Episode 142: WNBA's new CBA, Endurance cyclist Emily Chappell, and transphobia in sport
At the top of the show Lindsay, Brenda, and Shireen delve into the NWSL draft and the many wins from that day. [7:40] The crew then unpacks the WNBA players' recently announced new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), and what it means for the league and the players. [22:06] Jessica interviews ultra endurance cyclist Emily Chappell about what it's like to race a bike across Europe over two weeks, her mental health struggles, and why she decided to write it all down in her new book 'Where There's A Will'. [38:59] The panel has a discussion about transphobia in sport - and how it manifested in women's boxing. [50:55]
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile, [1:00:07] the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Alyssa Nakken, [1:03:06] and what is good in our worlds.
Links
WNBA And WNBPA Reach Tentative Agreement On Groundbreaking Eight-Year Collective Bargaining Agreement: https://www.wnba.com/news/wnba-and-wnbpa-reach-tentative-agreement-on-groundbreaking-eight-year-collective-bargaining-agreement
Bet on Women by Nneka Ogwumike: https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/nneka-ogwumike-wnba-cba-bet-on-women
New WNBA Deal Will Bring Big Salary Increases: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-wnba-deal-will-bring-big-salary-increases-11579023759
These States Want to Stop Transgender High School Students Playing Sports: https://www.thedailybeast.com/these-states-want-to-stop-transgender-high-school-students-playing-sports
The WBC and Alejandra Jimenez respond to shocking claims and jibes made by fellow female boxing stars: http://wmmarankings.com/boxing-alejandra-jimenez-responds-to-shocking-man-claims-as-well-as-other-jibes-made-by-fellow-boxing-stars
Cristiane tentou ficar, e SPFC não quis; declarações incomodaram diretores: https://dibradoras.blogosfera.uol.com.br/2020/01/14/cristiane-tentou-ficar-e-spfc-nao-quis-declaracoes-incomodaram-diretores
Lucy Gillett: Crystal Palace Women keeper suffered sexist abuse during game: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/51126018
El Fútbol Femenino Consigue el Primer Convenio Colectivo de su Historia: http://freedamedia.es/2020/01/15/el-futbol-femenino-consigue-el-primer-convenio-colectivo-de-su-historia/
90 Year old Barbara Buttrick recognized in Boxing Hall of Fame: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article239317753
Choir made up of girls aged 8 to 10 from an Ojibwe immersion program sing O Canada before Winnipeg Jets game: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-jets-choir-ojibwe-o-canada-1.542975
Meet Sophia Smith, the 19-year-old phenom who’s the future of NWSL and the USWNT: https://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2020/1/22/21070195/sophia-smith-uswnt-nwsl-draft-portland-thorns-profile
Holly Holm, Roxanne Modafferi, and Sabina Mazo win at UFC 246: https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2020-01-18/ufc-246-live-updates-mcgregor-v-cerrone
Giants make Alyssa Nakken first female coach in MLB history: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/id/28498408/giants-make-alyssa-nakken-first-female-coach-mlb-history
Transcript
Shireen: Welcome to this week’s episode of Burn It All Down. It’s the feminist sports podcast you need. I’m Shireen Ahmed, freelance writer and sports activist in Toronto, Canada, but hanging out in Chicago this weekend, and I’m leading the toxic femininity charge this week. On this week’s panel we have the amazing Dr. Brenda Elsey, president of the Feminists for Leo Messi fan club, undeniable genius, and associate professor of history at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York; and the indomitable and brilliant Lindsay Gibbs, with the most beautiful laugh and mightiest pen, and also the creator of the Power Plays newsletter – sign up at powerplays.news. She’s in DC.
Before I start, I’d like to thank our patrons for their generous support and to remind our new flamethrowers about our Patreon campaign. You pledge a certain amount monthly, as low as $2 and as high as you want, to become an official patron of the podcast. In exchange for your monthly contribution you get access to special rewards, and with the price of a latte a month you can get access to extra segments of the podcast, a monthly newsletter, and an opportunity to record on the burn pile only available to those in our Patreon community. We have recently begun a vlog which is absolutely riveting. So far we’ve been able to solidify funding for proper editing, transcripts and our social media guru Shelby, but we are hoping to reach our dream of hiring a producer to help us with the show. Burn It All Down is a labor of love and we all believe in this podcast, but having a producer to help us as we grow would be amazing. We are so grateful for your support and happy that our flamethrowing family is growing.
We have a kickass show for you this week: we will get into a conversation about the WNBA collective bargaining agreement, Jessica has an interview with ultra-cyclist Emily Chappell, and then we will have a discussion about women in boxing and maybe some particular issues. But before we get started, let’s have a quick conversation about the NWSL draft. Lindsay, can you tell us a little about that?
Lindsay: Yeah, I was at the draft over the weekend – not the weekend…I don’t know what day it is. Last week, sorry, I lost my voice a little bit, as you all can tell. It was wild! It was so dramatic in the first round, every single team ended up switching draft picks. I was there live and could not keep track of anything that was going on. Ultimately Sophia Smith ended up leaving early, I’m so fascinated by players leaving college early. Brenda and I argued a little bit over this over the weekend in Baltimore. So she was picked #1 overall by the Portland Thorns-
Shireen: Yay!
Lindsay: -and then we had a big trade involving Mallory Pugh, so Mallory Pugh is now with Sky Blue FC. Of course, if you listened to last week’s episode we had an interview with Sky Blue’s Alyse LaHue. She made so many big moves this draft. It’s really big that Mal has left the Washington Spirit and is now with Sky Blue, so I gotta say it was amazing to be there and to see all these dreams coming true. It’s a cheesy day, but it was also just dramatic. What did you all think?
Shireen: Well I watched a little bit-
Brenda: I learned about allocation money…Oh, sorry!
Shireen: I was just following mostly Portland because I love that team so much, and I really appreciated by the way, Lindsay, you tweeting out, because your tweeting was fantastic, you identifying the Canadians because it makes me feel happy. Even Sophia Smith’s speech was, I thought, really really beautiful, when she addressed the audience about her journey and what was coming. I just thought her thanking her situation and the context around it was really really important. She’s very very well-spoken, very articulate. So I was really fascinated by Sophia Smith and when she addressed the crowd and how wonderful that speech was, she’s very articulate.
I’m very excited she’s going to Portland, but I was a bit stressed out during the day because it was really difficult to follow. All my favorite soccer writers were like, we don’t understand the nature of what’s happening right now! Jonathan Tannenwald whose writing I appreciate was like, I don't even understand what just happened. So it was difficult on the receiving end to try to follow along, but I wasn’t watching it live, I was following on Twitter. Brenda, what did you think?
Brenda: I mean, I thought it was fascinating. I learned what allocation money is, I guess, which is buying money with money?
Lindsay: The owners were literally making up allocation money rules as they went, by the way, which is crazy.
Brenda: It was really complicated but it has to do with the caps and trying to get more capacity in your capped amounts by buying and trading for money…Trading money…It was really bizarre. I imagine that the week going forward is going to review that because it simply felt really weird to me. Anyway yeah, Sophia Smith now with the Portland Thorns, the biggest news is probably that the 21-year-old Mallory Pugh from Washington went to Sky Blue. So all the fans were saying “Now we’re Sky Pugh!” which was really cute itself.
Shireen: Oh, that’s so great.
Brenda: I know that everyone’s sort of saying the Thorns…I sort of think Sky Blue is coming out ahead in this because Mallory Pugh is gonna…Even if she needs year or two more of development she’s already hitting the ground running, she’s the more developed player. Sophia Smith is great; I know I’m gonna get a lot of shit about this but she’s young, she’s really young and she looks young and she’s competed against young people. She’s played for the u-17 team, she’s now called up to the senior women’s training camp this year. I still think she could’ve used a year or two more at Stanford, but we’ll see.
Shireen: We’ll definitely see. Were any of the draft nominees, does anyone know, going to the Olympic camp?
Lindsay: For the US?
Brenda: Good question. I don’t know.
Lindsay: No, none of them are on the team.
Shireen: Okay.
Lindsay: None of them are on the qualifying team.
Shireen: Okay. Because the team hasn’t yet been announced but there’s a camp to do all these qualifiers and I think the roster will be announced-
Lindsay: No no, the qualifying team has been announced, the team that’s going to qualifying next week has been announced and none of them are on that.
Shireen: None of them are on that, no, because the actual team for Tokyo hasn’t been announced yet, that’ll be announced later.
Lindsay: Yeah, because they haven’t even qualified yet. I’m pretty sure they’ll make it, but it would be kind of tacky to do that before they qualified!
Shireen: Anyways, we have so much to look forward to, and Lindsay again had a great interview with Alyse LaHue in Power Plays and on the show, just fantastic. It’s really amazing to see how that club has done and bravo for all your work on that.
Moving on, Brenda, can you start us off on our first segment?
Brenda: Sure. So this week really, really big news in women’s sports: basically the WNBA Players Association signed a 7-year collective bargaining agreement with the league. The players had opted out of their agreement early which some people said was risky but paid off big time this week, and I just want to read a little bit from the Players Association president and LA Sparks player, Nneka Ogwumike said in her piece that was written over a year ago when they did opt out: “Does opting out mean we take the CBA lightly? Not at all, and just the opposite. We take this seriously, so seriously, we’re not just opting out of this agreement, we’ve also given rigorous consideration to the agreement we want in its place. This was not an easy decision for any of us, and it came out of a whole lot of research and conversation and soul-searching and thought.”
She goes on to say, “We’re opting out because women’s basketball potential is infinite. We’re opting out because there’s still a lot more work to be done and we’re betting on ourselves to do it.” End of quote. So, what happened? Just the basics and, I know, Linds has written on this as well for Power Plays, which was excellent, I know Shireen’s got a whole bunch to say, but the basics: WNBA salary cap rises 30% from a million to $1.3 million, the CBA will include policies about domestic/intimate partner violence, I think the details on that are still to be worked out. Benefits: fully paid maternity leave, a new annual childcare stipend of $5000, a combination for nursing mothers and housing stipulations as well for players with children. Also, veteran players – and I don’t know what that meant, exactly, maybe Linds you could help, or Shireen, with the details – “veteran players” as they’re called are eligible for up to $60,000 in reimbursed expenses related to adoption, surrogacy, fertility, et cetera. So I’m just going to leave it there. I’m not sure if I missed any of the nuts and bolts but that’s what I got from it and it was just really fabulous to see.
Lindsay: Yeah, I think this was a really huge deal for women’s sports. First of all, we should say the entire collective bargaining agreement itself has not been released yet. So I saw a lot of questions about some of these nuts and bolts, it’s going to be fascinating when we get the entire document to really dive into it and see how this is exactly structured. One of the big things is that this CBA, there’s two kind of types of funding that we’re talking about for the players: one is the direct salaries which did increase, albeit not as much as some people would’ve liked. The top player salaries did almost double, they increased by 80%, but when you’re on the lower end it maybe went from $50,000 to $60,000 so it wasn’t as drastic, but still significant. So that is one thing that happened. There’s going to be $300,000 more in the salary cap that can go to player salaries now for each team, and that will grow by 3% in each of the eight years of the contract.
But there’s also this money that they are pretty much generating themselves via new marketing and player development and promotional initiatives, so this is where it gets very creative and, I think very exciting for the future of the league. The complaint always is that nobody is doing enough to promote the league, all these players go overseas and they’re not here during the offseason, and when they are here the WNBA and NBA don’t do a good job of marketing them – they’re not visible, we’re not seeing them. And so the league is really out of sight, out of mind for six whole months, which is huge. But not the league has to spend a minimum of $1.6 million a year directly to the players, so that’s a minimum, they have to spend that much money to help market during the offseason. That is money that will go directly into players’ pockets, I think the cap is $250,000 per player for them to work for the league during the offseason to do marketing and promotional activities.
So, each offseason now the league has to spend a minimum of $1.6 million and give that directly to the players to help the league promote the league itself during the offseason. Each player it seems like can get up to a max of $250,000. Obviously only the elite players will get $250,000, but that will help inspire them to stay and not go overseas during the winter, and that will be really big, to have the biggest names stay. At the same time it will give other players up and down the roster a chance to earn not $250,000 but some amount of money to stay, and it incentivizes the WNBA and the NBA to actually increase the presence and the visibility of the WNBA, engage sponsors and fans, and increase media coverage during these long winter months when the WNBA is not actually in session. All of this just helps boost and grow the league in a way that we’ve been begging for it to be grown.
There’s also a big changemakers platform which is a way that Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner, has started as a way to meaningfully collaborate with corporate sponsors. The first three that have been announced are AT&T, Deloitte, and Nike, and she’s really looking for new ways to brand and promote the league during this season. The only way this agreement can work without collapsing the WNBA financially is if there’s hard work put into branding and sponsorship and engaging corporations and promoting the players, and that’s good because that work has not been done. It puts an impetus on that work to be done, which is going to help grow the league so much and I’m so excited for that.
There are a couple of things I don’t fully understand yet: there’s a commissioners cup which will be kind of a midseason tournament, I gotta be honest I don’t fully understand yet how that will work, I’m very excited to figure that out, but I don’t know. Shireen, what do you think?
Shireen: Well I was really excited by, in particular a couple of things, like when Nneka Ogwumike was on Good Morning America, which is where it was officially announced with Robin Roberts. She actually said that she recognizes that women’s hockey and women’s soccer are both striving for something like this is something that really struck me, that these athletes are so aware of the larger picture and of the other athletes that are women that really are going for this. That’s the solidarity that I live for and I was so appreciative of. I was on a panel this past Thursday night at Ryerson University with Kayla Alexander who plays for Chicago Sky and we talked about it, we mentioned it and it was really important. She said it was very exciting, we all congratulated her, I mean she’s fantastic. She’s very excited about this, but she also mentioned that the CBA is not just for the elite players, it’s actually going to give opportunity and fairness for players all across sport, be it benchwarmers or whatnot, and I think that’s really important because we have a tendency to sometimes only think about the top level players.
It was fantastic, everyone’s really excited about it, and in the audience that night at the event, which went really well…Also part of the event were Brittni Donaldson, who’s the assistant coach for the Raptors, 2019 NBA champions, and then Dr. Jen Welter, the first woman NFL coach, so everybody was pumped about it. I think it’s important to recognize that also in the audience there was a hockey player formerly of the CWHL, and she got up and asked a question and said that we’re looking to you and thank you for this, because we hockey players who are in the middle of so much, the women’s hockey landscape is so confusing right now in some regards, they’re looking to the WNBA to be this trailblazing, amazing organization that has figured that shit out. I’m so excited about it, I’m actually very very excited about this. Brenda, do you have anything else you wanna add to this?
Brenda: I guess the message that it leaves me with, first, I’m just really interested in the maternity policies, and we’ve talked a lot about that on the show and it’s really, really important. Most people think I’m an academic and I got this great maternity policy – I got 8 weeks. And the 8 weeks I got started when the baby was born. I literally lectured on a Friday and gave birth on Sunday, which…
Lindsay: …God. Oh my god.
Brenda: Right? I was terrified the entire time I was lecturing that my water was going to break right there. I think the students were terrified too! Anyways, I’m just really encouraged because I couldn’t imagine being an athlete and having that job…I don’t know. So the maternity policies were really encouraging and for me the message to take away is about labor and athletes and labor, which is management, no matter how much they may say we want this to grow together/we care about you, no matter how much that may be true they won’t give you anything if you don’t force them to. That’s just labor history. There’s no giveaways, no freebies, they will never give you what you are worth, you must demand it. It doesn’t always work and so it’s so cool to me that they took this big risk and it paid off. I found it so heartening.
Lindsay: Yeah, to me the biggest takeaways is this rising tide lifts all boats, like we talked about. I was even talked to basketball players who solely play in Europe, who don’t play in the WNBA and have never been at that level, and they said that this will be really good for them because some players will choose now not to come to Europe, some WNBA players, and that means that money can go to players who only play in Europe, right? So it keeps lifting up everybody, and as Brenda said, collective bargaining is some important in every single industry, especially for women’s sports.
I gotta say, I’m concerned by the fact that the NWSL doesn’t have a collective bargaining agreement yet, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to create one because they’re skill kind of buying this management line that if they take these steps it’s gonna put the NWSL’s future in jeopardy. I talked to Tori Huster who’s one of the representatives from the Players Association at the draft, and she reiterated that. She said yeah, we just have a good working relationship with the management right now, but we’re not in a hurry to do an actual CBA.
I just want to give you a little history of the WNBA CBA to wrap this up to prove how, as Brenda said, every single thing was a fight. First of all, the WNBA launched in 1997 and when it launched the league’s salaries ranged from $15,000 to $62,500, not contract guarantees, no marketing license fees, no free agency, no maternity benefits, no revenue sharing, no year-round healthcare, nothing. This was from a conversation I had with Pam Wheeler who was the executive director of the WNBA Players Association from ’99 to 2014. In two years of the WNBA’s existence they unionized and fought for a collective bargaining agreement, and there was a lot of fear that it was too much too soon, and that they were rocking the boat and that they should be happy just to have a league in the United States to play for. But a lot of veteran players knew that that wasn’t true, knew the importance of solidarity early on, and we’re only where we are today because they started then.
It’s taken each fight to chip away at little bitty things. That first contract they got a $25,000 minimum salary for rookies and $35,000 for vets, they got a 401k, they got year-round health and dental care, and guaranteed contracts if they player was active at least half of the season. So that was the first contract. The second contract they finally got free agency. It’s so important to remember that you’re not going to get everything at once, you can’t get there all at one time, but this has been 24 years worth of fight from the players to get where we are today. I would urge other leagues to go ahead and get that fight started!
Shireen: Next up we have Jessica in a fantastic interview with ultra endurance cyclist Emily Chappell about what it’s like to race a bike across Europe over two weeks, her mental health struggles, and why she decided to write it all down in her new book Where There’s A Will.
Jessica: I am thrilled to be joined today on Burn It All Down by former London bike courier, who is now an ultra endurance cyclist, Emily Chappell. In 2016 she won the Transcontinental, a 4000km race (or for our American listeners, just under 2500 miles) across Europe. She did the race solo and, per the rules, unsupported. I’m gonna read from the website of the race to get the description just right: “Riders plan, research, and navigate their own course, and choose when where and if to rest. They will take only what they can carry and consume only what they find.” It took Emily 13 days and 10 hours to do the race in 2016. The TransCon was started by Mike Hall, a good friend of Emily’s. In 2017 Hall was killed, hit by a car while racing across Australia.
Late last year Emily’s book Where There’s A Will was published. In it she tells the story of her first failed attempt at the TransCon in 2015 and then the victory race in 2016, but the book doesn’t stop there. It then chronicles her friendship with Hall, his death, and the time after. It’s a beautiful book, beautifully written. It’s also at points hard to read, because endurance cycling is physically and mentally grueling and Chappell does not hold back on the details. Let me just read a quick quote, so this is just a taste, I chose a short one: “My skin inched with the restless discomfort of sleep deprivation, with the encrusted salt of three days of sweat, and with the pimples and insect bites that were beginning to pockmark my face. I dug my grimy fingers into my eye sockets and inspected the assortment of deceased insects that emerged.” Oof! Emily, thank you for joining us today!
Emily: Thank you for having me! You picked a really good bit there.
Jessica: I did…There was a longer one that I debated about but I got it down to that one. Let’s just start from how did you get into racing for 13 days straight? What’s your origin story?
Emily: It’s quite a long one really, I don’t have a good story about, you know, I was always into cycling when I was a kid, I always dreamed of this. I wasn’t a sporty kid at all, I got into cycling when I was in my mid twenties. I started cycling to work and then I fell in love with cycling very quickly, so from then on it’s like what’s the next thing, what’s the next big thing. So I was a bike messenger for a few years. I did a very long tour across Asia, it took me 18 months, and that I think…Those gave me some of the tools I then took into racing, which was something I got into in 2015. I had never thought that I would do that sort of thing. I never thought of myself as an athlete, I never thought I would be one of those superhuman people who did these things, but gradually I started to admit to myself more and more I wanted to do this, and also to realize because of the things I’d done I had some of the skills and that kind of came together to get me into it.
Jessica: So I’ve just read this book where you lay out in detail, like I said, how incredibly difficult it is, this thing that you do. What draws you to this? I guess it’s more like, why do you do it again…You know what I mean? Like I get why you’d do it once but why do you keep doing it, what draws you to it?
Emily: That’s the question really, I ask myself that a lot and I think that’s why I wrote the book to try and explain it to myself. There’s a lot of different ways of looking at it – you can go through the book and if you’re a glass-half-empty sort of person you could pick out all the sections like the one you just read that talk about how exhausting and disgusting and challenging and brutal it is, but much more if it is exciting and exhilarating and beautiful. I mean, Europe is such a beautiful continent, and it’s so varied and diverse. In one day of this race you pass through quite a few different geographical zones: you cross through mountain ranges, you pass through beautiful towns and villages, you eat amazing food, you see incredible landscapes. That was worth it. I look back on the race in some ways as the best holiday I ever had. Then also you’re doing this thing that you turn out to be able to do and it’s physically very demanding but you do it and there’s a bit of a high from that riding maybe 200 miles a day and being able to do it and mostly to enjoy it, you get a bit of a buzz.
It’s also bizarrely a very simple way of living. So it’s very hard…It’s not easy, but it’s simple. All you have to think about is keep going, keep going, keep going. That’s your only priority. Everything else you do, everything you eat, whenever you decide to sleep, whatever you do it’s just towards one goal. I find it really hard after these races and challenges and things, you go back home and real life is way more messy and way less conclusive. You don’t just have a single purpose, and honestly I feel homesick for the race once I finish it, because it’s hard but it’s this simple monolithic challenge.
Jessica: Wow. That was such a good answer. It doesn’t make me want to go do it but I understand why do you. How do you remember the details of the races so well? I can’t really remember yesterday! I was thinking, my husband’s a marathon runner and he once did this event with other friends where they raced for 24 hours straight but they were taking short naps in the van kind of thing…He was almost drunk when he got home, even though he wasn’t, it was the way he was acting, his brain kind of wasn’t all there. I just kept wondering like, your book, like I said, it’s beautiful, your writing is beautiful, and so much of it you feel like you’re there with you. I was just wondering how do you remember all that?
Emily: I think I might have quite a complicated answer to this. I’ve been asked this quite a bit and I’ve thought about it, so I’ve done races that were maybe 24 hours or something like that, and that’s actually a lot harder because you’re pushing harder, you’re among to keep going for the full 24 hours and empty yourself out and you’re a bit sleep deprived, so those ones are actually a bit more of a blur. During the Transcontinental one of the biggest challenges of the race, I think, and one of the assets of the stronger racers is, quite boringly, the ability just to look after yourself and keep yourself at a level…So, you’re going to be exhausted and sleep-deprived and borderline injured and permanently hungry, but if you let any of those out of hand it’s all over.
So you’re keeping yourself at a steady level as much as you can, which means you’re not actually pushing that hard most of the time, not about being strong and fast and going to your limit, it’s about keeping going within your capacity. So you’re not totally out of it, you’ve actually got to keep yourself switched on because you’ve also got to navigate and plan your rest and food, so your brain is still working quite well. In some ways it’s not like a race, it’s like a challenge, is the best I have for it. But also I think for me, when you’re riding your bike for hours a day and I rode my bike for two weeks during the race, and during that time I didn’t have any input – I didn’t read anything, I didn’t listen to any podcast or news stories, all I had to entertain me was what was going on around me, which was quite a lot of what was going on in my head. I didn’t get bored. I look back and I’m amazed by that, but I think part of it was I was riding along, taking everything in and processing it. And because I’m me I was thinking how would I put that into a sentence, and I spend the next two hours thinking, okay, how would I describe that bit of rocks so that people could really see it, and once you’re doing that you’re thinking okay, maybe change that word a bit…So you’re doing the first draft as you go along. And then I often get home, sit down and write things and it will all come out because I’ve been embedding it. I think for me cycling is part of the creative process.
Jessica: That is so interesting to me because, I was going to bring this up later but I’m going to transition to it now, you write a lot and you’ve mentioned this before, but you write a lot about your mental health in the book, and about depression you get after the races are over. I was struck by, you win this big race and it’s totally anticlimactic in your writing – I don’t know if that’s the word you’d use to describe how you felt at the time, but you actually end that chapter by saying “I felt fractured, fragmented, doubtful.” This is so interesting to me. I have depression, and one of the ways that I manage it is I just don’t let my brain stew on anything, ever. I’m always listening to things, taking things in, I’m not letting it sit still. So listening to you talk about being in the race and just being in your head, sounds terrifying to me. That actually almost sounds more terrifying than actually the physical part of it.
Emily: Yeah. I think for me the more terrifying bit is when I get home, because when you’re in the race you’re in your head, but your head is mostly a pretty good place, and you’ve got a lot going on, you’ve got problems to solve, usually minor ones. Then when I get home after a race I am exhausted, so all I can do is sit in a chair, I can’t go out on a bike to blow the cobwebs away or change my energy or anything, I can’t do very much and that is when I sit and stew and think about what a terrible person I am and all the rest of it.
Jessica: Why did you choose to be so frank about that in this book? It seemed like you’re being brutally honest there.
Emily: I always have been, I think. The first time I had a period of post-trip depression was after my big bike trip across Asia, and that I think was…I had a blog at the time, and I went offline for quite a long time, and then I came back and sort of confessed to people. The reaction to that was predictably quite a big one. A lot of people commented or got in touch privately, quite a few people who I knew as famous successful adventurers got in touch privately and said I’ve never talked about this but, hey, me too. This happens to me, it’s awful. And I’m certainly not the first person to talk about it but it made me realize that this is something that you need to talk about, and it’s important. It helps people and it helps people to identify maybe something similar to what they’re going through themselves. I think also I wanted to tell the whole story of what it is to race like this. I wanted to bring in all of the joy and the excitement and the exhilaration and hopefully you read the book and you realize how much I love this and how happy it makes me, but there’s also all of the terrible things I wanted to bring in as well, to be honest about it.
Jessica: You absolutely do get your joy, I will never forget the chapter about Albania, where you set it up like “I’ve heard this is a terrible place” and at the end you’re like “I love this country!” I will never forget it. You can feel your joy in your writing. I did want to ask about the overall frame of the book. It would make sense almost for you to tell the story of the failure in 2015 – not failure, but just the fact you didn’t finish in 2015 – and then the victory of 2016 and kind of leave it there, but that is not at all where you leave it. There’s this last portion about your friendship with Mike, about his death, and then your trying to cope with that and the time after that. It ends on the Transcontinental 2017. Why that, why that framing for this book? Why not just tell us about your victory lap?
Emily: I think because I didn’t want to write a book that was just about me winning a race, that seemed quite egotistical and quite boring, because a lot of books do have the narrative of ‘I started doing this, I tried, I failed, I triumphed in the end.’ I think part of me just thought, I want to be original. The book was in my mind in the planning stages before Mike died, and I talked about it with him, he was planning his own books, and I already knew then that me winning the race wouldn’t be the final chapter, I think I wanted it to be at least three years and the first one I fail, the second one I win, the third one I don’t know what will happen, because I wanted to put the victory in the middle. After Mike died it all stopped for quite a long time and I gave up on everything. Then I started to sort of settle down and get my head around things a bit more and think about the book again. It was this moment where I realized that if I wrote the book I was going to have to write about Mike and that that would probably be part three, would be Mike and his death and hope I cope with that and not really about racing at all.
In hindsight now, one of the reasons I couldn’t have the victory at the end of the book is that winning the race was, as you said, it was anticlimactic. It wasn’t the final victory that I’d imagined. It was kind of a, okay I’ve done that, it’s an experience I’ve ticked off, I know how that feels but what am I really looking for? I won’t give away the ending – it’s not a very exciting ending, but if you read the book you realize that I find some things I’m looking for outside of racing.
Jessica: Yes. My last big question, it’s not a focus of your book but gender shows up here and there throughout. Ultra endurance cycling is mainly a bunch of men, I’m guessing a lot of white men. We learn about handful of women riders and racers in your book as the community is small and these women are often both your inspiration or your competition or both. I just wanted to ask you in the years that you’ve been participating, has women’s participation in the sport grown? How have you seen that community of women change while you’ve been in it?
Emily: Oh, it has grown massively. This is one of the happiest things about it. So, five years ago when I first got into this I met Juliana Buhring, kind of the big cheese at that point, the only other woman I’d heard of who did this sort of thing. She and I made friends. We went for a ride together at one point and I remember being so excited that I’d found another woman who wanted to do the kind of bike riding that I did, like go on all night, go on for days, have a really terrible time riding and come out the other side, and it was amazing. And for a while I had a friend who could do that. Now everyone I know, pretty much, is a woman who does long distance. Every year there are more.
Jessica: Wow.
Emily: I know for the last five years I’ve watched people get into it, sign up for their first race, maybe not always have a very good time, maybe not always last very long in the race, but then go home and put themselves back together and do more things and then go on to win races. People are now setting up their own things, their own races, setting up their own training camps and get-togethers and communities, and it’s become this really wonderful scene with more and more people in it. Because I think we all still feel like we’re fairly new to it, so we’re all about brining more people in, don’t worry if you feel really stupid because I did like two years ago and I’m alright now, so come and make your stupid mistakes! We won’t laugh at you, and give it two years you’ll probably win the TransCon as well.
Jessica: That’s great.
Emily: It’s been wonderful.
Jessica: You have that wonderful section of your book where you’re struggling on…What was the name of the mountain?
Emily: Oh, Mont Ventoux.
Jessica: Mont Ventoux. And you’re struggling up it and the way you get through is you think about all the women who inspire you and you list them out. I was inspired reading that.
Emily: I would need a much longer mountain these days, I think. There are so many women who inspire me.
Jessica: That’s spectacular. That’s great. So last week on Twitter you wrote, “recording an audiobook is exhausting” which made me laugh when I saw it, because I had just finished Where There’s A Will and I was thinking oh, that’s what’s exhausting!? But that means there’s gonna be an audiobook, correct, for Where There’s A Will?
Emily: Yes, there is, there is. I don’t know exactly when it will be out but soon, I think.
Jessica: Great. Well I highly suggest that anyone interested in this at all should go get a copy, it’s also just a beautiful book if you enjoy beautiful writing. Where on the internet can our listeners find you?
Emily: I think the best place to look for me is probably on Twitter, so I am @EmilyChappell. Chappell has two p’s and two l’s. You should be able to find me.
Jessica: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, thank you for being on Burn It All Down.
Emily: It’s a massive pleasure, thank you for speaking to me.
Shireen: Lindsay, can you take us into our next segment please?
Lindsay: Yeah, so this was a very important conversation to have. First of all, this week in The Daily Beast Sydney Bauer wrote a very important article about how 19 different bills have been filed at 11 state legislatures over the past two months all introduced by Republican lawmakers, all targeting the transgender community. In most of these bills they specifically target to restrict the participation of transgender students in state sports competition. So this is what’s going on on the grassroots level. We talked about this, about Martina Navratilova last year, who came forward and made some very transphobic comments and those comments were then used by state legislatures to try and push bills like this forward. Martina said oh, I was just talking about elite athletes. But the Republican lawmakers very conveniently didn’t make that distinction and Martina Navratilova really has never fully apologized or fully grappled with the damage that she caused with those statements and unfortunately this week we had another incident of an elite athlete spreading transphobic misinformation.
This was actually our badass woman of the week last week, Claressa Shields. So this week Shields amplified a story about a female boxer publicly alleging that another boxer, Alejandra Jiménez, was born a man. So just to break down what happened here, Carlette Ewell, who is a world champion boxer, made a very transphobic Facebook post baselessly claiming that Alejandra Jiménez was born a man, and that the World Boxing Commission was covering it up because they wanted her to have a marquee fight with Claressa Shields and wanted to earn money from that. So Shields retweeted that article and said, “I don’t know if this is true, but the @WBCBoxing doesn’t even allow women to box 3 minute rds, so why would they allow a man to change into a woman and box. Doesn’t seem logical. But paperwork would be nice.”
Now, the WBC came out and publicly released in actually what was a very scathing letter directed at Ewells shutting down these rumors. First of all, there is zero proof that Jiménez…She has a bigger frame but she’s actually lost like 80 pounds all through boxing, so she has a little bit of a different build. She has short hair and she’s now being discriminated against. Among other things, she did give birth ten years ago. She’s a mother, too. So in a letter, WBC boxing said, “It’s shameful and regrettable to read the irresponsible, defamatory, discriminatory, untrue comments on social media concerning Alejandra Jiménez, our proud WBC super middleweight world champion. The individuals writing such rubbish and the organizations publishing it have zero moral integrity.”
So at least they came out against it, but Claressa Shields did not apologize for her tweets spreading misinformation. All she did was say, “Well that clears it. Jimenez is a woman who gave birth 10 years ago. Thank you to the @WBCBoxing for clearing it up.” But that does not do anything to take account for the fact that she was A) spreading lies about another boxer, and B) spreading transphobic notions. It was very disappointing for me to hear this from Shields and I’m worried, as we see these transphobic bills being pushed through quickly on the grassroots level to try and take sports away from trans youth, using fear mongering about ‘protecting women’ which is bullshit, to exclude youth participation in sports. Our elite athletes who have this microphone need to be more careful than ever, and my fear is, and this is the reality, that they are drinking the misinformation, the transphobic Kool Aid too, and spreading that incredibly irresponsibly. There is no excuse for this from Claressa Shields.
Shireen: Yeah, I will sort of echo what you’re saying here. I tried to follow a little bit of what was happening, not just with this, but now there’s this rift with Laila Ali, and I don’t know if it’s for promotional purposes or boxing purposes but there seems to be a lot of back and forth and bizarre fighting and challenging and talking trash, all that stuff. But getting back to this transphobic issue, I was so disappointed because Claressa Shields is somebody that we’ve had on the show before, we’ve talked about her numerous times when she’s won her belts and to see this kind of thing was so bitterly disappointing because the way that Alejandra was treated was completely, completely unacceptable. And then saying, you know, thank you to UBC for clearing that up – why did they need to clear it up, is my question. Why did this entire thing need to happen?
The fact that you don’t walk back and say what I did was not okay…I know there’s absolutely a place for, and I appreciate women who are brash and bold and very confident but when you cross lines that are discriminatory, transphobic, and all kinds of issues, that’s where it stops for me. I’m not struggling with this because it’s very clear for me, I’m very disappointed in this and the way that it was handled. Quite frankly I’m just very disappointed because Claressa Shields is somebody that’s reached out, I wrote an article about her and Amaiya Zafar for The Shadow League and how she mentors young women in boxing, and there’s so much good that she does, but I’m like, you can’t not acknowledge this, and I’m really glad we’re talking about it. Brenda?
Brenda: Yeah, Claressa Shields is also very open about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, and there’s no way not to see the vulnerability and not admire the place from which she’s come, but I am so bummed out about this. How can the very people that would be hurting trans people are the people that have hurt her, and she’s empowering the very people that abuse. It is so sad. I know people are complicated, it’s a bummer for me too, I always loved the fact that she was from Flint. I loved seeing the happiness that it brought a place that was in the news for being basically poisoning its residents and then dropped off the news and because they’re poor and because they’re Black they are being constantly discriminated against and denied basic rights and water. I mean, I was so excited and yeah, that’s very upsetting. Her fighting with Ali has been a couple years now and I’m happy to talk about that if we want, but Ali hasn’t necessarily…Has she come forward in supporting Jiménez?
Shireen: No, her discussion…And she might’ve been fighting with Ali for a while, but this past week all of it sort of erupted again.
Brenda: Yeah, yeah.
Shireen: This back and forth on Instagram. I actually messaged Lindsay like, I need to mute her, because I just can’t with this anymore. She went out and said now I’m gonna challenge Laila Ali, who’s 42, to a bout, $10m for the winner and $5m for the loser, etc, etc. It’s just a lot, but I do believe that Laila Ali sort of said well, she couldn’t beat me, that kind of thing.
Brenda: She did, even in 2017 and 2018 she talked about that there wasn’t Olympics when she boxed…
Shireen: Okay, right.
Lindsay: During her career. But I don’t mind, honestly, it’s annoying the back and forth, but that just kind of is boxing, men’s boxing too, it’s about hyping the fight, you’re self-promoters. One of the problems facing Shields right now is that she doesn’t have a true rival so I get all that, but it’s a lot. It’s a lot.
Brenda: I still love Ali, I mean, I don’t know…
Lindsay: All of this really says to me is that the activists, the reporters, people who are telling stories, need to be so much more responsible with how we’re telling these stories because they are reading this, you know what I mean? Elite athletes are reading this, and they’re susceptible to misinformation and fear mongering too. There’s just so much education that still needs to be done around this topic and unfortunately so much of it is treated as this hot controversial topic. Shut down that framing, it’s not a controversial topic, that’s not how to frame this. The more we frame it that way and the more we give legitimacy to the other side, that wants to keep trans youth out of sports and wants to call every woman that doesn’t look like our stereotypical woman ‘a man’ what we’re doing is we’re infusing hate and racism and homophobia and transphobia into women’s sports and my dream is that women’s sports needs to be a place without all of that.
That’s the job that we need to keep working at and doing, but ultimately people like Claressa Shields, people like Martina Navratilova, they’re reading the headlines too and they’re susceptible to all this bullshit too. I just urge media to be careful what stories you give air to, be careful when you weigh both sides equally. And remember during all of this, during elite competitions like the IOC, even the NCAA, there are rules in place for transgender athletes already and most people agree that those rules are pretty fair around testosterone. It’s not like all of this in unregulated, you know what I mean? There are, when you get to the elite levels, some guidelines already in place. If you want to fight against those specific guidelines then that’s a different conversation to have but most of this is not that, most of this is just ‘this man being a woman to take my trophies.’ It’s devastating and young trans people are reading this and they are internalizing it and they are feeling like they’re not welcome in sports and in society at large and there is zero excuse for that.
Shireen: Moving on to our favorite part of the show, the burn pile. Bren, can you get us going please?
Brenda: Yes, I’d love to. I’m burning the lack of organization, intelligence and initiative of the men that run Brazilian domestic football clubs. It’s not the first time that I’ve burned them I’m sure, and it probably won’t be the last, but these men are unbelievable. So, the attacker, maybe you’ve heard of her, Cristiane, one of the most prominent women’s soccer players in the world. Her mother is aging, and she wanted to go back to Brazil. We know that soccer for women in Brazil was legally banned between 1941 and 1981, that they’ve had a real uphill battle, the only thing that’s ever saved them is their own grit and determination, work, sacrifice, and amazing pool of talent that Brazil is always gonna have. She have up contracts with PSG and Lyon and decided that she had to move back to Brazil to be with her mom and also, I’ll come back to this, she has just recently come out for the first time officially last year. So her partner is in the mix as well.
Guess who can’t find her a team? Guess what guys didn’t decide that this was the pick of a lifetime, at 34, okay fine, she’s in amazing shape. This is the all-time most amazing scorer in Olympic history with 14 goals. She also was the top scorer in the Copa América Femenina. She was 3rd place for FIFA player of the year several times, she is the all time top scorer for the Copa Libertadores Femenina and the Sudamericano Femenino…Anyway, it doesn’t matter, she’s frigging amazing and everybody knows it, and you’re telling me you can’t find any team!? No job for you! So it took months, it was back and forth, it was really confusing. This past Thursday after a lot of mobilization of women journalists writing for independent outlets, of course, for no money, put enough pressure on them, Santos finally – the famed club of Pelé – came forward and figured out that oh my gosh, they do have a place for Cristiane in their roster.
I would just like to say, since she’s only played 29 games back in the Brazilian league, her average has been 1.5 goals per match. The ineptitude of the people running it, that ineptitude – if that’s really what it is, and not just straight out misogyny – is still sexist, and I want to burn it. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Shireen: I’m gonna go next. While we’re talking about women’s football anyway, I’m gonna just get right into this. This past week Lucy Gillett, she’s the Crystal Palace goalkeeper, said that she was subjected to sexist abuse during last week’s championship game at Coventry United. So this is deep into England and apparently this 25 year old was standing in the net, doing her job, and there’s men in the crowd calling the referee and screaming out “Check the gender!” So yeah, it’s awful. It’s absolutely awful and I think one of the things that’s always bothered me about this type of sexist abuse that’s been vocalized and hurled is the goalkeeper’s actually, not static, but is in one small area. It’s very easy to taunt them and it’s so upsetting, particularly when they’re saying stuff like this, and I think when people say oh, you should really just forget it, you should have thicker skin – but it doesn’t work like that, not with these levels of sexism and misogyny in sport.
My problem with this however is that although the football association has been aware, they have a spokesperson who said blah blah blah, we’re committed to tackling everything, homophobia/biphobia/transphobia at every level, which is fine, and they’re leading an investigation. The problem that I actually had with this, her reply kind of bothered me because she said there was a lot of verbal abusive comments, some directed at her directly and some at the whole team. But she actually said that, “if it was a racist comment it wouldn’t be tolerated. We’ve had players walk off the pitches for racist comments, maybe I should’ve walked off the pitch for that match.” Okay, hold up now. I think the idea that she thinks racist comments wouldn’t be tolerated…I don’t know what sports league she’s looking at because they are completely tolerated!
My problem is on the one hand I hear you and I’m with you standing against misogyny and sexism, but on the other hand no, you don’t get to compare sexism and racism if you’re a white woman, you do not get to do that. When we talked about it in the previous segment about Lindsay saying there’s a lot of learning that needs to be done, this is just one of those things. All systems of discrimination and oppression are wrong. You can say they’re all wrong, but to say this would’ve been dealt with, no. Racism has not actually been dealt with by the FA, in fact they are absolutely horrible in dealing with it. I’m not really sure where she’s going with that, I do still hate that this happened to her and it’s not okay and I want it to be dealt with but please, if you’re the receiver of sexism and misogynist abuse, don’t say it would’ve been dealt with much better because I’ve never seen when racism in football has been dealt with properly. I’m going to burn not only the people heckling but these systems and ways of dealing with it are not great, so I’m going to burn all of that. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Shireen: Linz.
Lindsay: Yeah, first of all I’d like to burn this car alarm that is still going off! Like I said, my entire neighborhood, I’m sure, is about to start throwing things. It’s 9:30 on a Sunday morning. Apologies, listeners, there’s literally nothing I can do. Whew, God, I can’t even think. It’s so annoying! Okay. I’d like to burn, keeping on the women’s soccer bandwagon, the lack of coverage of the NWSL draft. I was there, there were a bunch of amazing reporters there, who of course do great work – Meg Linehan of The Athletic did a phenomenal piece going behind the scenes of Sky Blue you should read, Steph Yang over at All for XI did phenomenal work, McCauley for SB Nation, obviously the Equalizer had everything covered. I’m not saying it didn’t get coverage, but the mainstream outlets had absolutely nothing and they didn’t send reporters there.
There were zero ESPN reporters at the draft, zero Sports Illustrated reporters at the draft, there were zero USA Today reporters at the draft, New York Times didn’t have anything on the draft, they didn’t even have anything after the Mallory Pugh trade which brought Mallory Pugh to Jersey, to the New York team! There were no wire photos, you can’t find a photo of the draft on AP images or on Getty images which is where reporters go to get images when they’re writing about these stories. SI did have stories written from afar, but these are outlets that have very capable soccer reporters, who management should have sent to the draft itself.
It’s so infuriating because we’re coming off this year where everyone was so eager to put Meg Rapinoe on the cover of their magazines and give her awards, elevate her words and act like they were doing something great by doing that, and they were, but they don’t follow through. They don’t follow through and cover the sport in the day to day action. You can’t cover everything, but this is the draft. You can make time for this. It’s in Baltimore, it’s not hard to get to, and it’s got all the biggest stars of the future right there. In order to sustain women’s soccer there has got to be coverage of things like the draft, and it’s gotta be prioritized. I’m just so sick of all of these big outlets doing these ‘year of the women in sports’ things, and women’s soccer players are our people of the year, and really what they’re doing is profiting off their greatness, you know, by spreading that stuff. Then they’re not doing the work to sustain the sport and I’m so over it. I want to throw it on the burn pile. Burn.
Group: Burn.
Shireen: After all that burning we’re going to lift up some amazing, amazing people. I just wanted to say, this is so exciting: Spanish women’s footballers have also reached their first collective bargaining agreement, so hurrah for that!
Congrats to 90 year old Barbara Buttrick who, in June, will be inducted as the first female boxer into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. The 90 year old legend has had the Miami Beach City Commission declare that January 15 shall be known as as Barbara Buttrick Day. So that’s excellent.
Congrats to friend of the show and half of my favorite New York couple Meg Linehan for being awarded a 2019 Media Award by United Soccer Coaches for her story in The Athletic: “The USWNT beat Thailand 13-0 because you don’t win World Cups by playing nice.”
Miigwech to the Strong Warrior Girls Anishnaabe Singers who performed the National Anthem at the Winnipeg Jets game on Saturday Night as a part of the Indigenous Culture Night in the NHL. It was the first time the anthem was sung in Ojibwe for any major sports league.
Sophia Smith, the No. 1 overall pick in the NWSL draft by the Portland Thorns. Of course we want to congratulate all of the other draftees too, especially Konya Plummer, who became the first player born in Jamaica to be drafted in the NWSL. She was selected 10th overall by the Orlando Pride.
Holly Holm, Roxanne Modafferi, and Sabina Mazo, who were all winners at UFC 246.
I also wanted to shout out Caitlin Nash and Natalie Corless, the first women’s team to compete in world cup doubles in luge. So there are women’s singles and men’s singles races on the world cup luge circuit, but there is no rule saying doubles must be composed of two men, so a moth ago Nash and Corless were able to race in that, and just won silver in the youth Olympics which are going on at the moment. So that’s pretty exciting.
Can I get a drumroll please?
Our badass woman of the week is Alyssa Nakken, who has been appointed the first woman coach in Major League Baseball. This is going to be exciting. The Giants have made her a part of their team, congratulations to San Francisco. She played softball in Sacramento State and she’s been with them ever since, this is just really really exciting and we’re looking forward to seeing all the incredible waves that she makes.
Now, what’s good? Actually that horn is growing on me! But anyways, Brenda, what is good in your world?
Brenda: This past couple of days have been amazing. I went to Baltimore and spoke on behalf of Fare to the Independent Supporters Council, which-
Lindsay: She was fabulous!
Brenda: There’s some hilarious pictures of me online catching that speech as I look annoyed under giant slides that say ‘WHAT IS A DISCRIMINATORY ACT?’ so it’s pretty funny, but getting to the work, basically what this is is for all of the various soccer leagues in the US, not just MLS or NWSL but all of the leagues like USL as well, there are these supporters groups that have grown up around them, much like European and Latin American soccer, and they do so much work in their communities, they are super progressive and interesting and independent from the club’s front office. That is part of the charter of ISC. So coming from Latin America and their barras bravas having a history of violence, and the women are changing that right now, but it was so refreshing to me to see supporters clubs that are just awesome and progressive and doing community work. I met a million wonderful people, and I got to hang out with Lindsay which was super fun, and that was really good. I’m still kind of glowing from that.
Shireen: That is awesome. So, my birthday’s on Wednesday and I know that everybody has January 22nd written into their calendars-
Brenda: Woo!
Shireen: -but I think that in addition to that, my birthday actually falls on the day that two of my kids have high school exams. So it’s just going to be me and my youngest just hanging out. I’m gonna go really wild and go to Panera, because I get free coffee and pastry, and for those of you that don’t know Panera gives you free coffee and pastry on your birthday.
Lindsay: What!
Shireen: I’ve been doing this like five years running. You just have to get a membership card with them and they’re lovely, they really like celebrating people. It’s wonderful and I really do like their coffee. I do want to mention again, I was on this great panel for She’s4Sports, an organization in Toronto. Ainka Jess organized it, Ainka, you’re amazing, and thank you for all the work you put in. It was a really incredible panel to be a part of, it was featured on the news and stuff and written about even in the national paper, one of them, the Globe and Mail. It was really wonderful because there was a lot of really fun questions, I got to plug Burn It All Down constantly, which is what I also like to do.
Also I’m in Chicago this weekend volleyball mom-ing, I’m actually just going around mom-ing everybody. At the panel Kayla came in, Kayla Alexander plays for Chicago Sky and the Canadian national women’s team, and she looked a little under the weather so I was like you need a tea! You need a ginger tea! She’s like yeah, I think I do! So I sent my son out, my eldest, and he got her a tea. That was great. Even this guy at this restaurant in Chicago looked a little under the weather and I was giving him cough drops. So I’m basically just moving through the world mom-ing everybody, and that’s okay with me, y’all. Totally okay. So yay for that. Linds?
Lindsay: First of all what’s great is that Shireen started out the show plugging our “vee log” which you’re not following, is a vlog.
Shireen: How do you…Is it “vlog?”
Lindsay: It’s vlog, like log! Vlog!
Shireen: That’s so complicated. Okay. Vlog.
Brenda: It is uncomfortable to pronounce. To be fair, vlog is a yucky word. And vee-log is-
Lindsay: Definitely no better!
Brenda: No, I like it! Vee-log! I disagree. I like vee-log.
Lindsay: Anyway, in case our listeners were taken aback by that. It is okay to laugh at Shireen for that, I’m giving everyone permission.
Brenda: Or to take it up! To start spreading it!
Lindsay: Please don’t spread vee-log! I just don’t like it.
Shireen: It just doesn’t roll off my Pakistani tongue, vlog.
Brenda: Right!
Shireen: It doesn’t work.
Lindsay: Alright, moving on, mom. Baltimore was great, seeing Brenda was great. I agree, meeting all these passionate supporters of MLS, NWSL teams was so great. I met so many good people who are doing such good work all around and building these communities very intentionally, and I love that, it’s so important. So I love Baltimore. We got to meet some listeners of the show, I got to meet some Power Plays readers, always come up and say hi because it means the absolute world. Also all this baseball drama, it’s hysterical. I know it’s actually really serious but the hysteria online, the dissecting of Jose Altuve’s shirts and the sleuthing, the trash cans, I am invested. And the Australian Open starts, so tennis today! I’m so excited about the Australian Open and I don’t have to be in an office everyday now, so I will be hopefully able to see more of it than I usually am, so I’m excited.
Shireen: That’s it for this week in Burn It All Down. Although we are done for now you can always burn all day and night in our fabulous array of merchandise including mugs, tees, hoodies, bags, and what better way to smash toxic patriarchy in sports and sports media than by getting someone you love a pillow with our photo on it? So go check out our Teespring store.
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