I’m just getting settled in a new apartment, but I’ve still had sports on my mind, and have been slowly working on a couple big projects behind the scenes. For now, enjoy some headlines and a book review.

Headlines

The Women’s Rubgy World Cup is taking place right now in England and is trying out a new piece of technology.

• The pool stage is ongoing through the first week of September, and then knockout rounds will continue for most of the rest of the month, culminating in the final on September 27th.

• In this tournament, all players (except for those with braces) will be wearing high-tech mouthguards that contain an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a red LED, which will light up when a player sustains a significant head impact. The mouthguard also sends an alert to the matchday doctor, but the red flash is for the benefit of the referee, to know to stop the play, and also for other players and the audience, to raise awareness. Also, Dr. Lindsay Starling says, “On the longer term, it builds up a picture of head impact that a player sustains throughout their career, which can then be used to better look after the brains of our players.” The mouthguards will be standard starting next rubgy season.

The Women’s Professional Baseball League has been holding tryouts for the last four days in Washington, DC.

• 98-year-old Maybelle Blair, who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that rose to prominence during World War II and was fictionalized in the movie A League of Their Own, threw the first pitch to Mo’Ne Davis, 25. “I’m re-living my life through these girls. The good old boys in baseball always wanted to keep baseball for the boys,” Blair said, “‘You should play softball.’ No, we shouldn’t. We should play baseball.”

• Women’s sports have been on the rise, with more and more professional leagues popping up, at least in part due to the democratization of broadcasting and fan culture through the internet. While TV placement certainly helps, the ability for anyone to, for example, watch a PWHL game live on their Youtube channel allows these new leagues to quickly build a robust fanbase.

The Athletic runs a feature on the rise of stalking in the elite sports world.

• According to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, this last decade has seen more incidents of celebrities and athletes being stalked than the entire rest of U.S. history, and it very likely has to do with our new media climate. Closer access to leagues and stars can lead people to develop parasocial attachments or obsessions, something which can be leveraged for brand loyalty and league profits, but can also put individual athletes in danger.

• The harrowing stories recounted in the article are only scratching the surface; The Athletic has compiled a list of 52 incidents since 2020, but warns that the list is incomplete. They say that no law enforcement agencies are publicly tracking athlete stalking trends and there are no academic studies about the topic.

• I looked into this a bit, too. I wasn’t able to find any literature specifically on stalking in sports. There is a small body of work on online harrassment and cyber-stalking, including acknowledgement that online violence “occurs on a continuum: through interaction between online and physical environments. While perpetrators may reside outside of the room, their actions are felt within,” as written in an editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. However, I think this refers to the real-world impacts of online harrassment, not the potential for the digital threats to be realized by fixated individuals. The Athletic is right to call out the lack of attention and research on this issue.

Book Review | The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters

Last year, at the most recent Olympics in Paris, boxer Imane Khelif was the victim of an internet shitstorm over accusations that she wasn’t really a woman, and that she’d failed a sex test. Did you ever stop to wonder: Why do Olympic athletes need to do sex tests? Why is it that only women need to? And where did the panic around trans people in sport even come from?

This incredibly researched book answers all those questions by tracking the athletic history of women’s sports through Alice Milliat’s Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI), its clash with and aggressive suppression by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the systemic misogyny that kept women athletes away from an equal playing field, and the very public gender transition of two track and field athletes in the 1930s.

Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston were two trans men who had competed in women’s sports before their transition. Neither of them ever attended the Olympics or expressed the desire to continue competing in the women’s category, but somehow their stories still sparked the myth of so-called “gender fraud” taking place within women’s sport. All the hubbub culminated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany, where the IOC ruled that all female athletes must show proof of their sex before competition.

After World War II, the rule was still on the books and was taken for granted, never really questioned again. But as Waters writes, because the IOC had given itself the responsibility of defining womanhood:

“The IOC had backed itself into a corner. By implementing sex tests, they were keeping alive the illusion that sports could be inherently segregated by sex, as they had been since the earliest days of the Olympics. Sex testing became part of the fiction that men’s sports and women’s sports were logical concepts. Abolishing sex testing would mean acknowledging that people cannot be sorted inherently into male and female categories, and if human sex is not built on a binary, fans might start to ask, ‘Why, then, should sports be?’”

Waters calls into question gender segregation of sport as an arbitrarily constructed rule, just like all of sport is just sets of arbitrarily constructed rules. That, of course, doesn’t mean these rules are random or unimportant. In contrast, it means that they are changeable, and that we should question their origins, their purposes, and their effects. We, humans, made up sports for fun. Nowadays, it’s an industry, a bureaucracy, a pathway to education, a career. It’s more important now than ever to make sure that the rules of sport serve us, instead of excluding anyone whose body doesn’t match old white Nazi sympathizer aristocrats’ vision of acceptable femininity.