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December 2007
Photographer Tod Papageorge on "American Sports, 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam." 
Recent research: on injuries in high school sports and newspaper coverage of male and female tennis players. 
It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it is a bird, but we don't know its name. |
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SportsLetter: How did you get interested in the issue of steroids and how long have you been writing about the topic? Shaun Assael: In the mid-1990s, Vince McMahon went on trial in New York for steroid distribution. I followed that story — and did a lot of research about steroids and wrestlers and wrestlers' deaths — and that led to my second book ["Sex, Lies, and Headlocks: The Real Story of Vince McMahon and World Wrestling Entertainment," co-authored by Mike Mooneyham]. Doing the research for that book, I came across something called "The Underground Steroid Handbook," which was like the Bible for the stuff. When the BALCO scandal hit and I started covering that for ESPN, I kept looking for the larger picture of the steroid story. I kept coming back to the "Underground Steroid Handbook." That took me back to the gyms of Venice Beach in the mid to late 1970s. That's where the idea for "Steroid Nation" was born — to start there and look at how steroids spread across the country and became a cultural force. SL: This book is a sweeping overview of steroids in sports, from baseball to cycling, from the Olympic Games to pro wrestling. Did you ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of this topic? SA: Overwhelmed? No. I'm proud of the research I did and how I molded it into a book. Hopefully, the reader will appreciate that it took a lot of work to boil it down into a readable timeline. This isn't a textbook; it's a story, and I tell stories of the people involved. SL: The story of steroids in America begins in the late 1950s, when Dr. John Ziegler developed a synthetic testosterone called Dianabol. Did Ziegler ever regret unleashing steroids? SA: I think he did. He invented Dianabol out of a spirit of optimism and patriotism during the Cold War. I think he felt that this was something that was going to help the U.S. compete with the Russians. What he didn't expect was that steroids would make a migration to the West Coast in the mid-1960s and become part of the West Coast gym culture, and that bodybuilders would take them in megadoses. He was a doctor, and those megadoses both frightened and angered him. Ultimately, he became embittered. SL: You write a lot about Dan Duchaine, the co-author of the "Underground Steroid Handbook," who believed that he "could unlock human potential through chemistry." Where did Duchaine's vision go so wrong? SA: One of the things I write about in the book is that steroids are drugs that meet at the crossroad of optimism and avarice. In the early '80s, I think Duchaine saw them as a drug of optimism. The Olympics were coming to Los Angeles, and he believed steroids could turn men into supermen. AIDS was making its migration down the Pacific Coast, and he believed steroids could heal the sick. As I write in the book, he saw steroids as a drug without a constituency. Where I think he went wrong was in not understanding that steroids are like a smoldering fire: they're very hard to control. And, Duchaine couldn't control his appetite. When he decided to go to Mexico and start smuggling this stuff, that was a pretty good sign that he had decided to break with mainstream society. So, while his co-writer, Mike Zumpano, decided to join conventional society, Duchaine went further and further and further outside of the mainstream. At the end of the book, one of the things I think you see is that, while he put on a brave front, he came to regret it. That's why he is such a cautionary tale. I think Duchaine is one part of the story of steroids that opens the eyes of people who don't know a lot about the culture. I think he brings the reader into the culture in much the same way that Timothy Leary brought his followers into the drug culture. SL: In the book, you write that Dr. Don Catlin has charged that at the 1984 Los Angeles and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics Games the names of several athletes who tested positive were never revealed. Will we ever learn who those athletes were? SA: No, not unless somebody wants to come out and give us a tell-all account. The one thing about steroids is that a lot of secrets just stay that way. SL: Were those incidents a case of sport burying its head in the sand? SA: It was very much a case of self-interest. Just like baseball thought they could derive the rewards of steroids and never have to pay a price for their use, so, too, did the U.S. in the Olympics. SL: In 1988, Ben Johnson tested positive at the Seoul Olympic Games. How did that incident change the perception of steroids in sports? SA: The first thing is that it produced legitimate shock, as opposed to now, which is bored shock. The second thing is that this is a seminal moment in terms of stitching together the story of steroids. This leads to hearings in Canada, in which Johnson's coach [Charlie Francis] comes out and bares all the dirty laundry. That then leads to Congressional hearings in America, which leads to the drugs being criminalized here. And, that leads to an era of prohibition, which, as I write in the book, becomes the time when real money could be made. SL: In 1990, via the Anabolic Steroids Control Act, steroids became classified as a controlled substance. What did that change mean? How about the change in governance from the Food and Drug Administration to the Drug Enforcement Administration? SA: Whereas before steroids were being prescribed openly by doctors, with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge attitude, now they were being pushed further underground. That was one unintended side effect. The other was that, at the time, the FDA had a passionate investigator [Dennis Degan] with a massive database who, albeit single-handedly, was really going after steroids and finding local U.S. Attorneys who were willing to build cases. He could have alone seized the day. Instead, in the bureaucratic shift to the DEA, steroids became less important because, relative to heroin or class III controlled substances, the DEA kind of yawned about steroids. It wasn't a priority for the DEA, and steroids got lost in the shuffle. So, this bill, which was trying to crack down on steroid use, paradoxically expanded their use. SL: Related to that, what were the implications — short-term and long-term — of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 for the supplements industry? SA: That was a boon for the supplement industry and a disaster for the sports end of that business. The California supplements industry and the Utah herbalists were active in pushing for this, and it was a perfect storm. So, this bill came out that perhaps had good intentions: let's let vitamin stores offer people the chance to have good old-fashioned herbal remedies. The idea was supposed to be, Americans should be able to take control of their lives, and that the FDA was being too draconian about home remedies. What nobody realized was that there was this little, little loophole that would change the sports world. The language basically allowed anything that was found in nature to be put into a pill legally, and that the FDA wouldn't be able to regulate his. And so, Stan Antosh gets this idea to make something called Andro. He has a chemist help him, and Andro changes the face of the sports world. Again, in the stitching together of the book's storylines, you see that his assistant becomes the person who makes the drug that fuels the BALCO scandal. Again, follow the bouncing pill. SL: In retrospect, there were so many highly publicized blows to steroid use — laws and regulations against it, the perception that steroids caused Lyle Alzado's death — and yet the arm's race continued. Why didn't these many cautionary tales about steroids in sports resonate? SA: I think that, basically, because steroids work. That was one of the great failures of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — that the medical establishment tried to warn everyone that steroids don't work. Perhaps they are dangerous without medical care, but they darn well do work. Again, it comes back to that single theme about optimism and avarice: steroids are hard to control. That's why, at the end of the day, the reason baseball had the problems it did is that the players got too greedy. SL: When the International Olympic Committee developed the World Anti-Doping Agency, that brought widespread testing to sports. Has the testing/penalty model that has been used to police steroids in sport worked? If not, what needs to be done? SA: I'd like to think that the testing model has deterred, to a certain extent, a significant percentage of potential users. Count me naïve, but I'd like to think that people who are on the fence about this really do think twice. Why? Because the testing at the Olympic level has gotten better. You have some tests now for EPO that are pretty good, and they're trying to close the gap on HGH. Carbon isotope testing for steroids can be pretty good. And so, while anybody can potentially beat the test, to do so they're going to need some kind of boutique chemistry, and I don't know that that's for everybody. Of course, the difference between [testing at] the Olympics and pro sports is so vast that you just can't look at pro sports and feel like there's any major deterrents. My big problem with USADA [the United States Anti-Doping Agency] was that, early on, while they talked a noble mission, a lot of their early busts were just pimply kids. Their first case was a 16-year-old fencer who took her sister's attention-deficit medicine. Is that really what they're in business to deal with? Increasingly, USADA has been smart and moved away from that and toward partnerships with law enforcement. They're going with non-analytical positives, which means a whole category of cases that are based not on drug-testing, but on investigative and documentary evidence. I think that's a significant shift, and I think that's because they recognize that the testing model is subject to such criticism and flaws. SL: Can you measure the impact of steroids among high school students in America? SA: The White House this week released stats that suggest drug use among youth is down . . . Last year, among high-school seniors, the answer to the question, "Have you tried steroids once in the last month, year, or ever?" was 2.5 percent. This year, that's down to 1.5 percent. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the trend-line is going down. I think that's because peer pressure works and deterrence works and the headlines work to discourage kids. At the same time, the motivation for some to get a college scholarship is such a specific equation that they will use. When they see the ability to save $10,000 or $20,000 on a college education — there, you have a financial motive. SL: Is there a place for steroid testing in high schools? SA: That's happening in New Jersey, Florida and Texas. Texas is going to be the biggest. New Jersey is spending $100,000; Texas is spending $3 million. So, is there a place for it? I'm a little torn about this. I think that, if the idea is to keep sports clean, then maybe it's worth the investment of about $170 a test. If the idea is teenage health, maybe the better idea is to invest it in seat belt laws, because car crashes kill more kids. SL: The Mitchell Report was released yesterday. What most surprised you about the report? What do you think the impact of the report will be on MLB? What do you make of his recommendations? SA: I think it was an honest effort, and I applaud the honest effort. I thought that the strangest thing was that George Mitchell did this credible report, but if not for the cooperation of Brian McNamee and Kirk Radomski, it would have been about three-and-a-half pages. What I also didn't understand was that, after he had done all of this, he had this touchy-feely, Alan Alda moment where he basically said, "Well, we've all made mistakes. I don't want to see these guys punished." I didn't really understand that. I don't know that the players did anything to earn that reward. If they had come forward and addressed the issue — if they had said, "This is what I did and why" — and if the union didn't have this obstructionist stance and if there was a real cleansing, I could see that. I mean, I'm in favor of a general amnesty, but only as a reward for clearing the air. SL: What about the legacy of this era: Should we throw out the records? Should players like Barry Bonds be in the Hall of Fame? SA: I really don't know how to answer the record question. It's too ambiguous. What I can say is that what hurt baseball is that the players got greedy. They took these megadoses and turned themselves into freakazoid record breakers. With the Hall of Fame, that's where morality comes in. That's where we have a chance as a nation to talk about our morality. Does the Hall vote go simply by skill? In which case, perhaps Barry Bonds and some of these guys get in, provided they can demonstrate they had skills warranting it before they used. Is character an issue? If character is an issue, I think that it weighs more heavily. SL: How much blame should the media take for not reporting about steroids in baseball earlier? SA: I think there are a lot of beat writers now that are wringing their hands and feel generally bad about it. But it's hard to be a beat writer. You have to show up at the ballpark day in and day out, for season after season. And, if they didn't see the needle going in the butt, I'm not sure what exactly they were supposed to report. I'm not trying to be an apologist for my friends in the media, but I do understand how difficult the job is. I think that there're some people who probably could have tried harder. But I also think that it's an issue that demands outside investigative reporting, with people who don't have to show up in the clubhouse every day. The one thing that was paradigmatic about the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage was that you had the marriage of the sports and the news side. I think that newspapers can benefit from that more. Having said that, we shouldn't ignore some significant reporting that was being done. Buster Olney did fairly groundbreaking work in the Times as early as 2002. At ESPN, Jeff Bradley did some significant work. SL: Several journalists including Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams and Howard Bryant have written excellent books on the topic of steroids. Which books would you recommend about this issue? SA: I don't want to single anybody's book out because I'll forget somebody, but there've been some good steroid books. I think if you read my selected bibliography in "Steroid Nation," you'll see the sources that I used. I think that readers can look at this and then make their own decision about how they want to do further reading. SL: Looking into your crystal ball, where do we go from here in sports? What's the future look like? SA: I don't think, in pro sports, that you're really ever going to get to an Olympic-level testing model. The NFL does the best, and largely they do the best because they're the savviest about knowing how far to go to appear credible and still allow enough wiggle-room that those who want to use can evade. Baseball has a stronger union, and I don't know that they can ever effectively have any credible testing as long as Don Fehr runs the union. What do I think about the future? I think there should at least be a discussion about whether steroids, in some form, should be legalized in sports. I don't say that we should do it, but I think the discussion would be worthwhile. Look: When steroids were criminalized in 1990, the AMA [the American Medical Association] sent a representative to testify before the Senate who said that steroids can be healthfully used, under a doctor's supervision and in low doses. And, I think it's possible to suggest that athletes, over a long season, might use low doses in a healthful manner, under a doctor's supervision. But in this era of hysteria that we're in, I'm not sure we can get to that conversation.
SportsLetter: You've spoken in the past about your major influences as a photographer: Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson. How did each of them shape your development as a photographer? Tod Papageorge: I think with any great artist — or photographer in this case — what's most moving about them for me is how they demonstrate the possibilities of the medium. Bresson, Frank and Garry, who was a close friend of mine, taught me different kinds of things about the medium. Which doesn't gainsay the fact that Bresson's was the first work I came across, and so he was the one who first profoundly attracted me to the medium. It was just a few pictures, and it changed my life overnight. I was in college, writing a bit, and decided seeing those photographs of Bresson that I was going to be a photographer. Just like that. I guess what I recognized in those few pictures was poetry of a visual form and that, although they were photographs, they weren't very useful for understanding the world. In other words, I didn't read them as documents. I read them as a new form, which is to say: poetry in photographic form. Their value was as artistic objects. That was the great lesson of Bresson's, and it was one that never left me. What I recognized in Robert Frank was, first of all, a photographer who looked at this country and saw it as a possible subject for a great body of work and who developed that, for the most part, through lack of motion, through a careful study of groups of peoples in stills. I think his book, "The Americans," is, at some level, a repudiation of Bresson's "Decisive Moment." With Garry, there's no European in Garry. He took the example of Robert Frank and extended that in investigating the American landscape — the social landscape, as it came to be called. He stretched this like a rubber band and snapped it into these incredibly zany, complicated, remarkable photographs, one after the other. SL: You mentioned your friendship with Garry Winogrand. How did that develop? TP: When I met him in New York [in the mid-1960s], he was inventing a new style of photography. It was tremendously exciting to be around him and work alongside him. There was a third photographer involved then — Joel Meyerowitz — and they were real New Yorkers who knew the city inside and out. Garry was, at heart, a very modest person. For whatever reason, I intrigued him. He always treated me, from the first time he saw my pictures, as an equal. He'd never met anyone like me: the fact that I was from New England and that I was stupidly incorruptible because I wouldn't do commercial work, like every other New York City photographer was doing. I guess in this vein I served as a kind of teacher because he gave up all commercial work about five years after we met and just began to teach to make a living. SL: In 1970, you received a Guggenheim Fellowship to do the sports photography project. What led you to apply for a Guggenheim? TP: I'm sure the fact that Garry got the Guggenheim [in 1969] made the notion very present in my mind. [Editor's Note: Papageorge curated and edited what became the exhibition of that work in 1977.] I seem to remember that he felt that my best chance of getting a Guggenheim at such a young age was to have a very good project. So, that's when I began to think: "What would be an interesting project to do that the Guggenheim Foundation would respond to?" And, I came up with this notion of photographing spectator sports in America. I think John Szarkowski, the late director of the department of photography at MoMA and who we now know, and at the time suspected, was the behind-the-scene person at the Guggenheim Foundation, was very intrigued by the project. But I think he was imagining it in a very different way from what it turned out to be. He loved all the vernacular forms of photography, and I think he was expecting to see wonderful photographs of somebody sliding into second base. The touchdown catch at the end of the game. But that is not what it came to be, not at all. SL: Do you remember how much money you received for the grant? TP: $14,000. SL: Why sports? What drew you to that concept at that time? TP: I've always been a fan of the major sports, as any rational person — or irrational person — is. In high school, my connection to sports was not as an athlete, but playing in bands. I was a drummer and did a lot of marching at halftime on the football fields of my high school. That part didn't have much to do with why I applied for the grant, but once I started the project, it did have something to do with what I photographed: The whole spectacle of sporting events — the majorettes, the band, all the spectators. It seemed to me that sports would be a kind of avatar or emblem of the state of the culture at that particular moment. I'm sure you've read the great opening chapter of the Don DeLillo book ["Underworld"] about the Giants-Dodgers game at Ebbets Field [the Bobby Thomson home run game]. Sports events, especially with men in this culture, are so deeply embedded in their understanding of not only what the culture is but even the great moments of the culture. It's odd that something that athletes do in a moment can become so resonant in the history of a particular group, but it's true. But I was really interested in the spectacle of the thing. By that I don't simply mean being in a stadium with 80,000 fans and the marching bands. But taking coherent pictures of all of that, that could somehow have the intensity of condensed meaning and still, at the same time, fairly represent this crowd, this mass. In other words, at some level I was very intrigued by the notion of taking photographs of very complicated visual events and to make them clear and powerful. SL: Before you applied for the Guggenheim, did you used to go to a lot of sports events? TP: I had no money to go to games. I watched a lot on television. I was a fanatic Knicks fan. Eventually, I was a Mets fan. Never a Yankees fan. SL: About the format of how you did this: Did you travel from event to event on one long road trip? TP: I got notice of the grant in late March or early April. I got a telegram because there was a mail strike and they couldn't send me notice. In the very beginning I photographed baseball in New York: Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, games at Shea Stadium. Then, I figured out what I would do next, which was to travel across the country and photograph major college football games and a couple of professional football games. I did fly to Indianapolis for the 500, and I did drive out one day to the Little league World Series in Williamsport. SL: Did you have any trouble getting access to events like the Triple Crown races or the Indianapolis 500 or the college football games? TP: I have to thank, posthumously, a man named John Durniak, the picture editor at Time Magazine. He's the one who got me the credentials to be able to do all of this. SL: Were there events that you attended and photographed that didn't make the book? TP: I remember I went out to Forest Hills for the tennis. There just weren't any pictures that I thought were strong enough. SL: What do you remember about the games and the events that you attended in 1970? TP: They just look like photographs, but the kind of intensity of attention that's required to do that is enormous. I'm almost in a fugue state as I'm making these pictures. I'm not relating at all to anybody. I'm just completely obsessed and concentrated on this very odd and singular thing that I'm doing. Nobody else in a stadium of 80,000 people is doing anything remotely like what I'm doing. The one person I do remember meeting with affection and having a good time with was the wonderful writer from the New Yorker magazine, Roger Angell. This was during the World Series, when reporters are treated very nicely. I mean, I'll never forget the Oyster Bar in Baltimore [laughs]. Anyway, I spoke a bit with Angell, and we struck up a kind of acquaintance. He's probably the only person I met during the whole year that I had anything to say to. SL: Did you watch the games when you were photographing, or were you concentrating just on taking photographs? TP: [Taking photographs] is very similar to an athletic act. So, that's like asking a baseball player, "What were you thinking about or what were you looking for when you're up at the plate?" With hitting a baseball or taking pictures, there's a lot of training involved before you're able to do anything effectively, but once you reach that point, it's totally intuitive. It has to do with seeing something — a motion or a gesture — and feeling the rush in the conjunction of figures across the frame, even, at some level, being aware of translating from the world of color to black-and-white, and how things will work in black-and-white. SL: A couple of images in the book had nothing to do with sports per se, like the scene from Jackson Square in New Orleans. Why did you include those? TP: To remind the reader about the fact that I was traveling on the road. That it wasn't simply me landing by helicopter in the middle of the field and concentrating on the event. This endeavor involved elaborate preparation. SL: The title of the book references the Vietnam War. Why did you decide to include that? TP: I started the project right in the middle of the Vietnam War. And then, on May 4th, Kent State happened and it really put me in a state. I was full of anger. The country was almost in a communal psychotic state at that point of the war. It's hard to imagine that today, given what we're going through and the fact that there's no reaction at all. So, I began to look at this project as a collective picture of the psychic state of America at a key point in the history of the Vietnam War. It was really a terrible time because the war had been going on for so long. What you can't understand today is it really seemed as if it would never end. There was such a feeling of hopelessness. It was brutal. SL: Could you do this type of book in the sports world today? TP: I don't know what I would do today because it's all very different. You know, when I watch sports on television today, it's all become corporatized, like so much in America. You go to games on a field named for a bank, and it's all about the logos. Where's the game? SL: These images are obviously unlike most "standard" sports photographs. Are there any sports photographers, or photographers who take photographs of sports that you admire? TP: Well, Garry [Winogrand] and his rodeo pictures. I sequenced his book ["Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo"]. Larry Fink and his boxing photographs. And [Jacques-Henri] Lartigue, with his incredible auto-racing images. But there's nobody I looked to. I think the book is more in the stream of photography in an American tradition, rather than in the sports tradition. SL: What sort of equipment did you use during the project? TP: I used a 35-millimeter Leica, with a 28-millimeter Canon lens. It's a very wide-angle lens — the lens covers a wider field — so you're taking in more. Effectively, it means you stand closer to what you're photographing than you normally would. The other reason to use it is it has a much deeper depth of field, so you get more things sharp in focus. That's something I wanted. SL: There are 70 images in the book. How many photographs did you take for the project? TP: I numbered the rolls of films to make contact sheets. The numbering isn't completely consistent, but the numbers stop in the low 300s. SL: How difficult was to winnow it down to 70 photos? TP: It seemed like it was endless. I think I expected a slightly larger book, but I do like the editing a lot. Lesley Martin was the editor [at Aperture], and we worked very intensely together. SL: You shot these in 1970, but only now is the book coming out. Why did it take so long and where were the photographs during this time? TP: Sitting in a box [laughs]. When I finished the project, I made a couple hundred small rough prints, and I showed them to Szarkowski. Basically, that's all you could do back then. There was no gallery scene with photography. There was no museum interest in photography outside of Szarkowski at MoMA. If he wanted to do something with them, he would. If he didn't, he didn't. And, he put them back in the box. That was it. The fact is, the pictures he saw were quite unlike what the book ended up being because when I went back, years later, in many cases I printed different pictures. SL: How did the project coalesce into the book? TP: It really happened with the entrance of the computer into my life and programs that allowed me to put together little maquettes. Not that the process of learning those programs was easy, but finally a program that was simple enough for me came out and I was able to use it. I had a group of pictures that I had taken in Paris over the years that I wanted to publish, so that was my training: taking those pictures and putting them into a sequenced book. Once I did that, I started working on other things, including what became the Central Park book ["Passing Through Eden"] and then the sports book. Without the computer, I think they'd still be sitting in a box. I was so preoccupied with family and teaching at Yale, and, as I've said, there was nobody calling me up. SL: The Central Park book was published by Steidl. How did you end up with Aperture with the sports book? TP: You know how these things get born: it was capricious. Tim Davis, who wrote the essay in the book, is a former student of mine. He loved the work and wanted to write an essay about it for Aperture Magazine. When Tim brought this disc I had prepared into Aperture to propose an article, Lesley Martin, the editor, looked at it and said, "Is this a book proposal?" SL: Will there be an exhibition of the sports photographs? TP: Yes, at Pace/MacGill [Gallery in New York City], in the fall of '08. SL: Do you still go out and shoot? TP: I don't really go out and shoot very much. Mainly, I photograph my family and extended family's summers up at Lake George. I'm sure that will result in some sort of publication at some point.
Ankle Injuries Among United States High School Sports Athletes, 2005-2006. Alex J. Nelson, Christy L. Collins, Ellen E. Yard, Sarah K. Fields and R. Dawn Comstock. Journal of Athletic Training, 42 (3) 2007.More than 7.1 million students, or 53.5% of enrolled students, in the United States participated in high school athletics in the school year 2005-06, "the 17th straight year of growth in high school athletic participation." As athletic participation grows, so does the incidence of sport-related injury. In this "first study to compare the epidemiology of ankle injuries across sports and between sexes among US high school athletes," researchers took ankle injury data from one hundred high schools nationally during the school year 2005-06. There were approximately 326,396 ankle injuries, or "5.23 ankle injuries per 10 000 athlete-exposures," comprising 22.6% of all injuries. In all sports except girls' volleyball, higher rates of ankle injuries occurred during competition (9.35 per 10,000) than during practice (3.63 per 10,000). The highest rate of ankle injury occurred in boys' basketball (7.74), followed by girls' basketball (6.93), and then boys' football (6.52).'The Times They Are A-Changin': Gender Comparisons in Three National Newspapers of the 2004 Wimbledon Championships. Jane Crossman, John Vincent, Harriet Speed. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 42 (1) 2007.Researchers analyzed the coverage of male and female tennis players at the 2004 Wimbledon tournament in three national newspapers: The Times (United Kingdom), New York Times (United States), and Globe & Mail (Canada). The study measured "the amount and prominence of the coverage devoted to female and male tennis players in all articles and photographs" during the two week tournament. "Male players had, on average, 1.4 times more space allocated to them than females." The average size of the articles/photographs, however, was not significantly different. The Times devoted more space to male players than female (1.5 times), but that may be explained by the success of a British male tennis player in the tournament. The study's main finding was that coverage was inequitable. However, "when compared to the amount of coverage female athletes have received in the past," the results show improvement in the amount of space devoted to women athletes.
The 11th Pan American Maccabean Games kicked off on December 26 in Buenos Aires with this anonymous mascot brightening up things. Apparently a naming contest is in the works.
BTW, bridge is one of the events. Meep meep.
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