Episode 192: The Olympics: WTF Is Happening?
On this week's show Shireen, Lindsay, and Jessica try to make sense of the current plans (or lack thereof) for the 2020/2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games. You'll also hear a preview of Shireen's interview with Dr. M. Aziz. On the Burn Pile, they burn the latest egregious transphobia in women's sport. Then, they remember in memoriam gymnast Dianne Durham and NFL reporter Chris Wesseling. They next lift up the Torchbearers of the week, featuring young trans athletes. They end the show with what's good in their lives and what they're watching.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
There is no 'middle ground' on trans inclusion in youth sports: https://www.powerplays.news/p/there-is-no-middle-ground
Lucy’s Legacy: A Profile of Lusia Harris-Stewart https://fraser61.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/lucys-legacy-a-profile-of-lusia-harris-stewart
Tokyo Olympics Playbook: Testing? Yes. Quarantines? No. Fans? Maybe. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/sports/olympics/tokyo-olympics-playbook
2021 Olympic health and safety playbook (PDF) https://gtimg.tokyo2020.org/image/upload/production/yze1yfbjqu08oo0hv37o
Playbook TLDR: Athletes warned against excessive celebrations at Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1103874/tokyo-2020-athletes-playbook
Over Budget and Fraught with Problems, Tokyo Games Spark Calls for Olympic Reforms: https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/over-budget-and-fraught-problems-tokyo-games-spark-calls-reforms
Tokyo Olympics head Yoshiro Mori says he won't resign after his derogatory comments about women: https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/30830256/tokyo-olympics-head-yoshiro-mori-creates-storm-derogatory-comments
Tokyo Olympics face another looming headache - no medical staff https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2020-japan-doctors/tokyo-olympics-face-another-looming-headache-no-medical-staff
Beijing 2022: 180 human rights groups call for Winter Olympics boycott https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/04/beijing-2022-180-human-rights-groups-call-for-olympics-boycott
Paris 2024 will have contingency plan if COVID-19 crisis not over: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2024-interview
Special Olympics goes virtual this year, RGV coaches keep athletes prepared: https://www.valleycentral.com/news/special-olympics-goes-virtual-this-year-rgv-athletes-engage-with-virtual-workout
Growing Chorus of N.B.A. Stars Boos League’s Virus Strategy: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/sports/basketball/kevin-durant-nba-coronavirus
Cheerleader sues Northwestern University, says she was groped and harassed by drunken fans and that officials tried to ‘cover up’ her complaints, lawsuit alleges https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-northwestern-cheerleader-lawsuit-sexual-assault-title-ix-20210129-dwmpjtoxknh2lcl5uj76hsz3oy-story.html
After the firing of Northwestern’s cheerleading coach, questions remain about the handling of racial discrimination within the program: https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/02/04/in-focus/marginalized-on-the-sidelines
Transcript
Shireen: Hello flamethrowers! Welcome to Burn It All Down. I’m Shireen Ahmed, and joining me today are Lindsay Gibbs and Jessica Luther. Happy Black History Month! We have an incredible show today. We will be talking about the Olympics – yes, the Olympics! Are they still happening? What’s going on with them? Do we really want to know?
Lindsay: Japan hasn’t even started with its vaccination program yet, so it doesn’t even start its vaccination program until the end of this month and it will not be fully vaccinated by the time the Olympics come.
Jessica: Holy shit!
Shireen: Before we jump into all that, I wanna say a special thank you to all of our patrons and our dedicated flamethrowers without whom the show would not be possible. Now, in celebrating Black History Month, what is an interesting fact that you recently learned about Black athletes or leagues or history? Lindsay, I’m gonna start with you.
Lindsay: Yeah, I was glad you brought this question to us because I actually…It was on National Girls and Women in Sports Day last week – it was the 35th annual day – but I found out something I’m a little bit embarrassed that I just learned, but that the first National Girls and Women in Sports Day began as a day to honor Flo Hyman, a legendary US volleyball player who won a silver medal with Team USA at the ’84 Olympics and played professionally in Japan. She was just really a standout and a superstar in Japan in the pro leagues there. But she died from undiagnosed Marfan syndrome on January 24th, 1986 after collapsing in a game, and her tragic death has really helped save lives by spreading awareness of Marfan syndrome and making it something that people really look for in athletes. So, yeah, I was glad to learn all that and to learn more about Flo.
Shireen: I’m gonna go next. I think probably you and Jess already know this, but for someone who enjoys going down rabbit holes and stuff like this, I didn’t Lusia Harris, the first women’s college basketball superstar of the modern era. Thank you to The Undefeated for this one and Helen of Women’s Hoops Blog because I went down said rabbit hole that I enjoyed. She was also the first…She scored the first ever basket in women’s Olympic basketball competition in 1976, and was the first Black woman to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Like, I said, this information is from Helen’s blog and The Undefeated. But I also really wanted to say that the hashtag The Undefeated is using is #BlackHistoryAlways as opposed to Black History Month, because the importance of this information will continue in like April and November, so it’s not like we only need to be going down the rabbit holes this month. Jess, what do you have for us?
Jessica: Yeah, so, I was thinking what did I learn recently, and I have been reading Dr. Frank Guridy, friend of the show. He has a new book coming out next month titled The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics. I’ve been lucky enough to read a lot of it in advance and it’s wonderful. So, I just wanna tell this story that Frank tells. It’s in chapter 3 of his book, he's writing about the desegregation of football in Texas. It starts with this incredible scene, November 5th, 1966, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist University, SMU, the Mustangs, are playing Texas A&M. Both are in the southwest conference, which is kind of like the precursor to the Big 12, it doesn’t exist anymore. SMU has Jerry LeVias – he's the first Black scholarship football athlete in the SWC. A&M’s coach, upon hearing of LeVias’ scholarship, said some fucked up thing about how no football team could ever unify if it had a Black man on it. SMU won when LeVias ran back an 83 yard punt return in the fourth quarter, his path cleared exclusively of course by his white teammates. So, will you just indulge me – I wanna read just a part of how Frank describes this scene in the book, which is so beautiful.
He writes, “A Jack Beers photograph captures LeVias mid-gallop, the soon to be All-SWC player racing toward the end zone with A&M Aggies aghast in the background, his Mustangs teammates smiling with joy. The photo is reminiscent of other racial scenarios in the sordid history of the US South – runaway slaves fleeing slave catchers, or innocent Black men running from racist law enforcement officers. In this context, LeVias wasn't simply running for a touchdown in a college football game. Here in the stadium named after Cotton, the commodity that symbolized the brutal exploitation of the enslaved, one of their descendants was running from the shadows of racial slavery and Jim Crow segregation and ushering in a new moment in the region’s and the country’s history: a post-Jim Crow athletic order.” I love this whole book, it’s beautiful. I’m learning so much from it. I’m excited for Frank. So, that’s what I wanted to share today.
Shireen: That’s awesome. We love Frank. So, next up: Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympics 2020, or 2021. I like to call this segment: what the fuck is happening!? Jessica?
Jessica: [laughs] Accurate. So, last year in March the IOC announced that the Olympics and the Paralympics, set to take place in and around Tokyo, would be postponed due to the global pandemic. But for now, the Olympics are scheduled to start on Friday, July 23rd, 2021; the Paralympics on Tuesday, August 24th. But a couple of weeks ago in late January, The Times out of the UK published a piece that started, “The Japanese government has privately concluded that the Tokyo Olympics will have to be cancelled because of the coronavirus, and the focus is now on securing the Games for the city in the next available year, 2032.” But that was based on an anonymous source without much to back it up. The IOC, the IPC and the officials in charge of the Tokyo Games have denied this report and, as of this moment, they are all still supposed to take place. But that just seems so wild, given the state of the pandemic if nothing else, right, Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yeah, so, I just think it’s important to take a very brief big picture look at this. We’re recording this on February 7th in the morning, and as of now there have been 106 million coronavirus cases. 106 million! And over 2.3 million deaths, globally. The vaccine distribution has started, but it’s very focused in wealthy countries right now and poorer countries are not getting the vaccine. There are now new strains coming out and popping up all over the world that are more contagious. The new strains are gonna be more contagious, and we’re figuring all this out in real time. So, we don’t know how the vaccine is going to handle all these new strains. It just feels sometimes like we talk about the coronavirus like it’s a hypothetical when it’s actually something really ravaging the world and has been for a year. It’s really destroyed the state of Olympic qualifiers, if we’re just talking on an athletic basis. It’s very unusual for it to be like 3-4 months before the Olympics, and for athletes and teams to not even know if they can go, right? [laughs] If they’re gonna make it there.
So, you’ve got the Cameroon and Chile playoff in the women’s Olympic football tournament already moved to April, it’s been rescheduled a few times. The two-legged playoff between China and South Korea was recently postponed for the fourth time. A gymnastics all around world cup in Stuttgart was just cancelled. I think all of this really comes down to…There’s a story about three Paralympians from Bermuda who weren’t even able to enter qualifying tournaments due to COVID restrictions and therefore they never even got a shot at qualifying for the Paralympics. So, I think it’s just devastating. You’re going to see the wealthier countries are gonna have more resources to deal with this, and the whole point is that people get a chance to qualify, and that’s not even happening.
Shireen: Thanks, Linz. One of the things that’s happening, that we’re watching happen, are safeguards that are proposed, and what that looks like if they Olympics do in fact go forward. One of the things I came across in this pre-research was a playbook that actually Lindsay and I were talking about, that looks like an animated comic series about what to do while competing in the Olympics in a pandemic. That’s actually what it looks like. I don’t know why I did that super deep voice there, I don’t know. [laughs] So, some of the “safeguards” being proposed are absolutely insufficient considering the pandemic and the variants that could be coming up. We’ve seen other events have been cancelled: the NWHL actually ended up cancelling the remainder of the Isobel Cup, there’s been NCAA games that have been suspended, numbers rising in the NBA. It’s really not a stable time right now.
So, the proposed playbook for the Olympics, let’s do a little dive into this proposed playbook. No cheering for the athletes, no visiting bars or restaurants in Tokyo, less intimacy in the Olympic village. [laughter] We’ll put a link to this playbook in the show notes. So, less intimacy in the Olympic village – how will this be policed? I don’t even wanna know. “Take enough masks for the entire stay, but avoid wearing one with an unofficial sponsor logo.” This was made sure to be mentioned up in the playbook!
Jessica: Wow.
Shireen: You know, of all the priorities to talk about this was one of them. “Do not use public transport without permission.” I think people are just shooting in the dark here, like, let’s make up a proposed playbook for a pandemic Olympics! And just really went with the most random things. I don’t know…I didn’t see “stay alive” in there anywhere written, but I’m not an expert on writing proposed playbooks. Lindsay, your thoughts on this too?
Lindsay: Yeah, I just…This is a quote from the New York Times: “Anticipating criticism, the International Olympic Committee spent the past week reaching out to stakeholders and lowering expectations for the first iteration of the playbook, fully aware that it was light on substance.” [laughing]
Jessica: Wow. This is wild. They’ve had a really long time now, it’s not as if they’re just scrambling at this point. Wow.
Lindsay: They’ve had a very very long time. Other things that stuck out to me in this – 32 pages, with illustrations! – not very dense at all playbook was that [Shireen laughs] athletes will be tested at least every four days, which to me just does not seem like enough! [laughs]
Jessica: Wow.
Shireen: I got an air fryer, and I feel like the instruction manual for the air fryer is more complex than this playbook! [laughter]
Lindsay: Yeah, it is!
Shireen: I mean, the air fryer didn’t work out for me but I’m just saying, it was more detailed than this.
Lindsay: So, we’re waiting til spring to decide whether spectators can even travel, and one of the things…As a media member I was looking at their guidelines for the press – they still want all the media to come, of course, and yet they’re reducing capacity in each of the events, and it makes no sense. So, they’re not reducing the number of credentials but they’re reducing the press capacity at each thing. [laughs] It’s all a mess. I don’t know how anyone’s planning ahead of time for this, and usually for the Olympics media and press and planning two years in advance – that’s the deadline for credentials.
Shireen just mentioned the NWHL, and I wanna say I think about how many different sporting events are going on at one time under the governance of the same people, and we’re dealing with…In leagues right now, the NBA is a fucking shitshow, and they have all the resources. 32 teams with only like 15 players on each team, right? And they can’t get them to follow directions. The NWHL was not successful in getting their COVID protocols followed, and that was only 6 teams! How in the world…So much of this 32 page manual seems to be based on personal responsibility, and we’ve seen that that doesn’t work! [laughs] That does not work. Bubbles and such will work, because if it’s a real bubble with real regular testing that will work because it takes the personal responsibility thing out of the equation, mostly. Oh, and there’s no quarantine! They’re bringing people in like a few days before the Olympics!
Jessica: But they told them not to have sex, so it’s fine. It will all be fine.
Lindsay: [laughs] They think COVID’s an STD!
Shireen: I want a clarification. Are media allowed to have sex and take public transportation? Or is that just for the athletes?
Lindsay: It’s gotta be discouraged for all of them because that’s about spreading it, not only to each other but to the rest of Japan. So, I really do think they think it’s an STD and you can only get it through sex. [laughs] That’s just not what this is! How are we not better at this?
Shireen: We have a choice quote from our favorite president Bach here. We’ll just play it to see what the opinion of the IOC is, not that we care, but just we’d like to hear.
Thomas Bach: Some even make the proposal to postpone the Olympic Games to the year 2032. I wanna say good luck if you have to discuss this with an athlete who is preparing for the Olympic Games 2021. There are some proposals to move it to another city which, everybody who knows about the complexity of an Olympic Games, is not possible in such a short period of time. We are not losing all our time and energy on speculations. But we are fully concentrating on the opening ceremony on the 23rd of July this year.”
Shireen: As expected, president Bach’s comments are reductive and ridiculous. I mean, it’s not that we don’t understand the complexity of the Olympics! It’s that we don’t want people to die, more, actually. I dunno, and the state of the Olympics is not great anyway, right, Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah. We talk a lot on this podcast about how damaging the Olympics can be to cities and how there kind of needs to be a new model here anyways. There was a piece in VOA news this week that said, “When Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Summer Olympics, organizers were jubilant. The event would serve as a public relations bonanza, showing the world Japan had overcome its long period of economic stagnation and the embarrassment caused by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. But things didn’t go exactly as planned – and not only because of the coronavirus pandemic, which forced the games to be delayed by a year.” I’m gonna end quote right there very briefly to say: we put too much on the Olympics! [laughs] Countries need to stop holding the Olympics for PR boosts! That’s just not what this should be! An Olympics cannot overcome a nuclear disaster! That’s not how this works.
Okay. I’m gonna start quoting again, “There was the expensive proposal for Tokyo’s main Olympic stadium, which was ditched after being widely mocked for resembling an oversized bicycle helmet, an intergalactic spaceship, and a "turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away. There was the original Tokyo Olympics logo, which had to be scrapped after accusations it plagiarized the emblem of a theater in Belgium.” Those were all the things that happened before the coronavirus. “According to some estimates, Japan will have spent as much as $35 billion to host the games, smashing through the original $7.5 billion budget. Organizers contest the larger figure, saying many of those expenses are for projects not directly related to the games.” But we all know that organizers use Olympics to get through other pet projects as well and that it’s all related to Olympics infrastructure.
Shireen: I mean, we know from what we’ve talked about and our own work and research on the Olympics that the budget that comes out a couple of years after everything’s factored in is always, always more than initially projected. But $35 billion is a grotesque number, and this makes us think about who’s running the show. Now, let’s for a second pause and talk about that. Yoshiro Mori, the former prime minister who’s head of the Japanese Olympic Committee, I mean, some of the concerns that he has are having meetings, because they’re arduous and long. My favorite part about this is that he was recently quoted to say that women take so much time. Out of all of these concerns, that’s exactly what his comment was.
Jessica: Like, during meetings, they’re taking up all the time talking too much.
Shireen: Which the data absolutely refutes. Any data, any meeting that any woman’s ever attended, and lived experience will also refute this. But the fact that women take so much time…I don’t know if it’s that women are raising concerns or coming up with helpful ideas, but just this concept that women take so much time…Now, he later apologized for the comments but refuses to step down from the position, although his feelings about women notwithstanding. He just feels that that was something that was of paramount importance to talk about. It’s just one of the holes. This whole Olympics is like Swiss cheese. Jess?
Jessica: One of the issues is what this will mean on the ground in Japan itself, of course, right? So, one thing that's been coming out over the last month is how much the Japanese themselves don’t actually want the Olympic Games to take place. The AP reported in mid-January that more than 80% of people in Japan who were surveyed said the Tokyo Olympics should be cancelled or postponed, or said they believed they would not take place. The Asahi Shimbun, a daily paper in Japan, published a piece last week about how people in Japan are souring on the Olympics. The paper conducted a survey on January 23rd and 24th which showed that only 11% of voters want the Olympics held in the summer as scheduled. That was down 19 percentage points from December’s survey. Even if these numbers are off in any kind of significant way, that’s still just so many people in Japan who don’t even want this to be happening at this point.
So then on top of that there’s an infrastructure issue around healthcare, which clearly is important during a pandemic. So, in January the president of the Japan Medical Association said their hospitals were taxed and that it would be impossible to admit any foreign visitors who catch COVID at the Games to the hospital, because there’s simply no room at this point. They’re in the middle of a third wave of the pandemic. The Tokyo Medical Association, which represents 20,000 doctors from dozens of smaller medical groups, was asked by both the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee and the Tokyo metropolitan government last year to secure more than 3,500 medical staff for the Olympics.
Reuters reported this past week that the director of that association, when considering whether doctors and nurses will be able to volunteer for the Olympics, said, “No matter how I look at it, it’s impossible. I’m hearing doctors who initially signed up to volunteer say there’s no way they can take time off to help when their hospitals are completely overwhelmed.” On some level it’s like, no shit, but also think about the humanitarian crisis that the Japanese could be bringing onto themselves by even holding these games at this point, games that people there don’t even want. It’s just…There’s something really, truly terrifying about that.
Lindsay: Yeah. I was reading that they don’t have many ICU beds in Japan at all, and all of those are already taken by COVID patients and just the tax that COVID is putting on its healthcare system is making hospitals go into deep debt. Doctors and nurses are already completely burned out, and will just continue to be. It’s important to note, you know, everyone has kind of treated vaccination like this magic pill of course, and one day far far down the line it will be, it will change things. But we’re so early in this. Japan hasn’t even started with its vaccination program yet, so it doesn’t even start its vaccination program until the end of this month and it will not be fully vaccinated by the time the Olympics come.
Jessica: Holy shit.
Lindsay: Yeah. Then the IOC has said it will not mandate people to have a vaccine in order to participate in the Olympics, which I honestly…I understand that I don’t think you can do that right now, but then we have to look at the individual governing bodies and see what they’re gonna do as far as the vaccine and its athletes, and that’s when things get even more concerning, right? In India medical personnel are first but right after that Olympians get priority and the Ministry of Health has said 100% that all Olympians will be vaccinated before the Olympics. You’re already seeing athletes kind of jump the line in Hungary, in Serbia; Israel has already vaccinated half its Olympic delegation and will complete the process by the end of May.
I think Canada and Britain have both said they’re not gonna jump the line for their athletes. I don’t think the United States has said either way. But you can certainly see these athletes finding ways even if it’s not mandated, right, to jump ahead in line and really mess up this system and prevent much more vulnerable populations than…Of course, we all know Olympians can get COVID and can die of COVID. We also know they are not the ones that should be first in line, because there are populations that are much much much more at risk. So, I’m just concerned about all of this and I think we’re gonna see some really ugly things as far as Olympians and other athletes jumping to the front of the line. It’s gonna be a superspreader event. It’s gonna be a superspreader event. There’s just no way it’s not.
Jessica: Then recently in a Burn It All Down meeting we had, Shireen pointed out that not only do we have the Summer Olympics coming up shortly, but just behind them we’re literally a year away from the Beijing Olympics in 2022, and there’s a really question at this point about whether or not they will happen, if they should happen. There’s all this stuff about the pandemic that still sadly will apply, probably, at that point in time. All the questions Lindsay brought up about qualifying, like what’s going to happen with the Winter Olympics, but also there’s issues with China, right? So, just days ago the World Uyghur Congress, which is composed of more than 180 groups representing Tibetans, Uyghurs, residents of Hong Kong and others, describe the 2022 Olympics as “a genocide Olympics.” In an open letter they called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics to “ensure they are not used to embolden the Chinese government’s appalling rights abuses and crackdowns on dissent.” So, here we are with yet another Games just behind the ones in Japan that have all these issues with them too, and it’s like, what are we even doing at this point?
Shireen: Look, I love curling as much as the next person, but it’s not worth this. In terms of do I think it should happen: unequivocally, no. I mean, yes we absolutely want athletes, marginalized athletes, to have amplification like we’ve talked about, particularly women’s sports. But not like this. Not when it’s not only a violation of human rights, which we know occurs with Uighur Muslims and against dissenting voices in China, but specifically this is a health risk. This is a health risk and, as Lindsay said, this is a superspreader event, and it disproportionately affects poor people. That’s what I think is the most concerning, is that this is willful recklessness and endangerment of lives, these types of events, on these local, regional spaces that don’t have the capacity to deal with the pandemic spreading the way that it did. We know who dies the most from this illness, globally. We know this. For me this is appalling.
Jessica: It’s so funny, I hear all this stuff that we have said up to this point and I still think we’re gonna get both sets of Olympics.
Lindsay: I do too. I 100% do too, because there’s just too much money and power at stake, and that trumps everything, right? It’s saddening, you know? But the sponsors, the television networks, they're all gonna just be going, blazing forward, so that at least some money can be recouped, and that’s gonna be the bottom line. That’s the way that these events have transformed over the years to be way more about money than they are about the athletes, and we're just gonna see that so clearly. I think about how NBA seasons and the NHL season and even how we’ve just seen the NFL season gone with all these stops and starts and random players getting quarantined for long periods of time and all these games delayed – how can that happen at the Olympics, you know? They’re sharing venues with other sports, you know? [laughs] They have to stick to a tight schedule. There’s no room for this, right? They have to have a hard out end date because these athletes have to go on, many of them competing in other leagues, have other obligations.
They’re gonna try to do this, and it's very very very concerning. A headline that really terrified me to no end also this week was, Paris 2024 will have contingency plan if COVID-19 crisis not over, which my brain was not wiling to even process the thought that this could still be here in 2024. But we know it could, right? We know it could. I’m glad that Paris is already coming up with contingency plans because it seems like the Tokyo organizers have just done nothing but nap the last year, like, what have they been doing!?
Jessica: They made the 32 page cartoon journal!
Lindsay: The cartoon journal.
Jessica: Or guidebook.
Lindsay: We are seeing other places be inventive that aren’t as tied to these corporate structures, be inventive about how they hold competition. The Winter Special Olympics are all gonna be done virtually, you know? I always wonder, at some point in this why couldn’t each sport or delegation be in a different space, right? Like, not have all the Olympics together. It of course would feel different, but you could host more bubble-like atmospheres at different spaces across the globe and more virtually for different competitions and of course air them, figure out a way to broadcast them so it's back to back. There could’ve been ways to get creative in this and be much much safer, but that is not the route that these organizers took.
Jessica: Well, these are money pits. This was a money pit for Japan.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Jessica: So, I’m sure they don’t want to scare away future hosts thinking that their Olympics won’t happen there because they’re also in the money pit with this stuff too. Yeah, you can see as you said, Linz, the money is just guiding all of this.
Lindsay: But wait – I did hear something about Florida? [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah.
Shireen: Of all the intelligent plans. Jess?
Jessica: Yes. So, friends of the show Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff wrote about this for The Nation, that Florida’s state chief financial officer…This is how they wrote it, Dave and Jules: “The cinematically named Jimmy Patronis…” [laughter] He sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee saying that Florida would be happy to host if Japan will not. Dave and Jules do a great job of explaining why on the ground this would be so devastating in Florida. One of the big points is that since the pandemic began the entire country of Japan has had 371,000 cases of COVID; Florida has had over 1.7 million at this point. So, just the idea of it is so ridiculous, but then it’s just like, what a joke Florida is. I mean, I’m from Florida and I have a lot of family there still so I feel like I’m safe in saying that. But what a joke of a state, man. Then to step up in this totally ridiculous way at this particular moment, it’s like you can't even script this stuff anymore. It doesn’t even…It's so outrageous.
Shireen: For our interview that will drop on Thursday I interviewed the amazing Dr. M. Aziz. They are a Black scholar and karate practitioner. We’re gonna talk about Blackness, we’re gonna talk about queerness, and we’re gonna talk about being Muslims in martial arts. We will also get into the Cobra Kai series about what is real and what is not.
Dr. M. Aziz: At this point I’ve had hundreds of people in classes, and not everyone that steps into a class is going to be someone that is affected by a hate crime, and you may not even have to use physical self-defense in your lifetime, but everybody who walks into that class is someone that feels unsafe in a larger world, or feels unseen or perceived as week and incapable in a larger world. So, I think practically speaking one of the big things that I hear folks coming back and saying they walked away with was, “Actually, I just felt better in my body,” right? “I went back into the world and I felt a little less afraid to be myself in my hijab or to be in my gender non-conforming body after I left the class. I felt like I was enough.” I think that’s one of the things that really keeps me going, is when people say, “I felt like enough.”
Shireen: Onto everyone’s favorite part of the show! Jessica Ray, what’s up?
Jessica: So, Lindsay hinted at this in the segment but I would like to talk about a wild thing that happened on Friday night in the NBA, during the Brooklyn Nets’ loss to the Toronto Raptors. Nets star Kevin Durant was pulled from pregame warmups, but then he was allowed to play starting midway through the first quarter. Then Durant was pulled during a third quarter timeout after playing 19 minutes. It’s not hard at this point to guess what happened. During the day on Friday, Durant rode unmasked with a team employee three separate times in a car, according to ESPN’s Malika Andrews. That employee had an inconclusive test, so Durant was allowed on the court. According to a statement from the NBA, “Under the league's health and safety protocols, we do not require a player to be quarantined until a close contact has a confirmed positive test.”
The employee then received a positive test, and so Durant was pulled after spending 19 minutes on court playing basketball. After the game James Harden, Durant’s new teammate on the Nets – speaking for everyone, I wanna say – said, “The game should’ve been postponed, I feel like. If we’re talking about contact tracing, he was around all of us, so I don’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to play and then was able to play and then taken back off the court. If that was the case, we should just postpone the game.” Yes, James Harden. [Shireen laughs] After the NBA told The Athletic that Durant had been pulled on Friday “out of an abundance of caution,” Durant took to Twitter writing in response, “Yo @nba, your fans aren’t dumb!!!! You can’t fool em with your Wack ass PR tactics.”
As of Saturday night, all of the Nets players and staff continued to test negative for COVID-19 but we know there’s an incubation period and lots of people test negative over and over until they don’t. Even if all of the Nets and Raptors do escape without contracting the virus there’s still a lot to be upset about here with how the NBA is handling COVID. All of this comes on the heels of players speaking out about the NBA’s desire to hold an All Star game a month from now. LeBron James called the idea of an exhibition game, which is what the All Star game is, at this point in time “a slap in the face to players.” Kawhi Leonard said holding it is “just putting money over health right now, pretty much.” A man of few words, but the right words here.
As always, there's a lot to worry over when it comes to sports and COVID but there’s something particularly painful about the NBA. I keep thinking about what Lindsay said back in early December in episode 183. She noted how a single positive test from Rudy Gobert nearly a year ago was enough to shut everything down, and then – I’m gonna quote our own Lindsay Gibbs – “We are headed into a winter that is going to be so dangerous and so horrific as far as the death toll, as far as the virus spreading, combining the flu. We can’t even really comprehend how bad it’s gonna get in a December, January, February, and yet the NBA is going on without a bubble – just going on!” Lindsay, you were totally right. And they are. They’re just going on, and the ridiculousness of that was on full display this past week. It's reckless and it's bad and it makes me sad in so many ways and I just want to burn it all down. Burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: I’m gonna go next, and just a trigger warning for everybody listening. I’m gonna talk about the absolute disaster that is Northwestern University. I heard about a story of a former cheerleader named Hayden Richardson who is suing the school for harassment, and I’m gonna be quoting from a Chicago Tribune article on this. Richardson details repeated instances where she said she was groped by drunken fans and alumni during university-sanctioned events, alleging the cheer team's head coach required female members to “mingle” with power donors for the school’s financial gain. This is disgusting, it’s exploitation. As we know, these cheerleaders as athletes aren’t paid, they're exploited, unwillingly. This is an absolutely horrific, horrific situation to put these young women in.
Adjacent to this, Jessica actually sent me an article in The Daily Northwestern reporting on…The article is called Marginalized on the Sidelines and it speaks specifically of the racialized abuse and harassment of Black cheerleaders and racialized cheerleaders also on that squad. It was talking about physical harassment, discrimination, and sexual assault. What has ended up happening is that Northwestern is now facing cases against them, they’re being sued by these former cheerleaders. But in addition to that, I’m really furious at the trauma, the abuse, and that the absolute violation that these cheerleaders experienced…I think that they’re mocked very often, there’s a lack of support from other athletes. There was a complete lack of support, and a disregard of their safety and their wellbeing from Northwestern University. I’m gonna take all of that shit and I wanna burn it all down. Burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: Linz, what are you torching?
Lindsay: I wrote about this in Power Plays this week and spent most of the week kind of immersed in this and I don’t even think the burn pile is big enough, like, that’s how angry I am about this. One of Biden’s first actions as president was to sign the executive order on preventing and combatting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Among other things that mandated that transgender children be allowed to use the locker rooms and bathrooms of their gender identity and participate in the sport of their gender identity. The executive order led to a slew of transphobic op-eds, which of course we’ve already been reading over the past couple of years, but these particularly whine that Biden is “erasing women” and “ending girls’ sport.” We also saw the escalation the emergence of anti-trans bills in local legislatures across the country that aim to ban trans girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
Most of those were done by far right wing Qanon types, but a development on Tuesday came from inside our own community. On Tuesday, a group consisting of multiple female sports legends officially launched the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. There’s six people: legendary tennis player Martina Navratilova; Olympic gold medalist swimmer and CEO of Champion women, Nancy Hogshead-Makar; you've got Donna De Varona, Donna Lopiano; and then the lone man, Tracy Sundlun; and professor of law and co-director of the Center for Sports Law & Policy at Duke Law School, Doriane Coleman. This group has been meeting for almost two years to solve “the problem” of trans participation in sports. It is five cisgender women, one cisgender man, zero scientists or trans people, and of course it is overwhelmingly, blindingly white.
The work culminated in a detailed website which includes an extensive briefing book titled, A Request to Congress and the Administration to Preserve Girls’ and Women’s Sport & Accommodate Transgender Athletes. This group is positioning itself as the moderate between two “extremes” – we don’t believe in full exclusion of trans girls and women, and we don’t believe in the full inclusion of trans girls and women, is what they continuously say. Yet the policies they are proposing are far more damning and dangerous than what currently exist in elite women’s sports. The policies really hinge around the onset of male puberty. It says, “before the onset of male puberty, trans girls and women can compete in girls’ and women’s sport without condition. But trans girls and women who have experienced all or part of male puberty must sufficiently mitigate their male sex-linked advantages through surgery and/or gender affirming hormones consistent with the rules of their sport.”
This focus on the onset of male puberty is maddening. First of all there is no one uniform age or date in which male puberty begins, nor are signs of this the exact same and uniform across the board. So, monitoring this would be incredibly invasive, and the working group provided zero details on the front about how this would be monitored or implemented but it is reasonable to expect that it would be invasive and it would devastatingly, disproportionately discriminate against racialized children who are perceived as being more adult than their same-aged white counterparts.
It’s also a very classist policy, even if the exact onset is discernible and a trans girl decides that she wants to begin medically transition. She can’t just stop by the front office during her lunch break! This is an incredibly expensive procedure and needs incredibly expensive healthcare that is not uniformly accessible. Under these guidelines, girls as young as 11 or 12 and even younger could be forced to make decisions about surgery and hormone treatment just so they can compete in sports with other girls. That’s just unconscionable. The Women’s Sports Policy Working Group is going out of their way to come up with perilous solutions for a problem that does not exist. Trans girls and women are not dominating girls sports. They are not the threat, they’re the ones being threatened.
Anne Lieberman, the Director of Policy and Programs for Athlete Ally, told me, and I think this sums it up: “While everyone is really hyper focused on hypotheticals in elite levels of competitions, trans kids are dying.” So, I wanna burn everything involved in that Working Group, and I know I went long here, but I cannot stress how important it is for everyone who is a fan of women's sports, everyone who considered themselves part of the women's sports community to speak out loudly and adamantly about this because they are using us, they are using the existence of our world to condone this discrimination, and we just cannot stand for it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Shireen: After burning all that needed to be burned, we wanted to take a moment to lift up some incredible people this week. First of all, in memoriam: Dianne Durham, who was according to USA Gymnastics, “the first Black gymnast to capture a national all-around title and paved the way for generations of gymnasts who followed.” Rest in power, Dianne.
Lindsay: Yeah, I also wanted to say this week we lost Chris Wesseling, a reporter for NFL.com and a co-host of the Around the NFL podcast, which I’ve listened to for…God, it feels like almost a decade now. He passed away from cancer, and I just wanna say that he was just a journalist I loved reading. I loved hearing especially about his love story with his wife, Lakisha, and the birth of their son, Linc, and Lakisha and Linc are in my thoughts and prayers, as are everyone who knew Chris. As always, fuck cancer.
Shireen: Jess, who is We Love To See It Shine of the Week?
Jessica: The Black Like Me Film Festival is happening this month. Starting yesterday, Monday, February 8, Colour the Trail, an organization based in British Columbia that wants to inspire more Black, Indigenous, and people of color to enjoy the outdoors, is running an online film festival featuring eight full-length films about Black people excelling at outdoor activities. You can get more information at their website: colourthetrails.com. That’s color with a ‘u’.
Shireen: As it ought to be spelled. [laughter]
Lindsay: It’s a very important clarification. [laughs]
Shireen: Linz.
Lindsay: The Star Rising of the Week: Jasmine Mander has been hired by Soccer Canada as Women’s National Team performance analyst. Mander is a former National Women’s Youth Team player. Congrats!
Shireen: Jess.
Jessica: Wizard of the Week is Sara Goodrum. She is the Brewers’ new Minor League hitting coordinator. She is the first woman to hold that job for an MLB organization.
Shireen: Can I have a drumroll, please?
[drumroll]
Weat Burn It All Down are proud to put young trans athletes on a podium, and recognize their light, importance and power. It has been a particularly egregious week against trans athletes. These young folks continue to fight transmisogyny and attacks on their lives by people who use women’s sports as a weapon against trans communities, inclusion and authentic identities. We offer our solidarity and our respect. We are in this fight with you. Torchbearers of the week are our trans athletes. I just wanted to add an excerpt from Layshia Clarendon's piece in Marie Claire that was published on Saturday, Feb 6th:
“The use of ‘protecting women in sports’ as a cloak for excluding trans women would be comical if it wasn’t so painful. There are renewed calls to police the bodies of women and girl athletes by excluding girls who are trans from participating on school athletic teams. As if, somehow, we can protect women and girls if we just exclude the ones who some believe are ‘too much like boys’ and are ‘given an unfair competitive advantage’ (for the record, this has not been proven). But this is the very thing that has harmed so many athletes—both cisgender and transgender—in women’s sports: the idea that our bodies are somehow fair game for scrutiny, debate, and intrusion. It is this scrutiny that is a threat to women’s sports—not the presence of trans women and girls. We must ask ourselves the critical question: Why are trans girls and women being targeted the most?”
For those of you that missed it, Layshia Clarendon was our torchbearer of the week last week and we offer them our continued love and solidarity. Whew, what’s good, Lindsay Gibbs?
Lindsay: Well, first of all I’m looking out my window and it is snowing! So, this is kind of the first snow I’ve seen here in Greensboro – and honestly it hadn’t snowed in DC in years. It’s not really gonna stick but it’s pretty outside right now. But what’s really good for me this week is this new app, or community, called Focusmate, which is kind of made for ADHD people like myself. It sounds weird to those who aren’t, but it’s essentially a virtual accountability co-working space where you schedule 50 minute sessions with a stranger through their scheduling system, and at the beginning of the call you see each other on video chat and you set your goals and then you stay on-camera – some people stay muted, some people stay unmuted, it kind of depends on what you want. Then at the end of the 50 minutes you check back in.
I’ve done multiple blocks every day this week. I’ve got 4, 5 planned for this afternoon. It has drastically increased my productivity and also just helped me kind of avoid some of my worst traits, which are just it’s so hard for me to find structure to my day since I work from home completely alone. It’s so tough for me to get started and this really helps remove barriers. So, it is only $5 a month for unlimited sessions. If you’re an ADHD person like me and are struggling, I cannot recommend it enough. Every single person I’m on the sessions with, we all say…Because all week I’ve been like, “I’m new to this and this is a game-changer,” and they’re like, yeah, this has changed my life. It is a great, great tool.
Shireen: I love that, all of it. So, I watched Flack on Amazon Prime, and I’m undecided about Anna Paquin, about how I feel. Fly Away Home, I love that movie, the whole geese and the teaching the geese to fly, it was a really good movie. Anyway–
Jessica: She’s in that, I’m guessing? [laughs]
Shireen: Yes. [Lindsay laughs]
Jessica: Okay.
Shireen: So, Flack is not like that. She’s basically this super problematic horrible person, and I actually really ended up enjoying this small limited series on Amazon just because she’s such a mess.
Jessica: She’s like a PR person? That’s why it’s called Flack? Okay.
Shireen: Yes, exactly. She’s a PR person. She works at this agency and it’s a mess and she’s a mess but I love the honesty with which…I mean, there’s no happy ending. This isn’t a spoiler. Every episode, it’s not a happy ending, let’s just say. I guess that is a spoiler. Anyway, it’s just really good, and it’s refreshing to watch that. I wanted to say, I know it’s rumored to be for white people, meal kits, but I’ve been enjoying them. My schedule’s super hectic and I have been passing off the responsibility of meals to my kids and they just assemble this stuff and it’s working out. It was my birthday, which I loved so much, and then it was Jihad’s birthday, my daughter. We had a really nice time, and special shoutout to my niece, Zaara, who will be turning 13 the day this drops. I adore here. She’s got my energy but she’s really smart and beautiful and talented and I just adore her and think the world of her. There’s a lot of Aquarian women in my life, this is just such a power month. But I got a lot of joy from the Which Co-Host Are You? quiz that we put out yesterday.
Lindsay: Oh, yeah. [laughs]
Shireen: Shelby Weldon, I love you, thank you for doing this, and thank you to the flamethrowers on Twitter, Erica who suggested it. It has brought us a lot of fun. There’s a little bit of a Lindsay flex happening there. There’s a lot of Lindsays and Jessicas and Brendas. It’s been great. I was a little worried about my mom – my mom ended up getting me, but I think she just did what she thought…My children were Jessica and me, so it was split, and that tracks, like, Saif and Sallahuddin were Jessica. Jihad tried to pretend she wasn’t me but in that process realized she definitely was me, so that’s on brand. Anyway, that was really, really fun. Jess?
Jessica: This past week a good friend of mine who lives here in Austin named Amy Gentry, she published her third novel – I loved her first two! She writes thrillers, and this latest one is called Bad Habits, I just started it. She has such a smooth writing style, and then she does these thrillers where things are revealed as you go and I’m not really sure how she really keeps track of it and brings everything full circle, but Bad Habits is about graduate school, so if you’ve ever suffered through the politics and the hell and the competitiveness of grad school this book might be for you. She is a huge fan of unlikeable female characters, so just know that going in.
Then last night we watched Dora and the Lost City of Gold, which is the live-action Dora movie. It’s on Hulu. We watched it because we have a 12 year old and he wanted to see it. It is phenomenal. There is no reason that a live-action Dora the Explorer movie should be this funny. I laughed the whole time. It is so well done. The women who plays Dora is spectacular. I know it sounds so weird, but I really cannot recommend this movie more highly. It’s the best movie I’ve seen so far in 2021. Dora and the Lost City of Gold. I laughed so much last night, it was really lovely.
Shireen: Okay, I was not expecting that. But okay, that’s amazing! Lindsay, maybe we can do a watch party for Dora because I would wanna watch Dora with you for just your facial expressions alone. [laughter]
Jessica: Lindsay’s face right now is just…It’s a no from her eyes.
Lindsay: Yeah. Insert face here.
Jessica: It’s a no from her eyes.
Lindsay: But speaking of watch parties, I’m thankful in retrospect for our Super Bowl watch party. [laughs]
Shireen: Yeah.
Jessica: Same.
Shireen: I wanted to quickly add in, Lindsay and I had the pleasure of dropping into Dr. Amira Davis’ class this week, and that was really fun. Love Amira, and especially all those people out there who are getting Amira on the survey and starting happy fan groups and clubs. So, that's fine.
So, what are we watching this week? The Australian Open started yesterday, which will be Monday, February 8th, and it runs until the 21st of February. NBA is continuing, the FA Super Cup continues, European football generally is continuing. The Champs League round of 16 starts very soon. Next week FIFA club world cup, so it's specific to clubs and not national teams, the men’s football is happening. The 2021 Six Nations championship men’s rugby is happening, and if you all remember the Six Nations women’s was cancelled. So, that’s a bit shitty. FIS Alpine World Ski in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, is happening soon from February 8th til the 21st, and the ISU speed skating championships are in Heerenveen, Netherlands. They also start on the 8th of February until the 21st, so get your sport on.
That’s it for this week for Burn It All Down. Burn It All Down lives on the Blue Wire podcast network but can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. We appreciate your reviews and feedback so please subscribe and rate and let us know what we did and how we can improve. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod and on Twitter @burnitdownpod. You can email us at burnitalldownpod@gmail.com and check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com, where you will find previous episodes, transcripts, and a link to our Patreon. Again, we appreciate you subscribing, sharing and rating our show which helps us to do the work we love to do and keep burning what needs to be burned. We wish you safety, health, and whatever joys you can muster during this continuing time. As Brenda says, burn on and not out.