Like ESPN's coverage of competitive eating, showing the World Cup on BBC2 did not do the women's game any favours
Emmeline Pankhurst, Germaine Greer, Clare Balding: your struggle is far from over, if Saturday's sports coverage on TV is anything to go by. There I was, watching Nathan's Famous Hot Dog eating contest when, once the men's championship had finished and the female troughers donned the nosebag, ESPN America made a brief announcement about how it was a "world leader in sport" and switched with indecent haste back to Major League baseball.
If that is the respect world leaders show to women athletes, is it any wonder that concerned MPs were addressing the issue last week, before they found a better way to get on the BBC News Channel was to have a view about the News Of The World?
Competitive eating, according to ESPN's commentators, is "the fastest growing sport in the world", which surprised me, as I have always thought of competitive eating as less of a sport, more as something that goes on at particularly feisty barmitzvah buffets, where there is a good chance if you reach out for a chopped and fried fish ball, you will get a fork in the back of your hand. But if competitive eating has joined the sporting pantheon, the least the channel could do is give us an idea of the current standing of the women's game compared to the men's. Not that I had any particular desire to watch women in the kind of frenzied routine Joey Chestnut, the Lionel Messi of processed pork, went through to retain his title ? his fifth championship in a row.
These competitive eaters do not so much eat the hot dog as mush it up and cram it down the cakehole with their fist. It is not pretty. "Look at the bite, look at the gnawing motion," one of the commentators cooed admiringly of Chestnut's technique. "When I see Joey eating with this ferocity and this determination, I get filled with emotion. I'm more emotional than the last episode of Oprah, because this kid brings every bit of his fibre to the contest."
While I prefer a woman with a healthy appetite to one who pushes a piece of steamed fish and half a cherry tomato around her plate, I am not sure a "gnawing motion" is ever a particularly admirable quality in a woman; an old-fashioned attitude I know, which these days probably places me about one step from Bluebeard.
Joey managed 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes in the traditional 4 July contest in Coney Island, six short of his own record, and celebrated with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, the stomach medicine, and one of the sponsors of the event ? which tells you pretty well all you need to know about it. "He looks like Djokovic up there, kissing the Pepto," said the commentator. "It's not the All-England cup, but it's his best friend."
As it happens, the MPs who wrote to BBC director general Mark Thompson asking for a fair deal for women's sport on the telly, were less concerned with female participation in America's gift to the proprietary-brand indigestion remedy business than in live coverage of the women's football World Cup, which the BBC were offering as a digital option, with highlights later on BBC2. However, Britain's young ladies are apparently so unfit these days that finding the remote and pressing the red button is beyond them, so the MPs demanded that England's quarter-final against France be shown live on proper TV, and the BBC, in the current media climate where policy can be determined by anyone with a few hundred thousand followers on Twitter, of course complied.
I am not sure, though, that showing the match in full did the women's game any favours. Some of the earlier highlights packages have looked impressive, but as players in this game tired visibly in the latter stages of a match that went into extra-time, there were some horribly misplaced passes, and an awful lot of hit-and-hope football, especially from England ? not because the players were women, but because they do not have the fitness levels of full-time professionals. In the event, the women's performance mirrored that of our male internationals: failing to progress because of a couple of flaky penalty misses.
If it is indefatigability you are after, try Sky's Super League, where commentators Eddie and Stevo never tire of extending metaphors beyond breaking point. As Warrington Wolves faded after building up a 22-point lead over Huddersfield Giants, and the Giants hit back, Eddie noted, "Warrington have been throwing down the 'Come in, come in' calls to Huddersfield, and they've come through the door. The big bad wolf ? or the giant ? is knocking the door in."
"Well, will it knock the house down? That's the big question," countered Stevo, reinforcing the feeling that there are times when a well-placed famous hot dog or two would not go amiss.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/jul/10/womens-world-cup
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