Keeping Score

So when is it the right time in your life to pose nude?

According to Olympic medalist Amanda Beard, the time was now as she explains to ESPN's Sage Steele on a video you can watch from Gene Wojciechowski's column . Wojciechowski also weighs in on Beard's decision to show all in Playboy. So what to make of all this? Is it empowering to women? Or just sad that a woman athlete has to strip down to earn some $$ because the sport she competes in can't support her financially? It's hard to listen to her tell Steele that she feels she is doing a good thing because she is showing how a body can be health and athletic. But who is looking at this naked healthy body? Beard needs to be a bit realistic about the context of Playboy.  It is what it is - don't try to cloak it as something it isn't. Most of the readers are not going to have any epiphanies about the female shape or women athletes as they flip through the pages before she's tossed into the recycling bin.

Road to Vancouver

I caught some of the U.S. women's national ice skating on Saturday. Great skaters, but all have issues, and the U.S. talent pool does seem light. Meissner squeaked out a win.

Women ski jumpers

If you have New York Times "Select" (I don't, but I have access to Lexis-Nexis) there is a piece on a discrimination complaint filed by women ski jumpers to the Olympic Committee so that they can compete in the Vancouver Olympics. It's long been a men's sport (1924), but women are still not allowed to compete in it.

Whither the "summer of women?"

Diane Pucin of the LA Times looks back to the excitement around women's sports in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and argues that it didn't quite translate to established successful professional teams in this country - a long piece that covers soccer, softball and basketball.

Ladies at the Olympics

John Crumpacker at the San Fransico Chronicle writes that it's time for the IOC to stop officially referring to women athletes as "ladies"

A bronze is still a medal

One bonus of the Olympics is it's the one time of year some sports columnists write about women's sports. Not that they are all great columns. Today there was a good one by Bob Ryan at the Boston Globe on how the U.S. women's hockey loss to Sweden (which put them in contention for the bronze) is a Catch-22 sign of progress in the sport. It can't be Canada and the U.S. teams forever - as other countries improve, it means their women's ice hockey programs are growing. A good sign for the sport.

No gold, no silver

In a big upset, the U.S.Women's ice hockey team lost to Sweden today. They will play for the bronze against whichever team wins the Canada vs. Finland match up.

Kwan and her sponsors

One of my new favorite sports blog is Sports Law Blog - they always have interesting posts. Here is one on an ESPN story about Michelle Kwan and her sponsors who built their Olympic marketing campaigns around her ... and now she's gone.

Ice time

In case you haven't noticed, the U.S.Women's Hockey team has been quietly kicking butt. They play Finland today.

And in another world of skating, I watched the silver-medal Chinese figure skating pair skate, fall and then skate again last night. This sport sometimes gets a bad rap in the sprots media for not really being a sport b/c it's judged. But watching skater Zhang Dan crash to the ice at the very beginning of their program, limp over to her coach, cry for two seconds, and then decide to somehow suck it up and find the will to skate through the whole program on a bum knee , landing all of her jumps, was pretty amazing. I'm glad I stayed up for it.

Olympics? What Olympics?

I've been so flat out with deadlines that I've barely kept pace with activities in Turin. I love watching the Olympics, but so far have only caught a few snippets here and there, including getting sucked into the youthful exurberence of snowboarder Shaun White. I also got to see speedskater Chad Hedrik win his first gold.

Snowboarders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler  raked them in today. Downhiller Lindsey Kildrow was injured in a horrific fall - there were three other crashes as well.

Here is a piece by Mechele Voepel in the Kansas City Star about the role of women at the games.

John Powers at the Boston Globe writes eloquently, as always, about Kwan's pull-out.