transitory phase in women’s sport in the country, where initial participants will hail from diasporic communities while the training infrastructure is established.

However this might be wishful thinking as there is still considerable resentment towards the idea of women’s sports within Saudi Arabia.

While the common conception is that Saudi Arabia’s reservations are down to religion, many Saudi commentators are keen to point out that it is less an issue of dogma and more so of cultural norms.

Often left unsaid by the media, the more extreme of these contentions are perhaps exemplified by Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Zuhayyan, an academic in Riyadh. His primary concern is the hymen.

“Saudi families equate a broken hymen with the loss of virginity, and a girl losing her virginity/hymen by any means other than legitimate marriage, such as participating in strenuous activity, damages the family’s honour. For this reason… saving girls’ virginity is deeply entrenched in their culture, and this tradition should be respected.”

Citing the claimes from various groups that human rights of Saudi women were being violated by their exclusion, Al-Zuhayyan offers a rebuttal.

“[The] Saudi government would not force its citizens, specifically, parents, to let their girls participate in the Olympics against their will. In fact, by doing so, it would be in clear violation of their human rights… Also, complete disregard of culture and tradition is a violation of human rights.”

He further claims that “cultural and structural conditions are not conducive for Saudi female athletes to present an impressive performance, or win an Olympic medallion,” therefore, by pressuring Saudi Arabia to include female athletes, international organisations such as the IOC are “intentionally and knowingly subjecting the entire Saudi population, particularly these female athletes and their families, to a degrading treatment in front of billions of people around the globe. This is also a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 5.”

“Thus,” he concludes, “one can easily discern that Saudi women’s participation in the Olympics is against human rights.”

Related articles

• Saudi Olympian told to ditch hijab (lfpress.com)
• Saudi Women’s Olympics Debut ‘Means Very Little’ for Gender Equality, Experts Say (usnews.com)
• Breaking the Olympic gender barrier in Muslim Qatar (cbc.ca)

Pregnant Malaysian shooter eyes Olympic gold

The Royal Artillery Barracks, where Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi will compete.

News for Wednesday 25 July is taken from BBC News

It is one of the first events of the London Olympics on Saturday morning, but the 10-metre women’s air rifle could also be among the most sensational.

Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi, a shooter from Malaysia, will compete at the Royal Artillery Barracks while eight months pregnant.

At least three expectant mothers have competed at the Olympics before, but Suryani, as she likes to be known, will easily be the most pregnant athlete to have taken part.

“Since I started shooting in 1997, I’ve been dreaming of going to the Olympics,” she said, after a morning training at Malaysia’s National Shooting Range on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

So when in January Suryani discovered that she was pregnant, her first thought was that her London ambitions were over.

But after talking to her husband and praying, she changed her mind. If “everything is in order”, she would still try, she told me.

Two days later, she qualified for the Games in the 10-metre air rifle, and has not looked back since.

Dressing ordeal

Despite an early period of morning sickness, Suryani’s now thinks that pregnancy might even give her a small advantage.

“Now I have balance at the front and the back,” she said, with a smile. “So the stability is there.”

With her stomach bulging, just getting in and out of the thick suit she uses for shooting is something of an ordeal. It is with a sigh of relief that she unbuckles her belt to allow herself to sit down and talk to me.

Not everyone in Malaysia is backing her decision to take part, but beneath the smiles, it is clear that there is steely determination to the 30-year-old naval officer.

“Some people say that I’m crazy. Some people say I’m too selfish. But I just ignore what others say. I just concentrate on what I want to do and what I dream of.”

And that dream currently involves picking up Malaysia’s first-ever gold medal at lunchtime on Saturday.

‘No kicking’

Currently ranked 47th in the world, it would be a considerable upset if Suryani did make it onto the podium. But to her credit, she already has a solid tournament record, with a gold at the Commonwealth Games in 2010, and a bronze at the Asian Games.

If she is to come out on top, she will need her unborn daughter to play her part and not kick at a crucial moment.

“On the morning of the competitions, normally, I will say to my baby, ‘Mummy’s going to compete today so I need you to calm down, and then afterwards if you want to be active and you want to kick a ball or something that’s OK!’”

Outside the indoor shooting range, JJ Raj, the secretary general of the National Shooting Association of Malaysia, and Muzli Mustakim, Suryani’s manager, joins us.

As they share a farewell drink by the swimming pool, JJ Raj says he knows that Malaysia’s prime minister will be taking a special interest in her event.

Luckily, Suryani is unflappable and shrugs it off.

If she happens to get a medal, she says she would share it with her daughter, but if not, she would settle for sharing the memories.

“When the baby is born, I will tell her you are very lucky,” she said. “You were not born yet, but you competed with me in the Olympic games.”

Related articles

• Olympics: Pregnancy No Barrier to Malaysian’s Olympic Journey (nytimes.com)
• Meet the Most Pregnant Woman to Ever Compete in the Olympics [Olympics] (jezebel.com)
• Women to Watch in London 2012: Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi (persephonemagazine.com)

Heather Watson becomes British tennis number 1

Heather Watson, aged 20

News for Tuesday 17th July was taken from The Independent

Heather Watson is set to go into the Olympics as the British No 1 and with her first WTA title under her belt. The 20-year-old who will be playing doubles but not singles at the Olympics, climbed to No 71 in the world singles rankings yesterday, just 24 hours after partnering New Zealand’s Marina Erakovic to victory in the doubles at the Bank of the West Classic at Stanford University in the US.

Watson and Erakovic, playing together for the first time, had already knocked out the No 2 and No 3 seeds before beating Vania King and Jarmila Gajdosova, the top seeds, 7-5, 7-6 in the final. “It’s such a nice feeling getting to the end of the week and being the last ones here,” Watson said.

The updated WTA rankings list sees four Britons in the top 100 for the first time for 21 years. Watson heads Anne Keothavong (No 76), Laura Robson (No 91) and Elena Baltacha (No 100). The last time Britain had four women inside the top 100 was in 1991, when Jo Durie (No 62) was joined by Sara Gomer (No 89), Sarah Loosemore (No 93) and Monique Javer (No 100).

The rankings could change again next Monday as three of the four are in action over the course of this week.

The four British women will all take part in the Olympic tournament at Wimbledon. Keothavong and Baltacha will compete in the singles and as partners in the doubles, while Watson and Robson will join forces in the doubles.

Related articles

• Four British women in top 100 for the first time in 21 years (guardian.co.uk)
• Double success for Briton Watson (bbc.co.uk)
• Heather Watson claims first WTA Tour title (itv.com)
• Elena Baltacha and Anne Keothavong to team up at London Olympics (guardian.co.uk)

London Eye: British pursuit trio delighted to claim world record under Australian noses

News for 6 April 2012 is taken from The Independent.

The British trio of Dani King, Laura Trott and Jo Rowsell produced the two fastest times in the history of women’s pursuiting to win Britain’s third gold of the World Track Championships here in Melbourne yesterday.

But while the three were all smiles bedecked with their gold medals and rainbow jerseys, the sentiment was that the champagne was very much on ice, the job only half-done with London looming.

A beaming King said: “Bring on the Olympics,” while Rowsell, bouncing back from a litany of injuries and illnesses, took things further adding “hopefully we’ll be invincible by the Olympics”.

Her wish is perfectly plausible. In what was their last competition before the Games, it would be unwise to bet against them in an event which is arguably as much about mental strength as it is about the riders’ speed.

In qualifying, the British trio had watched as the Australian team, made up of Annette Edmondson, Melissa Hoskins and Josephine Tomic, broke the initial world record with a time of 3min 17.053sec only for the British to steady their nerves and wrest the record back with their subsequent qualifying ride of 3:16.850, 10 minutes later.

Britain had broken the world record at Manchester Velodrome only wearing training kit two days before flying to Australia so were confident of going quicker in the final. But their coach, Paul Manning, winner of Olympic gold in the team pursuit in Beijing, opted to break the news to them before the final that their Aussie rivals had achieved the same feat in a recent training run.

Initially, the pep talk appeared to unsettle rather than lift his riders, who fell nearly one-and-a-half seconds behind their hosts in the final. Rather than panic, though, they stuck to Manning’s plan to ride a consistent pace for the 12-lap duration of the race.

They led when it mattered, moving ahead with three laps to go, thanks to a final 1,000 metres that was half-a-second a lap quicker than what the Australians could muster for a new world’s best of 3:15.720 nearly a second clear.

Trott, the youngest of the trio at 19, admitted afterwards she may look too diminutive to be capable of competing at the highest level but she proved arguably the strongest asset in the latter stages, putting in longer turns later on than both King and Rowsell, who hailed Trott as “awesome” afterwards.

Trott added: “We wanted to beat them on their home soil, especially before the Olympics. It puts out a strong message. They’ve got to beat us now, at our home town.”

For King, 21, and Trott it was a second world title of their brief careers while for Rowsell, it was her third, marking the end of a bad run of luck.

“I didn’t make the team last year,” she said. “I’d had glandular fever the summer before and then I had broken my elbow in the winter. These things happen in sport and I’m glad all that happened back in 2010. Now bring on the Olympics.”

Britain remain on course to add to their medal tally today courtesy of Victoria Pendleton, who looks to be riding herself into form at just the right time in the 200m sprint. Bronze looks the likeliest outcome, however, having been paired against Anna Meares in the semi-finals, Meares having set a world’s best of 10.782sec in yesterday’s qualifying.

Pendleton started the day slowly with only the fifth-quickest time in qualifying, confidently beating Yvonne Hijgenaar in round one before edging China’s Junhong Lin, who had earlier knocked out Jess Varnish, in the next round. The Olympic champion saved her best for last, however, beating France’s Virginie Cueff twice by a bike length in their best-of-three quarter-final to progress to the semi-finals of the individual sprint for a 10th straight world championship.

Related articles

• Live Sport Reports: Rowsell wants share of glory Down Under (walesonline.co.uk)
• British women take pursuit gold (bbc.co.uk)
• Joanna Rowsell Interview: London World Cup starts the Olympic momentum (velonation.com)