* Like, I bet, a lot of American men who are sports fans, tuning into the Olympics and have a girlfriend or wife, I've been watching a lot of gymnastics with my own girlfriend, one of the few sports she likes (we're just oozing with heteronormativity here).
Here's the question I'm left with that leaves me baffled about gymnastics, that has my girlfriend equally puzzled:
On a gymnastic event which calls for some kind of dismount, which is most of them, why is a step back or jump back sometimes penalized and sometimes completely okay, based on the scoring and the TV announcer's reactions?
Like, if they clearly stumble, that always seems bad. But I swear, there have been dismounts I've seen where the competitor takes a big step or even a big jump back and the TV commentators are like, "Ah! Bellissimo!" and others where the talking heads are like, "Ooh, the step back is going to cost them!" and it does. And it looks JUST LIKE THE SAME step-back that got the great score! Someone explain this witchcraft!
* I have spent years establishing in this space my tireless efforts to stand for obscure (at least in the U.S.) sports. Some of these sports are Olympic events, like handball, and curling.
When the Olympics come around and people watch said sports for the only time in four years, it really grinds my gears when these filthy casuals start immediately making suggestions on how said sport could be "better," as if it didn't have its own long history of evolution and tweaking, just like the sports they care about.
They do it in such a blithely confident manner, too. It's never, "I wonder why they don't XYZ in this sport? Can someone explain?" It's always, "This sport would definitely be better if they just XYZ'd! I'm an expert on this after watching 20 minutes of it!"
Example #1: Correct, there's no shot clock in handball. There are penalties, discretionary, if the ref feels like a team isn't trying to score in due course. I have never seen this penalty called and I've never seen it need to be called in the handball matches I have watched.
Example #2: No, the best athletes in your pet sport would not and could not switch sports and immediately, or even with a year or two of practice, become dominant in the new sport you just watched. Christ, c'mon, people.
Example #3: This one burns my butt the most. Maybe I've said it in this space before, but again I'm starting to hear people moan about the offside rule in soccer, and how it should be eliminated.
If there was no offsides rule to protect them, defenders would always stay back by their own goal. There would be no breakaway opportunities, except maybe in the last few minutes with a team desperately trying to tie.
When do people complain about the offsides rule? When it spoiled a fun breakaway, of course.
So the change they are agitating for would have the opposite effect of what they want. Not thinking beyond the surface about it, they are just picturing a world where a big rule is removed but everyone plays exactly the same and doesn't adjust. It's so stupid.
* Occasionally, I dive into politically contentious topics here, but it's rare, because unlike a lot of people I am only exhausted, not invigorated, by political debate.
Nonetheless, I feel I must weigh in on the Imane Khelif controversy, the Algerian boxer going for gold in the women's welterweight division despite certain people clamoring that she's a man.
They point to the fact that she's been banned twice by the International Boxing Association for failing gender tests. The IBA won't divulge specifics of their testing, what exactly she failed (something to do with testosterone levels? Chromosomes? What? They won't say).
Here's more on the IBA. They are a Russian organization whose banishments of Khelif came after she defeated Russian boxers. They also allow Russians and Belarussians to compete under their flag, unlike every other sports governing body. Which seems neither here nor there until you find out they did ban one country — Ukraine.
For various transgressions, they have faced boycotts from the boxing orgs of Poland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Finland, Canada, and the United States just since 2022.
Even if you put all of that aside, what's really worth nothing is that in her amateur career she has lost nine times. Nine times she's lost, but all of a sudden she's a "man pummeling a woman" as J.D. Vance put it.
Transphobes used to say that if you were born with a vagina you're a woman and if you were born with a penis and balls, you're a man, and that's that. In Khelif's case, there are no allegations she was born or ever had anything but female genitalia, so they've pivoted on what the One True Signifier of gender is, and now it's chromosomes, not genitals.
Nevermind that there is no published evidence that Khelif even has XY chromosomes, or elevated testosterone levels — I repeat, the IBA won't provide the details of their gender testing, but the bad faith actors have decided Khelif has XY chromosomes.
Listen, right-wingers. I know your campaign to shame, banish, and worse anyone who doesn't conform to what you consider to be true, correct, holy, and "normal" is at an all-time high right now, now that Western society is in the midst of this terrifying trend of "letting people be who they want to be," but Khelif is a woman, you horrid bigots.
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