Mandy Bujold and allyship with athlete mums' fight; caring about McDavid's 100-point quest
Women's sports have never been needed more, and have never been more popular, but equality for sportswomen who have children is going to take a long, long time if the fight gets diffused.
Fighting for gender equality is a team sport, and a win-win
Hot take from a dude with no interest in having a family nor in meeting requirements to box, wrestle or be shot out of a cannon: the fight for sportswomen such as the boxer Mandy Bujold to not be penalized for taking time off to have a baby seems to closely parallel the fight for universal child care in Canada. Both are worthy causes that will take much more to achieve than simply being a good idea whose time has come. Or, to use specifics, will take more than just Bujold fighting the good fight with the backing of her national federation and her nation’s Olympic committee.
Bujold, at this writing, will not be fighting in Tokyo Olympics, if indeed those go off. The IOC’s Boxing Task Force, which is 80 per cent male and does not have an Olympic women’s boxing alumnae,1 opted for “only using results from three events as its selection criteria — the 2018 and 2019 worlds and 2019 Pan American Games” to pick boxers from the Americas after an Olympic qualifier was kayoed by COVID-19. (OK, enough with the boxing puns.— Ed.) Those three events came while Bujold was pregnant before having her child in late 2018 and while she was navigating early parenthood. She is the world’s sixth-ranked amateur flyweight, so she should probably be one of the four from the Americas qualified for the Olympics, whenever and wherever they might happen.
An article on her website notes using the two 2019 meets seems curious in itself, since the events were close together and “Canada didn’t send its entire A-team” to the Pan Ams. Bujold may also far from alone in being left out in the cold. The Boxing Task Force was appointed in mid-2019 after the world governing body for amateur boxing was suspended by the IOC for not having its shit together (allegedly). The governing body has charged that plenty of younger fighters are getting jammed by the IOC’s decision halt not to fund and a find a way to hold qualifiers safely.
Remember, they do all this for the athletes.
The ‘as a guy, I have seldom thought of this before now’ deepish-dive that is more suited to the purpose of whatever this is less about the byzantine boxing politics and more about the supports athletes who are mums receive in their various sports. It is important. If physical sports have a future in the 21st century, and if it going to convince the public that they are relevant, it will need to elevate girls and women competing and having longer careers. That just seems like the reality. Building familiarity with an audience continuing to build the environment where people can compete longer and move farther and farther away from when it felt like child-raising and competing could not co-exist.
Media coverage of athlete mums is almost universally positive. Anyone who dares judges a sportswoman for her choices to play whilst parenting surely has an inside track on being that day’s main character on Twitter. Beyond that, it can be kind of catch-as-catch-can with understanding the minimum of three basic rights that need to become a universal standard in women’s pro and Olympic sports, without having to negotiate individually.
Rankings protection. It took the all-time dominant Serena Williams falling to No. 453 in the world while she was off to prompt the Women’s Tennis Association to protect the rankings of mothers returning to the tour.
Removal of fear of financial penalty. As recently as 2018, 41 per cent of athletes surveyed by espnW said their income decreased after giving birth, compared to only 16 per cent reporting an increase. There would be outrage if that percentage turned up in any professional field. It beats having 80 per cent report a decrease, but the last anyone checked, this is not a suffering competition.
Maternity leave. Thank you, Tips. The players’ association in the WNBA won “fully paid maternity leave” in the collective agreement they signed in 2020, which appears to be a first in North America.
And, hey, maybe the dudes can get paternity leave too, since fair is fair. Who would not love to see a few heads explode if an NHL player opted out of a season due to paternity leave and receive his full salary? Actually, it is surprising that neither the Arizona Coyotes nor Ottawa Senators have tried to do this in order to get to the cap floor.
Progress tends to move glacially and then rapidly, of course, and some lazy googling shows there have been plenty of positives, once the corporations that control individual Olympic sports maybe get shamed a little by a sportsswoman such as runner Alysia Montano. It seems important to be an ally, since there is a potential win-win for physical sports, female, male and coed, as they try to ward off competition caused by distraction culture and the effect that climate change is going to have on the whole Big Sport spectacle.
The reason for making the possibly lazy comparison with universal child care in Canada comes back to what Nora Loreto calls the need “to organize under a federated structure with the specific goal of bringing the promise to life.” Loreto wrote that in the context of child care, noting it took a good two decades of applied pressure in Québec before the province created $5-per-day childcare in 1997. In the lede of that column, Loreto noted that Canadian finance minister/prime minister in waiting Chrystia Freeland has guesstimated that it will take five years to bring the provinces and territories onside, even though it’s “a measure that’s as economically necessary and popular as childcare.” Five years is a long time for a young family. A baby who was born the day the federal budget was tabled might be in full-day school by the time there is national childcare, but it takes time to build something that works.2
Five years is a long time in an athlete’s life, too long for many in the Olympic sports. One theme that ran through the coverage of athlete-mums is that many had to advocate on their own when they approached sponsors about their pregnancies. It really should not have to be that way, and a good fan should want advocacy that is more “federated.” Working through the courts is a remedy, but that does not always necessarily build in a public consensus since it seems oppositional by nature, and social media-focused righteousness is bound to lose its uniqueness over time. Strength and numbers helps the powers-that-be acknowledge what’s right and popular.
Connor McDavid’s possible 100-point season?
Hockey Twitter can hot-take it out over the possibility of whether Connor McDavid can score 100 points in a COVID-compacted 56-game NHL regular season, as Wayne Gretzky believes he will. He would need 19 over the Edmonton Oilers’ last 10 games. The hat trick with an apple that McJesus put up in Winnipeg on Monday made him the fastest player to reach 80 points since Mario Lemieux in 1997.
A better question is whether, well, anyone outside of Oilers media and hockey media cares that much about it. We all should. McDavid and Leon Draisaitl making the 2021 Oilers a top-10 offensive team is probably more impressive than Gretzky and pals making the 1984 Oilers a record-setting offensive team. (And if any American media want to malign the competition McDavid is facing, well, the 1980s Smythe Division was usually weak beyond the Battle of Alberta. Cool jerseys, though.)
The rub with that is Gretzky and early-peak Lemieux bent our brains so much with their 190- and 200-point seasons during the pre-Gary Bettman, pre-neutral zone trap NHL. But yeah, feel invested, it is okay.
Lastly, but not least of all
One good explainer on lessons learned from the European Super League fiasco.
Tuesday night, the OHL Fanboys podcast (2014-19) is hosting a live reunion show on YouTube. There is a charitable tie-in and you might see a depressed guy put in a guest appearance.
Only overtly political point today: Ontario health minister Christine Elliott illustrated what I meant about a caucus running on “corporate lawyer energy.” She however-ed the preventable COVID19 death of 13-year-old Emily Victoria Viegas:
Comms people always try to teach you to pivot from an uncomfortable issue. The assumption is that you’d have enough empathy to never “pivot” from the death of a child. Let alone pivoting to “but the real story is that I work hard.”Elliott: "Emily's death is a tragedy...it is a tragic situation that she passed away." "However we all need to remember that we are working as hard as we can to bring vaccines" to hard-hit areas and building up hospital capacity, she says. #onpoli
Laura Stone @l_stone
An old friend suggested tonight that the reason I'm mad at Ford but not Trudeau is because I have a personal Liberal bias. It's good to hear from old friends. I hope I was clear, brief and polite when stating that it's because I've paid attention and know what I'm talking about.Ontario’s supply of faces to meet palms could run out in the next 10 days.
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on your screen, please stay safe, and be kind.
Aya Medany, an IOC Athletes’ Commission member from Egypt who is on the Boxing Task Force, was an Olympian in modern pentathlon.
Sorely tempted to say the legislation will need to be Conservative-proofed the way a home has to be baby proofed. Sorry/not sorry, but it’s an apt simile.