Episode 163: NASCAR and the Confederate flag, NOlympics, and the Return of Women's Sport Leagues
This week, Shireen, Lindsay, and Brenda dig into the history of NASCAR and the decision to ban the Confederate flag from future races [6:18]. After that, Lindsay interviews NOLympics LA organizers Molly Lambert, and Anne Orchier about the movement to abolish the Olympics [25:30]. Finally, they discuss the return of women's sports [46:31].
Of course, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [57:24], the Bad Ass Woman of the Week segment, starring Natasha Cloud [1:06:37], and what is good in our worlds [1:08:46].
Links
Who Is Bubba Wallace? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/sports/autoracing/nascar-confederate-flag-bubba-wallace.html
NASCAR’s quest to separate the heritage from the hate: https://archive.thinkprogress.org/nascars-quest-to-separate-the-heritage-from-the-hate-59c96fa0b266/
How 2 female NASCAR tire changers are making Daytona 500 history: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/02/nascar-daytona-500-women-pit-crew
Why NASCAR’s New Ban on the Confederate Flag Is Such a Big Deal: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nascar-confederate-flag/
Bubba Wallace' Black Lives Matter scheme car from Martinsville race can now be ordered online: https://www.cbssports.com/nascar/news/bubba-wallace-black-lives-matter-scheme-car-from-martinsville-race-can-now-be-ordered-online/
WNBA players, former Sparks GM Penny Toler speak out about WNBA proposed plan: https://thenext.substack.com/p/wnba-players-former-sparks-gm-penny
Jayda Coleman Named Gatorade National Softball Player of the Year: https://www.si.com/high-school/2020/06/11/jayda-coleman-gatorade-national-softball-player-of-the-year
Chelsea donate WSL prize money to Refuge: https://www.eurosport.com/football/barclays-fa-wsl/2019-2020/football-news-chelsea-donate-wsl-prize-money-to-refuge_sto7771042/story.shtml
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello hello hello and welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. My name is Lindsay Gibbs, I am the founder of the Power Plays newsletter, and joining me as we enter month, I think, one thousand of lockdown, are two of my fabulous co-hosts: Shireen Ahmed, the – now I just think of everyone’s intro for you – freelance sports reporter and cat-lover up in Toronto, Canada. Hey, Shireen!
Shireen: Hello, good morning!
Lindsay: I feel like I don’t wanna spoil our what’s good, but I feel like I now have to add “the birthday gift-giver-extraordinaire” [laughter] to that list, because I can’t stop thinking about that photo…You all will have to stay til the end of the episode to figure out what we’re talking about. Also, we’ve got Dr. Brenda Elsey in New York, she is the associate professor of history at Hofstra University. Hi, Brenda!
Brenda: Hello, good morning.
Lindsay: Today we’ve got a great show for you – because when do we not? We’re gonna be talking NASCAR which is actually, believe it or not, our loyal listeners will know, not the first time we’ve done deep dives into NASCAR on the show. It’s been a big week in NASCAR with them finally banning the confederate flag, so we’ll dive into that. I talked with NOlympics LA organizers Molly Lambert and Anne Orchier, and then we’re just gonna talk a bit about the women’s sports leagues that are starting back because the media likes to pretend that the only thing going on is the men’s sports leagues, but we know that’s not true. First though, speaking of women’s sports, there’s been some news about the selection to host the Women’s World Cup. Once again, it’s in less than three years and we still don’t know where it’s gonna be. Brenda, can you get us updated on the World Cup selection news?
Brenda: Yeah, it’s all bad for me. [laughter]
Lindsay: So that means Brazil’s gone, is what you’re saying.
Brenda: Brazil pulled out, which absolutely would’ve made the most sense if you’re critical of mega-events and the way in which they spend money because this would’ve been a wonderful use of the enormous white elephant stadiums that were put into place or modified for the 2014 World Cup. It also would be the first time it was held in Latin America, so that’s very upsetting for me personally because the Brazilian federation claimed it couldn’t get the government onboard. Okay…But it really just shows that they’re really not interested in stabilizing the women’s league, so I was bummed about that. Also, I’m disgusted by the rubric, the way in which they get points for this. It is supposed to promote the diffusion of the game and to support women playing and instead the red on Colombia’s report, the #1 reason why they have less points than Australia and New Zealand, is because of money, it’s seen as less profitable. Australians have money. [laughs]
Lindsay: So you’re saying we’re just perpetuating the existing systems with this decision?
Brenda: Yep, absolutely!
Lindsay: Shireen, do you have any feelings?
Shireen: Yeah, we talked about this a couple top of the shows ago, and I was very open and excited about the possibility of Australia and I agree with Brenda though, I love Brazil. But something that really is really fascinating about this, these arbitrary sort of judgements and modules that they use, I think it’s good to note, somebody replied to Rob Harris who had a Twitter thread about it, and this person’s name is Kevin Pollard, and they said that actually Qatar’s 2022 bid was considered to be a “high operational risk” and US was a favorite considering structure, politics, safety, weather, everything, but Qatar ended up winning. So these methods of judging and stuff, we don’t know. I know it's terrible that Brazil left, they withdrew, but I’m just saying that the way this whole thing is done is so slimy and I don’t like it. Really, I don’t have a better word for it. I think it’s slimy. I think of FIFA, I think of slimy, that’s the technical term. But I think I’m wanting to support and hopefully, if I can have the money, I’ll go to the corners of the world to support it, to support women's football.
Lindsay: Yes, same. Bren?
Brenda: We should probably mention Japan, right? That is also Shireen and I’s backup team, usually, and that’s been going through something really weird, which is the establishment of a new league called WE: Women’s Empowerment – it’s an English name for the Japanese league, which is kind of superseding the Nadeshiko league, which is considered to be the oldest semi- or professional women’s league in the world that continuously has played for 30 years. That’s seen as being part of their bid, and I really think in future shows we’ll dig into this a little more because I don’t get what’s going on there at all, why they would put that league underneath this new one. A lot of questions for me.
Lindsay: We will return to that question in later shows, and we will return to some women’s soccer talk later in this show. But for now, let’s start on the track. Shireen, can you tell us what is going on in NASCAR right now?
Shireen: Yeah, thanks Lindsay. This was a lot of fun for me, to be assigned to do the intro to this segment. I know nothing about NASCAR other than watching Lightning McQueen and knowing that they drive around the track, like, 500 times. Apparently that’s where Indy came on – I did not know this. They sort of turn left. This was my only understanding about what race car driving was. Particularly, I think the politics surrounding it…Let’s just say it’s not super welcoming for BIPOC, but what I mean is it’s just not something that particularly interested me. I think when I got to understanding more and heard about two particular women, who I will mention later in this segment, but just learning about that it has an interesting history, let’s just say that. For those of you that don’t know, NASCAR is the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing and the only reason I’m repeating this, all of you may know but I certainly didn’t, and I got this information from the Smithsonian magazine.
What was really fascinating was to read about the history of it was that this happened during prohibition. NASCAR ended up coming out specifically on December 14th, 1947. There’s somebody named Big Bill France – he was a bootlegger, a runner. The way that NASCAR was actually formulated was these drivers who used to take this bootleg alcohol would be very familiar with the roads and would learn how to drive with exceptional skill, so that’s actually where tis was born and where this ideology kind of came from. It came and they held a meeting, Big Bill France, he held a meeting with other drivers, car owners, mechanics, to put in what are standardized rules I guess, ideas and regulations in terms of the way it would function, and there was born NASCAR. I think that that’s really interesting, because any sport that was born out of resistance or disruption fascinates me, and I didn’t know this.
However, however – there’s a big however here – [Lindsay laughing] the culture that NASCAR took on was very different. When I think of NASCAR I think south of the Mason Dixon line, I think of the Confederate flag, I think of just a place I would literally never wanna be, that’s what I think of. I don’t know much about it, truthfully, other than that there was an article in the bit of digging that I did, there was an article written for Forbes magazine – I’m not angry at this article – by Dave Caldwell. It talks about the history, not just Danica Patrick who’s very prominently a race car driver, but it’s just that I would prefer if it was a little more critical – that’s my actual reaction to everything written by men all the time. And if it was written by a woman or BIPOC I would just be more interested. Now, I think that what I do appreciate is talking about women, though every single person mentioned in this article is white; most of them are blonde. You know, #NotAllBlondes.
But the point is, there’s very little…I did also learn that in up and coming leagues under the umbrella of NASCAR, there’s something called the K&N Series East and West, there’s different people, and these are all under the umbrella of this. You have to participate in a certain amount of the smaller races to be able to qualify for a bigger one. You know, it’s just formulated in very much the same way that other sports leagues would be formulated. So at the point where all this is happening there hasn’t been a woman who’s had a cup ride in quite a while, although NASCAR does have a diverse city program – and you’re all like, WHAT? They do have a diverse city program. I think for them the weight of the diversity program is more on gender. It’s been a big big big news week for NASCAR, we will get into that. They have famously announced that they will ban the Confederate flag, as Lindsay mentioned, and so I don’t know if this is the beginning of a decolonization piece or anti-oppression movement within NASCAR but whatever it is, I’m willing to go along for the ride!
Lindsay: Yeah, so I think I’ve talked about on the show before, we have talked about the Drive for Diversity program before here, and I grew up in the south so NASCAR was around me. It was a big deal, a big sport, but I never had an interest in it at all. My dad would watch it a lot, and his friends, and I’d just be like, why would you ever watch this? They’re literally just driving in circles, the typical hate. And culturally it just didn’t appeal to me that much either, and then when I was a contract writer for Bleacher Report maybe 6-7 years ago my editor, who I worked with on tennis stuff and Olympic stuff and other things, he was also the NASCAR editor and so he just asked me one day, “Can you write a column about the NASCAR race this week?” And I was very broke and needed whatever the amount I was getting per column, $130 or something, and of course I needed the work, so I just said absolutely, no problem, and then went and learned as much about NASCAR as I could in two days.
I ended up writing about the sport kind of week in week out for a couple of years and I grew to like it a lot more than I ever thought I would, for a lot of reasons. There’s primarily what I always talk about: it’s an easy sport to come into because it’s the same drivers on a week in week out basis, so it’s kind of the same 25 main characters, people that you’re getting to know, so it’s really easy to follow the rivalries and the drama and to get personally invested in these drivers and their teams. Of course, then there’s the big huge diversity problem. There’s only 1 full-time Black driver in NASCAR on the top series, on the top echelon of the sport, and that is Bubba Wallace. He’s been around for a few years and has just always been…I mean, he’s never shied away from answering questions about race, but he never really wanted to engage deeply in the topic, I think. He came through the Drive for Diversity program and it was part of his story, and for understandable reasons…
There was a video on Bleacher Report up from a few years ago where he talks about the fact that he thinks he’s not getting any sponsors because he’s Black, that’s why he’s having trouble finding sponsors. And that video was almost immediately completely scrubbed from the internet. I’m sure he and his team and NASCAR worked really hard to get that away. But over the past few weeks Bubba has been the leader of the sport in addressing Black Lives Matter, in opening up and pushing his fellow drivers to say something, putting the pressure on the top names in the sport to condemn the murder of George Floyd, to have frank discussions about race. It’s been one of the more powerful things I’ve witnessed, I mean, he is just the epitome of having the pressure of a sport on his shoulders, and most people are not willing to engage in this topic. He has risked a lot because of how much NASCAR is tied to sponsorship, how much NASCAR is tied to this conservative marketplace, and how much hate he’s gotten throughout his career just for being Black. He has stood up in this moment and really pushed the sport forward.
There’s been some surprising allies that we’ve seen: Ty Dillon is a white driver who came up in the scenes with Bubba Wallace and they had last week this 30 minute long deep dive Instagram discussion on race and that’s something I never thought I would see from two NASCAR drivers. Dale Earnhardt Jr has long been a leader in wanting the Confederate flag to be banned from all NASCAR races, so he’s been leading the charge, but we’ve really seen this kind of upswell of momentum. The NASCAR drivers had come together to put out a video addressing systemic racism, you’ve seen names from top to bottom of the sport hashtagging #BlackLivesMatter. It’s the bare minimum, I get it, but to see it in this sport feels like a significant step and it all culminated when Bubba called for the Confederate flag to be banned. This is something he’s been advocating for, but he really in this moment, I think, realized the momentum he had, and NASCAR finally said you’re right, we’re gonna ban it.
What this means we still have to see. When I was at a race in Richmond a couple of years ago, actually four years ago for ThinkProgress…Yes, there were some trailers and some RVs that had the flag flying high, the actual flag itself, but it was more that that symbol was on t-shirts, it was on hats, it was on coolers, it was everywhere you looked kind of ingrained into what people were wearing, and once we get back to a place where lots of fans are at these games I’m very curious as to what we’re gonna see next. Which is a long way to say it’s been a big week, but obviously it’s only the beginning. Shireen, for those who have not deeply listened to our archive, can you tell us a little more about the Drive for Diversity and how that has helped the sport?
Shireen: Sure. The Drive for Diversity program was really an attempt to reach out to different communities and have people coming up through the ranks, women or people from racialized communities, and even some LGBTQI, although I don’t actually know if there was a specific call for LGBTQI community outreach there. However I think that what ended up happening is we know of two names very specifically: Brehanna Daniels, who was the first Black woman to be featured, and she has won badass woman of the week on our show before, and along with her is someone called Brenna O’Leary who is not a Black woman, but she’s a woman.
The two of them were famously on a team together and it made news that there was two women, one Black and one white, but just the fact that there was two women on this pit team, which was a really big deal. Now, when you think of the total numbers of people in the entire system of NASCAR it doesn’t seem like a lot, but considering it’s literally 99%, I would say, white – I might even say ninety nine point something, but there’s not actual statistics, because I looked for them, on the number of BIPOC or marginalized people and what that looks like. NASCAR doesn’t keep numbers on this, they’ll just point to the diversity program. I do believe it’s growing; there’s Bubba Wallace’s impact on youth moving forward.
I think it’ll grow, it has a long way to grow. I’m not comfortable saying that NASCAR is a place where there is equitable or sustainable change, I’m not ready to say that yet personally, because I just don’t think that’s a thing at this point with NASCAR. Now, that being said, with Brehanna Daniels talking so much – and she’s very articulate, she’s very excited, she’s quite young, she’s in her early to mid twenties, like, to be able to say that and really look and find your career and find a family. Her interviews are great, she’s very enthused and emphatic about loving NASCAR. She loves it, and she’s found a team there. That makes me hopeful. But you know, there’s the cynical side of me that’s like, okay, maybe that’s just in one pocket. But we’ll see, especially with the changes coming forth and this entire thing.
Lindsay: Yeah, and I think it’s important to note a few things; first of all, the Drive for Diversity program is more than a decade old at this point, so there have been people doing the work. There are actually a lot – I was surprised when I started covering the sport regularly and writing about the diversity issues within the sport – there’s a lot of really good people behind the scenes really working to make change and constantly fighting against this part of their fanbase that NASCAR has felt beholden to for so long. I do think that NASCAR fans are pretty aware of Drive for Diversity.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of racist shithead NASCAR fans, and change in this sport is, I think, even more difficult because of the culture and also because of the way this sport is: there’s only 40 drivers on the top ranks, there’s only about 25 full time rides in the top ranks. It is super, super hard to break into because these careers last for decades in some cases, so it’s really hard to get any drivers. But what my point was was there have been people laying the groundwork for a decision like this within the ranks for a long time, and I wanted to acknowledge that work, I didn’t want to make it seem like the work was done or that everyone can pack up and go home now. I just do think it’s important to acknowledge that a week like this doesn’t happen without decades of people working behind the scenes, often unrecognized, to lay a foundation for this and carving out space within the bigger organization.
Brenda: This really only took off in the 1940s and 50s as a symbol of the Dixiecrat party and the anti-desegregation movement, so this is a really violent symbol. If you wanna mark it in history, it’s the history of extrajudicial violence against African Americans in the United States, not just the south. It’s popular with the Klan and it’s popular at University of Mississippi football games. Mississippi is the only state that still have the Confederate flag within its state flag. So, luckily NASCAR doesn’t do races in Mississippi, so this isn’t a particular problem. And for any of you that get told in the next couple of weeks that the Confederacy is about states’ rights, remember: it’s about states’ rights to have slavery. That’s the state right that they’re talking about; remember that Mississippi started its state declaration against the Union by saying it “throughly identified with the institution fo slavery.” That’s like number one. It doesn’t say, oh, we’re super interested in tariffs. Okay?
It’s been crazy, but that said, the Mississippi flag thing is in particular for me interesting because Tommy Joe Martins, one of the NASCAR drivers, is a native Mississippian who used to drive with it on his car. I thought it was really interesting the way in which the last week he has come out to say he’s evolved on this issue and he’s really happy that NASCAR has now banned it and that there are so many other ways to express being proud of Mississippi. So just as a little bit of background too, in global football sometimes the Confederate flag gets used by the far-right in eastern European soccer games and by those white supremacists there, so you should know that it has global resonance and that it is considered – even by FIFA – to be a discriminatory symbol and any global football team can be sanctioned for its use in their stadiums.
Lindsay: I wanna shout out one of the most pure things that I’ve seen this week. It’s made me so happy for Bubba Wallace and, I think, it’s been a lot of the most prominent Black athletes really now saying that they wanna watch NASCAR, that they wanna support him and come to the races. Alvin Kamara, the NFL player, started tweeted about it like, “I need to get into NASCAR now.” NASCAR invited him to the race, I think he’s actually going this weekend. Renee Montgomery, a WNBA player in Atlanta, she tweeted out something like, “I wanna get into NASCAR now!” and for an entire day her thread was just asking her followers – once again, it’s WNBA players, so you wouldn’t think there’d be a huge overlap between the audiences – but really it was all of her followers patiently and enthusiastically explaining NASCAR to her and she was asking all of these NASCAR 101 questions and it lasted the entire day. NASCAR also invited her to a race, which I get can feel a little PR-schticky but she was so excited by it and all of her replies were just so pure. There was not much, that I saw, animosity or hate, it was just welcoming in this new slate of fans and I hope that that’s what it gets to be going forward.
Alright, next you’re gonna hear my interview with NOlympics LA organizers Molly Lambert and Anne Orchier. Just a programming note, that this interview was recorded a couple of weeks ago before the protest really spread around the country and we saw every single day more extreme examples of police violence at those protests, but we do talk about abolishing the police here, so I think it’s still timely, for sure.
Hey everyone, Lindsay here. I am thrilled today to be joined by Molly Lambert of NOlympics and the co-host of the Night Call podcast, and Anne Orchier, another member of NOlympics, a former Burn It All Down guest, and a member of the LA Tenant’s Union. They are here to talk to all of us about, I guess you can guess by now, the NOlympics movement and where things stand as the 2020 Games have been postponed and we’re seeing if 2021 is a possibility and should it be a possibility. Molly and Anne, thank you for joining us.
Molly: Thanks for having us.
Anne: Yeah, thanks so much for having me back on.
Lindsay: We included the last one, we liked it so much, in our best of the year, so, you know, it’s good to mix it up. Lots of pressure on you in this interview, is what I’m saying. [laughter]
Anne: Perfect, just what we need right now.
Lindsay: I guess I’ll start this with you, Anne, let’s just dive right into it. Is Tokyo 2021 going to happen, and should it happen?
Anne: I think to start with your second question, we were pushing for the cancellation of 2020 prior to coronavirus, prior to the pandemic, and we’re pushing for the abolition of the IOC everywhere, so, short answer: no, Tokyo 2021 shouldn't happen. All of the same concerns that we had pre-COVID-19 in terms of displacement, militarization, diversion of resources from the victims of natural disasters in Japan, those still exist and not only is the current pandemic not fixing those or making them easier to fix, it’s making everything worse, and continuing to prioritize the Olympics over the basic needs of folks who are struggling is not a viable option, in our mind. The question of “will it happen?” seems very up in the air right now.
Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely. Moly, for you, what are the…Anne just touched on a few mains points of why you’re not for the Olympics, period. How has the coronavirus changed that reasoning, if it has at all?
Molly: Well, I think we’ve seen that the global infrastructure to handle a crisis is not as strong as we obviously hope it would be, so it seems like something like this draws attention to really the weaknesses in the international social safety net and the ways that countries really could be helping and supporting each other, and so the idea of just spending a lot of money on a frivolous symbolic version of all of the countries coming together that doesn’t really benefit the people in those countries just seems even more ridiculous now, I think than it did before. We obviously are for a kind of global solidarity but at NOlympics we like to think about what would that global solidarity really look like as opposed to the superficial version you get every four years during the Olympics broadcast where they make it seem like everybody’s coming together to help each other, but we think that what people really coming together would look like is something very different.
Lindsay: So what does that look like?
Molly: Well, hopefully it looks like some of the stuff we’ve been doing at NOlympics. Us and a bunch of other NOlympians went to Tokyo last summer to meet with some of our comrades in Tokyo and I think really talk about that with other people from other cities that have been affected by the Olympics; Anne can talk a little bit more about that.
Lindsay: Yeah, we talked right before Tokyo, so I would love to learn how that trip went.
Anne: Yeah, it was pretty incredible, like a fever dream, and not just because it was like 100 degrees and 99% humidity every second that we were there. But yeah, we’ve been communicating with folks in other cities since day one, basically, since we founded NOlympics in the spring of 2017. We’ve been talking to folks in Tokyo and Paris and London and Rio, people who are currently fighting bids in their cities, people who had previously hosted and wanted to share what their struggle looked like – what worked, what didn’t. I should mention Vancouver as well, Calgary, Denver, New York, Boston, Chicago, a long list of folks in other cities, and that’s been a huge cornerstone of our work. This is not a NIMBY “get the Olympics out of here so they can destroy some other city.”
And being together in person, the kinds of conversations that you can have are really important, and I think that’s been sort of a through line of our work also since day one. A lot of our work is based on talking to people and if you compare that to how the IOC works, how the national organizing committees work, how the local organizing committees work, they work in this elitist cover of night way – it’s a lot of closed-door conversations, private meetings, private parties, they’re not publicly accessible. Their version of international solidarity is, you know, a couple of people on private jets being ferreted to and from each other’s mansions, and big power players. For us, I think our summit in Tokyo was basically the opposite of that. It was hundreds of people in the streets of Tokyo marching from multiple different continents, it was sitting together having dinner and talking about what kind of music we liked and what evictions looked like in our cities and what different approaches to organizing housed and unhoused tenants together were successful, and what the challenges were.
Just being in the same room and having space to have winding conversations feels really critical and it’s something that we’re trying to continue right now. We’re working on a series of public transnational teach-ins with folks from other cities that are really designed to be an opportunity for people to talk to each other from all these cities and countries and get to know each other better, to understand the differences in our cities, and figure out how we can work together in this moment.
Lindsay: I think we’re seeing a lot of people question how sports can bring solidarity when sports aren’t going to look like we expect them to. This isn’t, as you mentioned, this isn’t just about Tokyo and whether or not we see the Games in 2021 which, I just think from a logistical perspective, the global nature of the event…It’s hard to fathom how it’s gonna pulled off, we’ll have to just see. But I know this isn’t just about Tokyo for you all – it’s about Paris, it’s about LA. There was recently a Paris referendum…Molly, can you fill me in on that?
Molly: Yeah, I think Anne might actually be a little better qualified to handle that one. [laughs]
Lindsay: Anne!
Anne: So Paris, they have a petition that was launched, and so the question of the referendum is interesting because that’s typically been the clearest and most straightforward path to getting an Olympics cancelled in any cities. I’m still trying to figure out, honestly…Obviously every local and national context has different protocols for how you get a referendum on a ballot, how votes take place, what they mean, what kinds of things can get on the ballot. But in Paris I think they’re still talking about the potential for a referendum, and we’ve seen this happen in other cities, particularly I think most of the cities that dropped out of the 2024 bidding process. A lot of them didn't even make it to the referendum stage because people organized these mass petitions and were able to sort of demonstrate as a soft threat through the collection of petition signatures like, hey, people don’t want this.
This is sort of a first stage to, I think, to pushing for something more formal to demonstrate this is what the opposition looks like, this is the scale. And also with the petition vs the referendum, they’re just straight up calling for the cancellation of the Games, a lot of times, in order to successfully get a referendum on the ballots. It tends to get a little bit wonkier and more budget-related and sort of, you know, not necessarily “should we hold these or not?” but “should we be using this source of funding to pay for them?” – whereas the petition is just like, we don’t want the Olympics, period. So they just launched that a couple of days ago, it’s been performing really well every time I’ve checked on it. There’s a number of groups including ours, including the folks in Tokyo, who have signed on and supported that. So yeah, it’s exciting. They’re really taking this moment and seizing it, swinging big.
Lindsay: Yeah. You all do a lot of organizing also around housing and hotels and the Airbnb world, the entire housing world in Los Angeles is a part of your work, and what’s the status of that right now, especially in the middle of this pandemic?
Anne: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s interesting with that part of our work which we kind of label under the Homes Not Hotels umbrella, and that kind of comes from this myth that all of the boosters like Casey Wasserman, like Eric Garcetti, their big rallying cry was “we don’t have to build anything for these Games, these are the no-build Olympics.” It’s like, okay, it’s all semantic. There’s all these stadiums going up that are displacing people whether or not you come out and say they’re for the Olympics, they’re displacing actual people, so there’s that. Then the other big thing that we started seeing almost immediately was that city council was using the looming specter of the Olympics to push for a particular type of eviction, an Ellis Act eviction – it’s a state law in Los Angeles, it's a loophole allowing landlords to force people out of rent-stabilized homes if they plan on converting them into hotels.
So that was a big focus of the campaign, the Homes Not Hotels campaign, initially. We started moving in the last few months leading into this new pandemic age to Airbnb which had announced a partnership with the Olympics. Airbnb displacement in LA is really intense, so that had become a new area of focus. And then almost overnight the hotel industry cratered including short-term rentals like Airbnb and the big corporate hotel industry, and so a lot of the work we’ve been doing is now focused in two areas: one is that we helped form and are part of a state-wide coalition called No Vacancy California that is pushing for quote-unquote “elected leaders” across the state including our mayor Eric Garcetti to commandeer the hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms, now exist as the tourism industry is on indefinite hiatus, to house unhoused folks who were already at an increased risk of dying on our streets.
We have, prior to the pandemic, on average 3 unhoused folks per day die in Los Angeles, which is unbelievable. I mean, it’s believable given the conditions, but completely unconscionable. Of course, these are the same folks who are at a much higher risk of dying of COVID. So the idea that we have hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms, like, so many more hotel rooms than people who need a safe place to shelter, which, as we know, housing is the only effective protection we have against coronavirus right now.
So that’s been the big push of No Vacancy and we’re currently working on one of the projected that we had been starting before all of this came out, something called Locks On My Block; we were basically trying to track all the illegal Airbnbs across the city. The city had finally after a years long fight put more extensive regulations in place about what types of units could be rented out as Airbnbs to basically prevent people from creating these illegal hotels and taking housing off of the market for folks to actually rent and using it to drive investment from tourism. There are some number of units in LA that are vacant that the city has already declared illegal to not be rented out, and so we're trying to work on a plan for how we can create more pressure to also convert those into housing for folks who immediately and urgently need it.
Lindsay: It’s always events like the Olympics but also emergencies like the pandemic right now, they hold up a mirror, don’t they, to the inequities. I guess my final question is just how have you all seen…In what ways has the government reacted during this pandemic – we can talk locally or nationally – that mirror ways that you’re concerned about the government acting for the Olympics?
Molly: I think we see that people are placed so far behind profit as a motive for the reopening right now. Even in California where we theoretically have a slightly better process than some of the states have now for their reopening, they’re still just completely going ahead with reopening everything early now when it totally doesn’t seem safe, and the reason for that is that they are catering to business owners and landlords and people with power and with money on every scale. So we can see right now how with a crisis things don’t feel like they’re happening the way that they should be, it doesn’t feel like the people who are the most vulnerable and need to be taken care of the most are being prioritized, and that is kind of par for the course in Los Angeles.
We’ve had this big budget argument where they are deciding to award over half of the budget for LA to the police department, so we know that the Olympics will only exacerbate things like that, that it’s a national special security event, which means that ICE can come in and have essentially full reign to do whatever they want in Los Angeles during the Olympics. That should terrify anybody who cares about what happens in Los Angeles. We just can tell that the people that are served by the Olympics are not your average person in LA, it is a very specific group of privileged oligarch people that are gonna make a lot of money on this, theoretically, and that’s all they care about. Anything good about the Olympics is sort of just a smokescreen to get that to happen. We’re not against sports, we’re not against international competitions, but as long as the International Olympic Committee is in charge of the Olympics it’s gonna continue to be a grift.
Lindsay: Yeah. Anne, do you have anything to add to that, to bring us home?
Anne: Ooh, pressure. [laughter] This is the pressure cooker, we’re in the hot seat on this one, I love it. It’s giving me some pep to the start of my day. No, I think it’s important…There’s sometimes a response we get that’s “You can’t just by against the Olympics. What do you want instead?” I think for us, a lot of work we do is not just imagining but the work we actually do in real time, I think, helps us to see this is what the path forward for creating something better looks like – whether it’s an international sporting competition, whether it’s a livable city, whether it’s an Earth with clean air. All of that comes from dialogue, like Molly said, from prioritizing people’s basic needs, particularly the needs of the most vulnerable people over profit, and if that’s the foundation that you start with, we can come up with something way better than the Olympics. I have no doubt about that. I don’t see the work we’re doing as the death knell for sports, I think what we’re doing is we’re reimagining and recreating the conditions that we need in order to come up with better versions of literally everything, including international sporting competitions.
Molly: Yeah. I think one thing NOlympics says a lot is “what would real international solidarity look like?” as opposed to the illusion of it offered by the Olympics and NOlympics has done a lot of great work talking with people in other cities impacted by the Olympics and really realizing that what we all have in common is a housing crisis and a human rights crisis and an environmental crisis and these are things that impact everybody around the world. We are usually so siloed off from each other that the pandemic offers this glance at what would it really look like for people to take cues from each other and communicate with each other and build something away from…You know, it just doesn’t seem like the people in charge right now have any vision for what an alternative could look like. I think that falls on organizers and other people that wanna have a more optimistic vision for what a city could be like and how it could serve the people that live there instead of just moneyed interests.
Anne: Yeah. The best offer that they have on the table is just, like, here’s a couple of bandaids and maybe a handful fewer of you will die, maybe you could be one of the few people who doesn’t suffer as badly as the others. That’s their big vision.
Lindsay: Yeah, and that’s simply not good enough. Anne and Molly, thank you so much for joining us. How can people follow the work you’re doing at NOlympics?
Anne: Our website is NOlympicsLA.com and then all of our social media handles are @nolympicsla. Sometimes folks get confused – it’s just one ‘o’ so it’s not ‘No Olympics’ it’s ‘NOlympics.’ We’re also newly on TikTok, I believe.
Lindsay: Oh!
Anne: So Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, all the greatest hits.
Lindsay: I once again feel old, as I do every time someone mentions TikTok. Well thank you so much, it was great to talk to both of you again. Stay safe, and keep fighting.
Molly: Thanks so much for having us.
Anne: Yeah. Thanks, Lindsay.
Lindsay: Alright friends, back to women’s sports. Brenda, I know we’ve got some news in the US leagues and some international leagues. All sports have decided, it seems, to come back from coronavirus, and that includes the women. So, what’s happening?
Brenda: Yeah, so we see that really so far globally besides individual sports – MMA, we saw Amanda Nunes last week – women’s sports, it’s really been football/soccer that’s come back first in terms of Frauen Bundesliga, for example. And it’s been really interesting because it’s a ready for TV version, right? There aren’t fans and there’s lots of different schemes as to how to fulfill the television contracts, as to how to deal with sponsors, and it’s kind of a weird anxiety-provoking time. It’s not clear that the top athletes are going to participate in this, if they’re worried about coronavirus…People are gonna get hurt with these kinds of tournaments and these sped-up seasons. I think La Liga, the men’s league, even has 40 games back to back, taking and compressing the amount of time that people have to rest. So it’ll be really interesting to see how it’s going. Are they getting the type of support in women’s sports [dramatic reveal noise] – spoiler alert, NO. Not from the media, not from the trainers, not from the federations.
But it’s still really interesting. You’ve got the Bundesliga which has already been back now coming on a month, and it’s been pretty fascinating, now they’re gonna start to relax some of the rules like the media personnel are allowed to be at games, coaching staff is no longer wearing masks. They sort of have spearheaded this and it’s been really interesting to watch. The NWSL is next on June 27th with its Challenge Cup, as it’s called, so it’s the first US pro league to return to live games, which is pretty fascinating. A lot of players seem to be uncomfortable with it. At the same time, the US, like the German league, has given them decent contracts, salary, housing that should’ve been commensurate with what they’d gotten before. That’s really great for them that they’ve been able to negotiate that. Then you’ve got Latin American leagues falling apart, England cancelling, all different types of reactions. It’s interesting to keep up with.
Just one other note: women athletics also take place at universities and what we’ve got so far has been really troubling. The University of Houston immediately suspended all “voluntary” – I’m doing the biggest air quotes possible, because I don’t know how student athletes “voluntarily” are really doing anything – voluntary workouts after six student athletes tested positive for COVID, coming down with symptoms. So that’s another thing to keep into consideration, that all of these student athletes are being subjected to coming back, and it’s been really apparent right off the bat that this is not necessarily the safest thing for all involved.
Lindsay: Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, just in terms of updates on what’s happening, I can talk about NWSL Challenge Cup. I did have a hot take with Meg Linehan and Steph Yang; just on the piece about that, you can’t have sports without sports media. About the Challenge Cup, which is slated to begin June 27th, media won’t actually be going. I reached out to Meg Linehan and I have a direct quote from her on this. She was saying that, “Access will be restricted.” Meaning that remote access will have to be stellar. This for me makes it seem really bizarre. Meg also said they will have to be “inventive” in how they create spaces for that.
That being said, Meg did mention that she is a national soccer writer, she’s the only full time hire on women’s soccer in the entire country, and she often doesn't get her information for stories, she does features more, she doesn’t do post-game pressers all the time. But that being said, that Challenge Cup is set up so that no media will have direct access to players, and what will that look like? For someone like Meg, it wasn’t worth it to go through the risk involved with travel and isolation and necessarily still not being able to access players. For her and for other media folks, it’s better to have something set up that really is, like she said, inventive, but also create a space where media can put in media requests, get answers, or have Zoom calls perhaps with some coaches afterwards or something. The NWSL really has to figure this out, because as important as it is that this is happening we also wanna have media covering it fairly. We’re all clamoring and wanting for media to cover this, why don’t we have access? That's critical, that’s something that I think about a lot. You’re not gonna have media have access to the players – it makes me wonder, is it even safe to do in first place?
As we know, the rosters for this are not even concrete. The final rosters come out June 21st, players can opt in or opt out. It’s still rumors who’s going to or not going to, and they have until June 21st. What happens after that I don’t know. What happens if someone goes to you to opt in, and then sees the set up and says I don’t wanna play, what happens then? Those are still questions that I have that haven’t yet been answered.
Lindsay: I think that for the WNBA we’ve had some big updates this week; we’re recording this on Sunday morning so things, to borrow the NPR Politics podcast line, things may have changed by the time you are listening to this. But earlier this week we got news through the great Ari Chambers, friend of the show, that a bunch of players were unhappy with the way negotiations were going between the players association and the WNBA itself, and they were unhappy with the communication levels between the players association and the rest of the players. None of this I think is surprising, these negotiations are really tough and it’s all really personal – we’re talking about people’s livelihoods and we’re talking about their health and we’re doing it at a time when most of these athletes are fighting for the end to police brutality and systemic racism and are very dedicated to that fight and wondering if it’s worth it to go back onto the court given all these conditions.
The original update we got from Ari was that the WNBA was offering to pay the players just 60% of their salary, which many consider just not enough money to incentivize them to be isolated from their family for 2-3 months at the IMG Academy in Florida. They don’t get a plus one – that was the news earlier in the week – and a lot of stuff about how the food options…While of course the NBA is getting private chefs, the WNBA’s looking at boxed lunches. So, just not great. The news got better as the week went on, there was a new proposal from the WNBA that has exciting things such as 100% salary for all the players; players can opt out, though in the NWSL players can opt out and still get paid, that’s not true for the WNBA. If you opt to sit out you will not get paid. But it’s still good that there is an opt-out option.
There’s also extra provisions put in like the NWSL had extra provisions put in for the mothers in their league, which is really important. The WNBA followed that mold and was able to get a caretaker to come on for players with children so that they’re not separated from their children for this long of a period. So, it looks like we’re moving towards a deal right now. No update on, as someone put on Twitter, the Lunchables situation, although I have heard that there will be a stipend so that players can go and buy their own groceries and cook for themselves if they’re not happy with the food that’s going to be provided. All of this is taking place while the NBA is looking to come back in about a week after the WNBA – right now it’s looking like the WNBA will come back on July 24th, once again in Bradenton, Florida, and then the NBA will come back about July 31st in Disneyworld. A lot of NBA players are wondering if this is worth it for them. Kyrie Irving has led a big call between I think about 80-100 players were on, including prominent WNBA players such as Natasha Cloud and Renee Montgomery who I was just talking about earlier on this show.
He doesn’t think that playing this summer…He’s not playing anyways as he’s been injured, but he doesn’t think that they should play this summer, he thinks that’s distracting from social justice causes, he thinks they should use this time to be with their families, to be in their communities, to be doing the work now that everyone is kind of paying attention. Of course there’s some NBA players who need the salaries and feel like it's best if they use the platform of NBA games to propel their activism forward, and I think in the WNBA you see the same thing, of course on a different scale. But the calculus is going to be very individual for players both on an activism level and a personal health level. For me I’m so interested in listening to these athletes and just supporting whatever decisions they make and, you know, really going from there.
It’s time for the most lit segment of this show – do you get it? [laughs] Sorry. The burn pile! Shireen, get us started.
Shireen: Thank you. So, as you all know, I’m in Canada. In Canada this week white women decided to use the n-word, Wendy Mesley, who’s a senior reporter at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; she’s been put on suspension and her show was suspended as well. Then what ended up happening was there was a bit of an issue…It’s not a bit of an issue, it’s a huge issue, of misogynoir and bullying of Kayla Grey who is the only Black woman broadcaster at TSN, a sports network, a huge outlet in Canada. What ended up happening is this is a result of Sheri Forde, who is white, who wrote a piece on her family’s experience. Sheri is married to a fellow TSN staffer named Duane Forde who is Black, you know, biracial children, and Sheri wanted to write about her experience having that in the wake of all of this, and it’s totally fine and important for her to share how she feels.
She wrote on Medium, so she wasn’t actually at an outlet when she wrote that. She typed out the n-word twice in her piece, and that went unchecked. When Kayla, who is a stalwart of everything fabulous in sports media in Canada, just pointed that out…Because responses to Sheri’s piece that was shared on Twitter were so many people, and that was really disappointing for me, which is one of the things I’m gonna add to the burn pile, was the responses were like, “This is wonderful, thank you.” Not a single person checked her on using the n-word, and I went to read it – which has now since been changed, she’s edited it now – I haven’t read that word, and it’s incredibly jarring and upsetting, and I’m not Black. There’s no way, no way it should’ve been written out. Now, Sheri’s excuse was “my husband is Black and he said I could” when Kayla called her out.
Enter: Tim McClure, who’s this white dude…We don’t even know who he is. He blocks everybody. He’s this white guy apparently associated with TSN. He went on an 11-point thread and basically said Sheri should have the right to say what she wants; he called out Kayla Grey specifically and he tagged her employers. He tagged TSN, he tagged TSN PR, he tagged Bell Media which owns TSN and was like, “This is not a call to get her fired!” – I’m like, why the fuck would you tag her employers, you son of a bitch? Secondly, one of his Twitter threads on one of the tweets he also turned off responses, which I didn’t know you could do. He turned off commentary. And he quoted Maya Angelou at Kayla. So, yes, this sub-par white man is quoting Maya Angelou at Kayla. It was a mess. So anyway, everyone took to Twitter, we rallied, it was much the subject of a Zoom call I had with Black Girl Hockey Club on Friday night, we’re all figuring out what to do.
What ended up happening out of that and all of that mess…It’s not for a white man to come and defend a white woman’s actions, but that’s exactly what happened, and it’s disgusting. People poured out and reached out to Kayla who’s been doing so much, and exhausted. So I wanna take all those facets of white supremacy, especially this white man – who the fuck are you, Tim McClure? Nobody even knows. I just wanna share the photo of him blocking me, because he blocks anyone that tries to reply to him. It’s super problematic, it’s terrible, it’s insulting. Kayla is an absolute star. As a result of this we had #KaylaGreyAppreciationDay, which is yesterday; also, the 1-year anniversary of the Raptors 2019 win. But all of that other shit that led up to it is exhausting, it’s infuriating, and it’s a part of white supremacy. I wanna take that and I want to put it on the burn pile. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: I’m so happy you did that, because I’ve been trying to follow that as someone who doesn’t know much about Canadian media and I needed that explainer. [laughter] It’s been very hard to follow on Twitter, so that is good. I’m gonna go, quickly. I would like to put…Well, maybe all men, but in particular the US men’s national team, not the US Soccer associated part, but the players association. This week US Soccer finally came forward and said, “Oh right, we were huuuuuuge racist assholes when we said that Megan Rapinoe could not take a knee during the national anthem and that was bad and we are sorry and we repeal the policy.” Before that, all of the US women’s national team players association released a statement calling on US Soccer to do that.
Then the men’s players association released their own statement which said that the Federation’s anthem policy was an ill-advised and insensitive political statement by the Federation to show that they would not tolerate the conduct of Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe. Here’s the sentence: “Because the policy was never negotiated with our players association it did not apply to the US men’s national team players, so we were not concerned about it. However, the Federation absolutely needs to acknowledge they were wrong and to apologize for it and rescind it.” So obviously that sentence that sticks out is “it did not apply to us so we were not concerned about it.” First of all, they never negotiated it with the women’s players association either, they just unilaterally made the rule. So that’s just not a good excuse.
And number two: it’s that why we are here as a nation right now? Because we’ve all decided that if it doesn’t apply to us directly we're not concerned with the issue? Doesn’t that just perfectly sum up why we are where we are? And for them to put it in writing at this point and not even express the tiniest bit of shame for saying that part out loud…!? I shouldn’t be stunned anymore, I know, but I am stunned, so I’d like to throw that statement in particular and, once and for all, anyone everywhere who thinks that because a policy or a rule or discrimination of any kind does not directly apply to them that they get to opt out and not be concerned about it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Bren?
Brenda: In honor of Pride month, I wanna burn the behavior of Brazilian football player who currently is at Club PSG, Paris Saint Germain, for his homophobic behavior. This week the LGBT activist Agripino Magalhaes filed a complaint against him at the São Paolo prosecutor’s office because Neymar had basically used a homophobic slur in a private conversation, the equivalent of the f-word in English for gay people, but actually it’s even more violent and hard to explain in Portuguese; there’s more than one word. He threw the insult at his mother’s boyfriend because his mother’s boyfriend revealed he was bisexual. We on the show have made fun of Neymar’s mother’s boyfriend’s dancing…
Lindsay: Oh, right! [laughter]
Brenda: So I did wanna circle back to say that that had nothing to do with us not supporting his bisexuality, which is obviously something we would celebrate, whereas his dancing is obviously not, sorry. [Shireen cackling] The homophobic language was leaked and, in addition to that, one of his sponsors is the underwear company Lupo; last month, a commercial that he did also had a homophobic and sexist…It’s hard to explain it without explaining every detail of the commercial, but basically when a man comes in to see him in his underwear he’s embarrassed and leaves the dressing room when he’s trying on this underwear which, if you know anything about Brazilian football, is a decision that you make in a commercial like that, Neymar would never feel uncomfortable being naked around other men. So, yeah. I want to burn his participation in the commercial, I want to burn the way in which he talked about his mother’s boyfriend and that his slur against the LGBTQ community should be something he responds to, should be something PSG responds to, should be something that the Brazilian Federation responds to, so, burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Alright, after that burning it's time to uplift some women who have inspired us this week in the badass women of the week segment. First of all, UFC is going on and we wanna congratulate Cynthia Calvillo who topped the top-ranked women’s flyweight fighter in UFC for a huge win on Saturday night. Also, wanna shout out Jayda Coleman who is selected as Gatorade’s Softball Player of the Year. The Colony High shortstop is a left-handed pitcher, and we are looking forward to watching Jayda soar.
Huge shoutout to the Chelsea women’s side and Anita Asante – our guest last week and a must-listen if you haven’t yet – for donating their FAWSL prize money to Refuge, an organization in the UK that supports survivors of interpersonal and domestic violence. This is Chelsea’s third league title and they also won the Continental Cup this year.
Can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Wanna shout out Natasha Cloud, Burn It All Down favorite and winner of this award before, who became the first woman to sign a sneaker deal with Converse Athletics this week. As someone who’s covered Natasha Cloud since her second year in the league, to see the way she has grown on the court and especially off of it, using her voice and using her platform…She was not a well-known player when she came into this league. She was a mid-major player, she was a second round draft pick, and it is…Her activism fuels her play on court. Everything with her starts with her voice and starts with her activism. It is great to see her get rewarded in this way.
Alright, what’s good? Brenda.
Brenda: I’m embarrassed almost to say it, but………Messi’s back on the pitch! [Lindsay laughing] It’s been a couple months but…Not just him, actually, all the people back, and I have stuck with my Frauen Bundesliga fandom. So I hope to get a little more knowledgeable and familiar with that because it has been nice to have a league come back first that I wasn’t as familiar with, so I took some time and watched something I wouldn’t normally watch. That’s been really fun. Badminton, the weather’s been really good, and I like playing badminton, and my kids are now old enough to play for real and keep it going, so volleying for a while, which is really nice.
Shireen: Wait a minute, are you saying badminton?
Brenda: Badmitten? What are you saying?
Shireen: Is that bad-min-ton? I’m sorry, is that the same thing? Racket sport?
Brenda: Yes, it’s badmitten for us.
Shireen: Oh! Sorry, because I was like, what’s happening. Okay.
Brenda: Yeah, we say, I believe…I mean, I always said badmitten growing up.
Lindsay: Same. Yes.
Shireen: Okay.
Brenda: I honestly have never thought about it but you know, yeah. Bad-min-ton. [laughter] It is British so, you know, with your accent Shireen you’re probably right.
Shireen: Badminton.
Brenda: You’re probably right.
Lindsay: Oh my gosh, Shireen’s British accent…
Brenda: But yeah, that’s been really awesome. Anyway, just simple things, the weather. It’s a very midwestern thing to talk about how great the weather is but that too has been wonderful.
Lindsay: Must be a southern thing too. Speaking of weather – awkward transition – I have booked a three night stay for me and my dog on a 100 acre farm in the middle of Virginia for this week.
Brenda: Ooh!
Lindsay: You know, I can’t really travel anywhere, but I want my dog to be able to run run run. I need to get out of this apartment. I have to do a little bit of work there, but hopefully after a day or two I can then take off and then I’m gonna go down and visit a few family members in the mountains in North Carolina if my…I’ve taken a COVID test on Monday because I was out at the protests, so depending obviously on how that comes back will depend on if I can go see my family, but you know, I haven’t really left home and I don't feel super comfortable doing it right now but I think for my mental health getting out, getting away from my apartment and the computer and getting outside is gonna be key to continuing forward this summer. So that’s what’s good in my world. Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, thanks. My dad turned 75 on Tuesday, so in Ontario your’e allowed to expand your bubble to ten, so I was able to go to Windsor where my parents are, and my brother’s family came as well. It was pretty spectacular. My dad doesn't like birthdays, he just thinks like, “I don’t do birthdays!” and he’ll say they’re not permissible–
Lindsay: A gemini after my own heart! I love it.
Shireen: I know, I thought about that! And then he’ll say, Islamically they’re not permissible, and I’m like no, no, don’t do that! But anyways me being extra, as you all know, I got him balloons from Party City, you know, a helium 7 and a 5, just to throw him off. But the real treat was the 50-foot inflatable dog in flip flops, swim trunks and sunglasses that went onto our lawn at my parent’s house at 9:00 in the morning. Dad had no idea, and it was brililant. I didn’t tell anyone, I didn’t even tell my mom. This was actually a co-conspiracy with me and my parents’ dear friend Virginia Hills. Virginia, I love you. Virginia is my mom’s office manager and she just teases my dad more than anything, so we co-conspired to get this done. I didn’t tell anyone in my family just because they’d spill the beans, and it’s hard for me to keep secrets, but this was amazing.
It was just wonderful. My dad was completely mortified, the video was so funny. The kids did not know either, so all seven grandkids, like, from ages 10-20, all woke up and were like, oh my god. They were all doing Snapchats, TikToks with this huge…People were driving by. My dad was just so completely embarrassed, it was the best. That was so much fun and in fact, this is a side note: I posted this photo, I just tweeted it out on my Twitter account and I got probably the most responses to a tweet I’ve ever had. Part of me loves this, and thank you for all the warm wishes for my dad, but part of me is like, will y’all please read some of the shit that I write too!? [laughs] Anyways, so it was a wonderful, wonderful weekend. We came back because I had to be here to record. Happy birthday to my dad!
Also, just wanted to say that my son, Sallahuddin, made the Team Ontario training program for volleyball. I’m a very proud mama. He will be training online though Zoom and going through the very vigorous three and a half weeks in July. I’m excited for him. It’s gonna be a lot of hard work, and very challenging because he’s never trained online before, it’s always been in person. He’s excited to get back and, like Brenda, I have a badminton set in addition to the table tennis, so we’ll see how that goes. Again, bad-min-ton. So anyways, that’s about it. I’m looking forward to summer starting.
Lindsay: Thank you all so much for listening to Burn It All Down. If you wanna support us on Patreon: patreon.com/burnitalldown. We will have some exclusive segments and a video for our Patreon supporters this month, so those are always fun. We’re on Facebook and Twitter, all these links in the show notes because my brain is already on vacation mode and can’t remember all the differences between all our little handles. [Shireen laughing] Just being super honest! Love you all so much, thank you for getting us through another week. To quote our Brenda: burn on, but not out.