Episode 232: 2021 Stories That Went Under the Radar
In this episode Jessica Luther, Shireen Ahmed and Lindsay Gibbs talk about important sports stories from 2021 that went widely unrecognized. You'll hear about women's sports media, the implosion of the Syracuse women's basketball team, the start of a Saudi Arabia domestic women's football league, the IOC's gendered and racist persecution of runner Caster Semenya, the cancellation of the Women’s Baseball World Cup and the prolific handball goalkeeper for Iran's national team, Fatemeh Khalili.
Following this discussion, you'll hear a preview of Shireen's interview with Michelle Moore, an award-winning leadership coach, speaker and educator about her work in racial equity in sports and writing her book, Real Wins: Understanding the power of difference to make meaningful gains.
Next, the team burns the worst of the sports this week on The Burn Pile. Then, they lift up those making sports better, including Torchbearer of the Week, Kristen Hayden, who won with her partner the mixed synchronized 3-meter competition at the USA Diving winter national championship, making her the first Black woman to win a national diving title in the US and get an invitation to the world championships. They wrap up the show with what's good in their lives and what they are watching in sports this week.
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
Why the mass exodus from Syracuse women’s basketball? https://theathletic.com/2678410/2021/06/29/why-the-mass-exodus-from-syracuse-womens-basketball-ego-manipulation-fear-tactics
Saudi girls 'dream' big with launch of soccer league: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211121-saudi-girls-dream-big-with-launch-of-soccer-league
Caster Semenya on Maintaining Dignity and Hope in the Face of Oppression: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/special-series/olympics-caster-semenya
2021 WBSC Women’s Baseball World Cup officially cancelled: https://www.wbsc.org/news/2021-wbsc-womens-u-15-baseball-world-cups-officially-cancelled
Clubs in Japan's top baseball league NPB are establishing women's teams: https://www.wbsc.org/news/clubs-in-japans-top-baseball-league-npb-are-establishing-womens-teams
Iranian bursts into tears: the most moving moment of the handball World Cup https://gettotext.com/iranian-bursts-into-tears-the-most-moving-moment-of-the-handball-world-cup
Transcript
Jessica: Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica, and this week I'm joined by Shireen and Lindsay. Today we're going to talk about some stories in sports that you might've missed in 2021. Of course we'll burn things, highlight torchbearers, and tell you what's good in our worlds, as well as what we are watching this week. But first, before we get into all of that, we are about to go on our annual break at the end of the year. The next time we're going to record an episode like this is in January of 2022. Wow. So, I want to know what you all are looking forward to during our break. Lindsay?
Lindsay: Sleeping in on the weekends. []laughs] And, as the non-parent of the group, I know that I'm uniquely positioned to allow that, but I don't know. I'm very excited. I'm just very excited for the holidays. I mean, obviously the pandemic is still raging and I'm very aware of that, but last year we didn't do at all our Christmas Eve, you know, our big family Christmas celebrations, like it didn't happen at all. I didn't do anything for Christmas last year, really. And so we are doing them this year, you know, vaccinated and tests and everything, knowing there's a risk. But that's what I'm most excited about is actually getting to do Christmas. And remember, last year I was moving in the middle of Christmas. So, last year, Christmas was just like…It was a pandemic, and I was moving. So, it was not Christmas. [laughs] It just was not Christmas.
Jessica: Oh, well, I'm happy for you. That's very exciting. Shireen, what are you going to do? What are you looking forward to?
Shireen: My kids are going to be gone for two weeks, so I'm like, what?! I had all these plans – meaning just sit on my sofa. But I'm going to go see my parents for a little while and I'm excited about that. And even if there's a lockdown in Ontario, which people are predicting for January, I will still go see them. It's just me with them, and I'm double vaxxed and I will take an antigen test. But I mean, there were certain things that I wanted to do like go skating outdoors and these kinds of things. So some of the stuff I think I might still be able to do, like go snowshoeing by myself. Just be conscientious.
I just signed up for a Brown Girl Outdoor World ski trip in January. There's going to be three sessions. There was a really cool thing on Instagram, and friend of the show Melissa Doldron had told me about it. She tagged me. So, I signed up for it. And I love skiing and I don't get to ski enough. Last year there wasn't enough snow. So, I'm excited. I'm trying to stay really positive about it, despite this plague that rages on.
Jessica: That's so funny. Y'all have very nice things, and my number one thing on my list is that I was looking forward to is not being in meetings. [laughs] I was looking at my Google calendar yesterday, and I'd just be like, wow, there's nothing on it for next week that has anything to do with being on a Zoom or talking to anyone about work.
Shireen: We have our Christmas party though, this week.
Jessica: That's not the same.
Shireen: Okay. [laughs]
Jessica: That's not the same thing. And then of course I have my…I mean, I say of course. If you've been here for a while, then you'll know this. I have my annual tradition of making too many sugar cookies and decorating them like I'm Martha Stewart. I've been doing this for like almost 20 years now, and I haven't even started that yet. So, that is what I will be doing over the next week and I’m very excited to do that. And I might read a book. Like, I literally wrote “read a book” on my list– [laughs]
Lindsay: Me too!
Jessica: Because it's a big deal at this point. [laughter] So, fingers crossed that I can read a book. To cap off a wild 2021, we thought it'd be worth spending some time talking about sports stories that flew under the radar, or that people might've missed in the midst of, you know, the constant avalanche of news during an exhausting global pandemic. So, Lindsay, will you please get us started? What is one of the things that you want to highlight that might've flown under the radar this year?
Lindsay: Yeah. So, this is going to be really surprising for people to hear from me. And I'm starting out I guess a little bit meta, but I complain a lot about coverage of women's sports, but I think we're going to look back at 2021 as a game changing, marquee, almost paradigm-shifting year for coverage of women's sports. A lot of this groundwork has been laid of course in previous years, but what Haley Rosen has built at Just Women's Sports earlier this year, they announced a $3.5 million fundraising round, and they're going the start-up route and getting money and they're expanding and they're hiring new people and they're doing things that ESPN and espnW should have done. But she's doing it. She's building the infrastructure.
What Ari Chambers is doing with HighlightHer, with Bleacher Report, not only coverage-wise and getting exposure for these female athletes, but also projects in the community. It’s just game-changing. What Camille Buxeda is doing with WSLAM, getting SLAM magazine to finally focus on women’s sports. And these are just a couple. I know I'm missing a bunch, but we have people we love at Sports Illustrated that are covering more women's sports. We have people we love at ESPN, and Katie Barnes, who are pushing the envelope there.
And of course, some of the biggest journalism stories of the year, it’s come from Molly Hensley-Clancy at the Washington Post and Meg Linehan at The Athletic exposing the systemic abuse within the National Women's Soccer League. I don't think it's talked enough about as a media story, which is why I wanted to put here, because it's women's sports. Like, I think if this was any other sector that had exploded in this way, it would be getting these year in retrospectives, which is why I wanted to kind of put it here, because there's a long way to go and I will keep being critical. I promise. [laughs] But I'm excited at what these people are independently building and building within legacy institutions. And you need both, and we're getting both, and I'm excited.
Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, shoutout to our own Lindsay Gibbs and her remarkable Power Plays newsletter that, if you haven't signed up for yet, what are you doing? Yeah, that's great, Lindsay. Like, now I'm all happy and I'm of course going to do like a classic Burn It All Down thing and bring us down. [laughter]
Lindsay: I mean, same. [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah, here we go. So when I was looking back at things that happened this year, I stumbled across the implosion of the Syracuse women's basketball team from last spring. And I was like, oh yeah, that happened. But it's just wild. So, a reminder of what actually went down: a month after Syracuse lost in the second round of March Madness, 12 of their players – 8 of them with more than one year of eligibility remaining – announced their decision to transfer from the program. Twelve! That left three players on the team. Since 2018, 20 players had transferred, which was the highest rate among Power Five women's teams without a coaching change during that timeframe. In June, Chantel Jennings and Dana O'Neil reported at The Athletic – there we go with The Athletic again.
Lindsay: See? It is part of the good story, even though it’s a bad story.
Jessica: It really is. Chantel and Dana reported at The Athletic that, “Syracuse women's basketball coach Quentin Hillsman has shown a pattern of inappropriate behavior, including unwanted physical contact, as well as threatening and bullying players, that has contributed to the program's high transfer rate in recent years.” They spoke with 9 former Syracuse players and 19 other people, including team managers and staff members. That report led to Syracuse hiring an outside law law firm to look into all of it. In August – so, two months later – Quentin Hillsman resigned before the report came in. But the report would eventually show that the athletic department did not do enough to address the troubling behavior of the team's leadership.
That is a truly stunning series of events. Like, just shocking on paper. At a major program! And while it certainly made waves within the women's college basketball world, there were definitely pockets of people talking about this, and obviously we had good reporting around it. It's amazing, and also not at all, how little the larger sports world paid attention to what was happening there. It's not hard to imagine that, had this been Syracuse men's basketball team imploding in this way around a coach like this, it would have spanned multiple news cycles at all of the sports channels. So now, under acting head, coach Vonn Read, the team just won its sixth game in a row over the weekend. Again, only three players on the current roster were on the team last year. So, like, talk about a rebuilding year.
Shireen: Did they recruit heavily? Like, what happened?
Jessica: There were a lot of…Something like 7 of the players transferred in from other programs. And then I assume they had their normal recruitment of players coming in. So yeah, it was just a ton of turnover. And they got good players. Like, it'll be interesting to see how the season plays out and what kind of actual coverage we get around how this team does in this year following – which should have been one of the biggest news stories, but wasn’t. So, Syracuse women's basketball. Shireen you're up next. What's your first story?
Shireen: So, I kind of went with yay, cup half full. [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah, good. There you are! There she is. [laughs]
Shireen: Hello! So, on Monday, November 22nd, 2021, Saudi Arabia’s women's football league launched its first domestic women's league. Now I know we've talked on the show that in Jeddah they had a regional league, but this is a national domestic league. You know, various cities are doing it. It’s really important for a couple of reasons. First, because women were only allowed into a stadium in January, 2018.
Jessica: Wow.
Shireen: Yeah. So this is huge. And you know I've done work on women in stadiums, and this is important. Honestly, it's a good development after this, and particularly after lifting a decades-old band that prevented women from playing publicly to begin with. And this is only two years after they're are now allowed to travel without a male guardian. And the reason I bring that into it is particularly when we're talking about Arab countries and Muslim majority countries, the issue of mobility and the issue of being able to move around is absolutely correlated. And we see this when we talk about issues of oppression of Palestinian players, how their mobility is taken away, and how it absolutely affects their sport and how they play, where they compete. And as I said, they started an initial regional league, and we had interviewed Bireen Sadagah, a player, in episode 127. And at the time, this is what she said.
Bireen Sadagah: So, when you go there, you play, you enjoy the game. You actually tell your friend, come on, let's try this. I had fun playing football. It's something new. It's something different. Because here in Saudi, most girls, they only play volleyball and basketball. No one actually really plays football, because they have the concept of football is only for men. And I think we actually changed that thought.
Shireen: And for that league, there were no men spectators allowed, which is usually at par. They have the closed stadium for men, and women and children under 12 can absolutely attend. But this particular national league is looking at greater sites, and upon creation they hired former national German player and storied coach Monica Staab, and the Saudi Arabian football federation women's director Lamia Bahaian said to her, “We want to go to the World Cup.” And I really hope they get there. I mean, it's, you know, gonna be a tough ride. It's going to be an uphill battle in that region. In particular, Jordan has been working on this for a very long time.
But I love that intentionality. I love that dream. I love that there is a World Cup that they look to with eyes shining to say, “We can see it,” because of what's happened at the World Cup, the numbers, the excitement in that region; in particular, the fact that the players can travel, that there's huge excitement about it. Like, I love all of this for them. So, I mean, when it first came out, I think when it was announced last year, it kind of made flash in the pan news, but I just kind of wanted to dig a little deeper to say it's actually happened. I didn't hear a lot about it, but I'm really excited. We're going to keep an eye on this, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Jessica: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. I had no idea.
Lindsay: I didn’t know it had started! [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah. Thank you, Shireen. Under the radar, totally! Even here at Burn It All Down. [laughs]
Shireen: And we're one of the only places that had interviewed a player, like literally, I think in all of the Western hemisphere, we're one of the only shows that actually talked to a player at that time in Saudi Arabia. Yay us.
Jessica: Wow. Go team. Lindsay, what is your second story from 2021?
Lindsay: You know, when we look back at this year, of course we're going to be talking about the trans bans throughout women's sports. But that's something we cover heavily on the show, although it can never get enough attention, of course. But in that spectrum, though of course different, but in the world of policing women's bodies and the women's category, one of the most outrageous and inexcusable stories of the year was the exclusion of Caster Semenya from the Olympics. So, in case you're unfamiliar, Caster Semenya is a South African runner who won gold in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics in the 800 meters.
I want to read you a piece that Caster actually wrote for the New York times this week. And so this is kind of her intro. It says, “My dream was to defend my titles at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games. I won gold in the women's 800 meter competition in both 2012 and 2016. I wanted to compete again in the Olympics and get one step closer to my goal: becoming the greatest female 800 meter runner of all time. But I didn't get to run in Tokyo. I am furious, sad, and disappointed that I was denied the opportunity by a 2018 World Athletics ruling.”
And since Caster came onto the scene, she has been the target of racist and sexist rules regulating testosterone that target intersex athletes. This really took to the next level when the international track and field association, the IAAF, published, promoted and funded a study in the British Journal of Sports in 2017. The scientists who wrote this were affiliated with track and field's world governing body. And this study concluded the athletes in women's sports competing in athletics with higher testosterone levels than their peers had a 1.8 to 4.5% performance advantage.
To poke holes in the study, the highest approximate advantage that male athletes usually have over female athletes is 10%. So, 1.8 to 4.5% is well short of that. And then there's the scope of what this study led to, which was that the 1.8 to 4.5% advantage was only applicable to competitors in five events, with the biggest advantages coming in hammer throw and pole vault, and the smallest advantages coming in the 400 meters, 400 meter hurdles and 800 meter events. However, the resulting ban that the athletics federation put into place targeted just runners in the women's category from the 400 meters to one mile. Not those in hammer throw, not those in pole vault, even though – or probably because – women from the global south do not dominate those events!
Anyways, if you're already mad, I'm sorry. I gotta just tell you one more thing. While this study was the root of the ban that kept Caster Semenya from defending her title, and we've already said the study itself is very flawed. It actually was recanted. So, that report itself has been officially recanted by the authors, but it did not happen until after the Tokyo games. Caster is continuing to fight in court, and is a brave champion, but I just…We didn't talk about it enough. I didn't write about it enough. The fact that she was unable to compete is a tragedy and one of the most appalling things in sports right now, and that is a really dense list. [laughs]
I want to finish by reading the end of her New York Times column. It says, “Despite missing Tokyo, my head remains high. I'm a Black South African. I was lucky to be born with a special talent; but without ambition, perseverance, and faith in yourself, you will get nowhere. The many setbacks I've experienced have made me stronger. Setbacks are part of what it takes to become a great athlete. I know about maintaining dignity and hope in the face of oppression, and my goal now is to win my legal case. For me, as a woman, as a human being, fighting a cruel injustice, victory would be sweet. As sweet as any I have achieved on the track.”
Jessica: I'll never not be deeply sad about how these massive sporting institutions have targeted this one single person. Okay. So, for my second story, I'm going to go to my particular niche, the only part of baseball that I care about, which is women's baseball. Sorry, men's baseball fans. I wrote a piece in October for Global Sport Matters about the current state of women's baseball. And one aspect, of course, was the impact of COVID on this already massively under-resourced and under-supported sport. Right before we published that piece, so it did actually…There’s like a little parentheses where this made it in. It was announced that the one major international tournament, the Women's Baseball World Cup, had been canceled.
And I'm so sad about this. The last one was in 2018, which I attended and wrote about for Huffington Post. It's when I met Francis Ford Coppola. So if you want to know about that, that's in that piece. The latest one was initially supposed to take place in 2020, but because of COVID that was pushed to 2021, and then they canceled it altogether. And they're now shifting from a two year schedule – so, they used to, you know, it was 2014, 2016, 2018 – to a four year one now. So that means that the next Women's Baseball World Cup isn't going to happen until 2024.
So that was six full years between World Cups, without any good indication of if anything at all will fill that international competition void. And I specifically bring that up because when I interviewed people in Australia, in Canada, in the US, in Japan and in Venezuela about the state of women's baseball and what needs to improve, all of them told me that they need more international competitions, that they are necessary. And so the cancellation and the fact that they’ve shifted at the same time to have this huge six year gap just makes me very nervous for this sport that already gets such little attention and such little help along the way.
But I want to say, I am not all doom and gloom on this. When I spoke to Hiroko Yamada….She is lovely. I enjoyed that conversation so much. She's the president of the women's baseball federation of Japan. Hiroko was excited about the possibility of there being a new professional baseball league for women in Japan that would run alongside the Nippon Professional Baseball league. You might know that Japan was the only country to have a professional women's baseball league, but it was financed by like one rich dude, and he hit hard times a couple of years ago. I don't know if it was COVID related. And so the league just kind of folded, like, there just wasn't the money anymore.
So, now, at least three NPB teams have announced that they hope to participate in a women's league in Japan starting in 2023. Hiroko was just really excited about this idea and about what this would mean for women's baseball in Japan. And it’s really something to watch Japan continue to just lead the world when it comes to women's baseball. And this is yet another step to show how important it is within that country, and that made me just so happy, and I was thinking about how happy that probably made Hiroko when they announced these things. So, that's my happy story about women's baseball going into 2022. Shireen, bring us home. What's your other story from 2021?
Shireen: Again, happy.
Jessica: Look at you go! [laughs]
Lindsay: Shireen, glass half full. Glass half full.
Shireen: Absolutely. Well, my coffee cup is currently empty, but that's not the point. [Jessica laughs] The point is that I'm going to talk to you a little bit about handball. Yes, friends. IHF women's handball, in particular court handball – not to be confused with beach handball, and we will get there in a minute. Now, this started in 1957, right? European teams have won every time except 1995 when South Korea won as the first team outside of Europe. And Brazil won in 2013 as the first team from the Americas, it says, but like just from this side of the world. And the biggest winner that’s not European is Russia with four titles.
I think nine teams participated in that first championship, and now it's like 32 in 2021. And this is really, really important because this is a very popular sport outside of North America. And I'm telling you all this because I like to look at the way that a sport has progressed throughout time, and this is relevant. So basically, they do every other year, like every second year, and then it's alternating with the Olympic tournament where women's handball was actually introduced in 1976.
So, I do want to remind everybody that just before the Olympics you heard about the Norway beach handball team, because they weren't permitted to choose their own uniform. They wanted to wear shorts, and were contractually and legally obligated by the federation to wear bikini bottoms. Now, on November 1st, that was actually changed. And there's a New York Times article that we'll add in the show notes about that, because it was quite a kerfuffle, women not being able to choose what they want. And I did a lot of commentary and wrote about this at the time, which is why handball kind of stuck out in my head.
Now, fast forward to now. I'm going to talk to you about Fatemeh Khalili. And you're like, who? I’m like, yes. Fatemeh Khalili, who is the goalkeeper for Team Iran. Now, Team Iran doesn't have like a storied history from like the 1960s in handball. They started to develop a team in the early 2000s. And when I say they were committed to this, they were committed to handball like you wouldn't believe. And we know that they’re futsal superstars and do very well in the Asian Confederation and have won. Now, handball, friends, is really where Persian women are slaying.
So, Fatemeh Khalili was a torchbearer of ours a couple of weeks ago in an episode, and I like the story because Iranian women are often left out of mainstream conversations, particularly if it's a sport like handball. Although they lost, she was given player of the match, and she cried and she sobbed. It's the tweet that was shared on the IHF. The actual sight was beautiful. It's her sobbing, and she had like 40 key saves, which is amazing. They lost like by a lot, actually, in that match. But the point is, is that she kept trying and she kept going and she’s sobbing and her teammates are hugging her and the opponents were giving her a standing ovation. It's one of those moments in sports that I feel we really needed this.
It's just so lovely that everybody's crying, she's crying, and it was shared a lot on Instagram. But did we hear about it in the mainstream reporting? Absolutely not. And I mean, there's a difference between actual reporting…And I'm not trying to minimize the importance of digital spaces and those kinds of things, but time and resources are dedicated to women's sports reporting, that's different than having like a thing go viral. Do you know what I mean? So, I would have loved this, someone to do a deep dive on it. Maybe that person will be me. Anyways, putting that in the universe. Love Fatemeh Khalili. Maybe one day she'll be on Burn It All Down. I'm manifesting that.
Jessica: All right, Fatemeh. You heard it. [laughter] This was lovely! Thank you all for doing that review with me. I feel like I learned something, so I hope everyone listening did as well. On this week's interview, Shireen talks to the lovely Michelle Moore, an award-winning leadership coach, author, speaker, and educator. They discuss Moore's work in racial equity in sports, and about her new book, Real Wins: Understanding the power of difference to make meaningful gains. Catch that interview on Thursday.
Michelle Moore: This isn't a positive thinking empowerment book, “let’s think our way positively out of discrimination.” It's not that. This is the harsh reality of my experience, right? These are some of the things that could have made the experience better, but this is how I have chosen to redefine success, and my idea of success has shifted so much because of my experiences, but also I'm not into losing. I'm not into just competing for the sake of it. I'm into rinsing everything out of this opportunity for my lifetime so that I can win, right? And that doesn't necessarily mean that I’m the winner or the best seller or on this list or that list. I don't define my value by that stuff. I define my value by the quality of the work, the way in which I connect, move, and inspire and work with those around me to get the best out of themselves so that I can get the best out of myself.
Jessica: Now it's time for everyone's favorite segment, the burn pile, where we pile up all the things we've hated this week in sports and we set them aflame. I am going to start. It's COVID. The thing that I am burning is this particular upswing of COVID. And I mean that generally, regarding the continuing damage of the Delta variant and the newer wave of Omicron and what that means for all of our daily lives. But I also mean specifically within sports. And so just bear with me here, folks, because I want you to understand what I'm talking about, in case you have somehow missed this.
This week, over 150 NFL players tested positive for COVID. The league postponed three games: the Las Vegas Raiders and the Cleveland Browns game was moved to Monday, the Washington Football Team and Philadelphia Eagles game and the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams games were moved to Tuesday. The Browns, the Washington Team and the Rams all have more than 20 players on the COVID reserve list. In the NBA, the Brooklyn Nets have 10 players on the COVID list as of this recording, including Kyrie Irving, who they famously had said could not play this season because he was not vaccinated, but then who they activated this week as their numbers dwindled. But whoops, he was immediately placed on the COVID reserve list. Something like 8% of the players in the league are affected by COVID at this point.
The Bulls had to postpone two games last week, as did their G League team. The NHL announced on Friday that all games for the Colorado Avalanche, Florida Panthers and Calgary Flames are postponed through at least December 23rd. It's not clear what's going to happen in that league. Both men's and women's collegiate basketball games have been canceled, including more than a dozen men's games canceled or postponed recently. The Premier League, which is at the start of a busy couple of weeks, something like 40 games in 17 days, has postponed I believe six games now over the last week. It’s just really hard to keep track. Every time I look at an article it's like two days late on whatever the numbers are.
So, that's a lot. Like, a lot a lot. And unlike what happened in the spring of 2019, it seems like sports is just going to continue on no matter what at this point. The NBA, which led the way almost two years ago on shutting down in the face of the pandemic, is not going to stop. It, like the NHL, has increased testing and mask policies. It's not clear what's going to happen with the Premier League, though ESPN has reported that some people are pushing for them to delay all their games until the new year. The NFL and the NFLPA though have decided that asymptomatic fully vaccinated players no longer have to be tested on a weekly basis. Instead, asymptomatic vaccinated personnel will now be subject to so-called “strategic and targeted testing” so they can choose to be tested as much as they want. Apparently a lot of those 150 plus players were asymptomatic, and so the answer is to not test them? I'm not sure I get it.
I honestly don't know what to say about all of this at this point. I know we're all fucking tired and we wish things were different. But the truth is, COVID is really deadly. In the last two years, it has killed 5.3 million people around the world. That is a stunning number. We are still in it, and sports are not immune from any of this. To put it plainly. I'm just really worried about everyone's health and safety, about how we're just seemingly going to play through it all no matter how bad it gets, about where we go from here. And so I just want to burn all of that. I just want to burn it. So, burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Lindsay, what are you burning this week?
Lindsay: Urban Meyer, Jess. I'm burning Urban Fucking Meyer. [laughter] And explicit warning, because these quotes have cuss words and we do not bleep out, here at Burn It All Down. [laughs]
Jessica: Earmuffs, kids! Earmuffs!
Lindsay: The burn pile is rated R. I’m sorry, it just is. So, just 13 weeks into his first season as head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Urban Meyer has been fired. He had a 2 and 11 record in Jacksonville, and even though there have been worse seasons by the win-loss record in NFL history, his tenure will go down as the worst coaching stint in the history of the NFL. Whew! I mean, it’s undeniable. The end of his tenure, honestly, I would say nobody had this on their bingo card.
But I bet somebody did actually have this on their bingo card, because what actually ended his tenure was Josh Lambo, a former kicker for the Jacksonville Jaguars, telling the Tampa Bay Times that, prior to the final preseason game against the Dallas Cowboys in August, Urban Meyer, who apparently does not call any specialists, punters, kickers, or long snappers by their names at all. He just uses their place or a cuss word. So, he approached Lambo, who was in a lunge position, said, “Hey, dipshit, make your fucking kicks.” And then he kicked the kicker in the leg. Of the kick, Lambo said, “It certainly wasn't as hard as he could have done it, but it certainly wasn't a love tap. And in the workplace, the boss cannot strike an employee, which, yes, I would say that's a good rule. [laughter]
Jessica: You know, Lindsay, you know who had that also on their bingo card? College players who were coached by Urban Meyer. They had this on their bingo card.
Lindsay: Yeah! Exactly. So, apparently Lambo told Meyer, “Don't you ever fucking kick me again.” And Meyer responded, “I’m the head ball coach. I'll kick you whenever the fuck I want.” [Jessica gasps] Whew! So, this report, which, you know, did I think give the Jaguars cause, came right after an NFL network reporter, Tom Pelissero, said that in a meeting Meyer had with his assistant coaches – who Meyer had a big role in hiring – Meyer delivered a biting message that he's a winner and his assistant coaches are losers, and individually went around the room asking each assistant coach to compare their resumes to his.
Meyer denied that report and said, “If there is a source, that source is unemployed. I mean, within seconds.” And apparently it was that threat to sources that inspired Josh Lambo to come forward with his story. Josh had spent five years with the Jaguars, so he felt an obligation to the players that were still in that locker room. Meyer of course coached for 30 years, high school and then collegiate ranks, to unpaid players where he exhibited full control over…He, Meyer, was recently out of coaching after it was discovered that he had enabled a domestic abuser on his coaching staff for years and years and years. Every single person knew that this hire was a bad decision before the Jaguars made it.
The fact that he signed Tim Tebow, who hadn't played football in six years, to be a tight end. He didn't understand free agency rules. He was very mad that he couldn't meet in person with players before signing them, which I'm guessing meant he didn't know how much control he would be able to exhibit over players and couldn't look them in the eye and see he would be, you know, weak and cowering towards him. Of course, while filling out of his coaching staff, Meyer first hired former Iowa strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle, who had been fired by Iowa after multiple Black players provided accounts of his racial bias and bullying.
Of course, Meyer's out of a job, but he might have a future. He can go back to teaching a course on character and leadership at Ohio State, or maybe a speaking tour. He released a book in 2015 that promised lessons in leadership and life. While it has been a little bit enjoyable to see Meyer get fired and roasted and to see how spectacularly this has burned to the ground, I also just want to say: this is a person who we know this abuse did not start here. He has systemically abused players without power for decades, and people knew about it and people enabled him, and it was only the fact that he was losing and that he came across adult men who had money and had power and could speak out against him that he's been stopped. So, I want to burn that shit to the ground.
All: Burn.
Jessica: All right. Shireen, what is on your burn pile?
Shireen: Okay. So, initially I was going to go with the UEFA draw for the Champs League, but we all know that UEFA's basically a mafia, and they set up things. And when I say that, I'm just not making this up. This is actually the term that Dr. Frank Guridy told me one day. So essentially, a mistake, a “technical mistake” – you can't see me doing air quotes because, you know, we're a podcast, an audio podcast. But essentially, Manchester United was left out of this draw. I’m just going to just sum it up, because this isn't my actual burn. And they had to do it again, and then they set up these series of tweets and everyone's like, what are you doing? Like, you excluded them, and you can't have Villarreal and Atlético Madrid. They have to be facing each other.
Anyway, it was a gong show. In my opinion, it was purposeful and intentional, because UEFA's just like that, and they want to set up the teams that will attract the most viewership. And arguably Manchester United facing Real Madrid would draw more fans. I'm not a big fan of either of them, but that's okay. I just felt like it was my duty to report this; also because I love Amira, who's a big Man U fan.
Anyway, the thing that I'm actually actually burning…I’m going to talk a bit actually about peaceful protest and sports activists who are also human rights activists. And this is in particular Tenzin Kunchok is currently being detained. And you're like, who is that? She's one of the activists who was peacefully protesting earlier inside IOC headquarters in Switzerland. And Kunchok took this action to stand up for Peng Shuai, who we've talked about on the show, and countless other Tibetan and Uyghur women who suffer under this occupation. Now, I’m just going to play a little bit of a clip from her tweet.
Thomas Bach and the IOC are beyond complicit in the Chinese government’s silencing of Peng Shuai. Thomas Bach is just another pawn of the CCP’s propaganda machine. The IOC has failed human rights, to allow China to host the Olympic Games, despite the CCP’s violence against women, ranging from the silencing of Peng Shuai to the use of rape as a force of torture against Uyghur woman, or the religious persecution of countless Tibetan nuns.
The International Olympic Committee has declared that the CCP’s treatment of women is acceptable. We asked the world support Peng Shuai as well as countless other women who are currently being silenced by the CCP, by boycotting the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022. Through a full boycott of the genocide games, the world has an opportunity to send a clear message to the CCP that gender-based violence is unacceptable.
Shireen: I mean, we struggle with this, and it's important to talk about it and to always remember that as we want to celebrate women athletes, and this is something we discuss repeatedly and honestly before every major tournament, that we want to support women's sports, but we wouldn't be authentic if we didn't actually talk about the systems of oppression surrounding those mega tournaments and what happens. It would be very disingenuous to not talk about activists who are being detained by and because of their peaceful protesting with the upcoming Olympics. We are literally like a month away, almost, or like, I don't know, eight weeks away from the Olympics? They start on February 4th. My math is terrible. Bear with me.
The thing is, is that China is a place where they're manufacturing what's coming out of it, how it looks. And we want to support women's sports. We want to support a lot of women who get amplification during the Olympics that they wouldn't get any other time. But what about those Tibetan women? And those Uyghur women that are treated…And the Uyghur community in particular, who were put in concentration camps in China? And I think it's fair to talk about that. I think it's fair for us to rally about that. And I'm actually going to put a link to a petition that will go in the show notes and that I would love if all the flamethrowers take this as a call to action as well to sign that. I want to take all of this and I want to burn it to the ground.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Now to highlight people carrying the torch and changing sports and our wider culture. First, our Brenda Elsey wrote the following about the great bell hooks, who died this week at the age of 69. “Activist, scholar, poet, teacher, the most brilliant of them all, Dr. bell hooks left us this past week. Her works including Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, along with dozens of other books, articles, poetry, essays, sought to use criticism to build empathy, end the harms of inequality, and motivate. Her book, Feminism Is for Everybody, is a pithy triumph that imagines a world where everyone is better off embracing intersectional feminism.
hooks once said, ‘I am passionate about everything in my life. First and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that's a dangerous person to be in this society. Not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.’ True. She was dangerous for those who wanted to perpetrate racism, violence, and the rest of it. Through her work, and all of us who have benefited from it, she'll continue to scare the hell out of them. She truly burned it all down.” Lindsay, who are our college champions this week?
Lindsay: The Wisconsin women's volleyball team, who won the NCAA volleyball championship, defeating Nebraska in–
Jessica: Thrilling, thrilling.
Lindsay: Thrilling, really nail-biting, like oh my god, this was good, this game was so good, five sets. It's the first volleyball championship for Wisconsin. It was so good.
Jessica: It really was. Shireen, who is our firecracker this week?
Shireen: Congratulations to Julianna Peña. She defeated one of the greatest mixed martial artists ever, Amanda Nunes, and in doing so became the UFC bantamweight champion.
Jessica: Lindsay, who are our ray of lights this week?
Lindsay: That'd be survivors in sports. First, over 500 abuse survivors in gymnastics have reached a $380 million settlement this week with USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic and Paralympic committee and their insurers. Additionally, USA Gymnastics agreed to change its board structure, which includes having at least one survivor on the board. We also learned last week that FIFA and the United Nations will establish a global investigative network next year to tackle sexual abuse across all sports. This comes in response to female footballers in Afghanistan and Haiti among others reporting extensive abuse by the leadership of their football associations.
Jessica: Shireen, who is our lightning rod this week?
Shireen: Tiffany Mitchell. Tiffany went up against Basketball Australia and their policy asking women with braids to tie them back or put the braids in a bun in order to play in the WNBL. She wrote a long post on Instagram about how this rule specifically targets Black women. And in response, Basketball Australia acknowledged that their policy was outdated and culturally insensitive, and WNBL rescinded the rule.
Jessica: Lindsay, who is our bright flame this week?
Lindsay: Steph Curry! This is a fun story. Beating the all time reigning three point king in the NBA this week. He has hit 2,977 winners in 789 games. For some perspective, Ray Allen got his record in 1300 games. That's who he passed on the list. And that means that Steph Curry took the record 511 games before Allen did. You know, gotta shout out North Carolina boys! Love it.
Shireen: You do. You have to shout out North Carolina boys. [laughters]
Jessica: Shireen, who are our professional champions this week?
Shireen: For our professional champions of the week, well, we have two teams. First of all, I would like to highlight the PWHPA’s champion of the Kipling showcase in Toronto. Team Scotiabank of Calgary edged out team Sonnet of Toronto 3-1 to win the latest iteration of the Secret Dream Gap Tour. I was so lucky to be there, and I'm so happy to see women's hockey continue to thrive.
Our next champions are actually the men's side of Team Algeria, AKA Les Verts. So, they beat out Team Tunisia to win the first iteration of a FIFA sanctioned Arab Cup. So yes, there have been different versions of this tournament, but this was the first one sanctioned by FIFA. And it was actually hosted in Qatar. So, as Algeria won and the chants of “One, two, three, viva l’Algérie!” rang out and people partied in the streets all over the Middle East and in North Africa, one of the most incredible things was, after their win, Algerian coach Madjid Bougherra dedicated the country's victory to Palestine and to the Gaza strip in particular. We just love the solidarity. Congratulations, Team Algeria.
Jessica: Can I get a drum roll, please?
[drumroll]
Our torchbearer this week is Kristen Hayden, who is the first Black woman to win a national diving title in the US, and the first Black US diver to get an invitation to the world championships. She won the mixed synchronized three meter competition at the USA diving winter national championship with her partner Quinn Henninger last week. Get this: it was the first synchro competition together for Henninger and Hayden! That's amazing. Hayden is now only the second ever Black national champion in diving in the US, joining Mike Wright on that short list.
Afterwards, Hayden said, “I don't think words can even describe the feeling. You read about people like that. You watch Serena Williams, Simone Biles, Simone Manuel. And when it's yourself, it's insane. I think the whole diving community is headed in the right direction, and I just want to be a good example for young Black Americans or any minority, really.
Kristen Hayden: When I was younger, there was no US Black female diver that I could look to. So when I'm diving, I'm not just diving for myself, I'm diving for the future divers that are coming up and saying, I need to be a good role model because they're going to look up to me. They're going to follow what I'm doing.
Jessica: You are certainly that, Kristen. Well done. Okay, let's talk about what's good. I'm going to go first. What's good for me? I listened to this amazing podcast. It's a difficult one. It's called Believe Her. It’s by journalist Justine van der Leun, about a woman who killed her abusive partner in 2017 and then was sentenced to 19 years to life for his murder. But it's a nuanced, brilliantly reported…One of the smartest things that I have listened to or read about domestic violence and how this plays out when the women survive and get punished for it. It's sad and it's hard, but I just think it's a remarkable piece of journalism. So, that's called Believe Her.
And then I want to do two things that I have loved on television recently. Love Life on HBO Max; the first season is Anna Kendrick, and it's good. But season two stars William Jackson Harper, who most people know is Chidi from The Good Place. And Jessica Williams. And I loved every second of it. It is so, so good and smart and well done. So, Love Life. And then we have been watching Baking It on Peacock. I know on this show I have talked about Making It with Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman and their crafting. And this is Baking It with Maya Rudolph and Andy Sandberg.
It is so cute. The baking part is fun and everything, but Maya and Andy make up songs constantly and sing them, and they're ridiculous and perfect. I could just watch the two of them just talk to each other. And part of what I love about it is Maya Rudolph is perfect, and Andy Sandberg, who I love from Brooklyn Nine Nine – which is such a weird sentence I never thought I would say if you'd asked me 10 years ago. But he clearly is just so jazzed to be there with Maya Rudolph, and I understand that emotion completely. So, Baking It on Peacock has just like been adorable. And so that has been good for me. Lindsay, what about you?
Lindsay: Yeah, I've got a lot to look forward to this week, if COVID allows it to happen. But mainly right after we record this, I'm going to do a little reunion with my high school friends. And because of COVID it's now been, you know, probably three years, and a lot of them have had babies since, so I'm going to get to meet the babies and I'm very excited about that.
Shireen: Do they know you're famous?
Lindsay: No, they know I'm single and childless. I’m just kidding! [laughter] They know I am the black sheep of the group.
Jessica: No!
Lindsay: No, no. They’re wonderful people. They're wonderful people. I just might feel a little bit insecure around them, but not because of them. But I actually have a work trip that I'm hoping happens this week, and it's a really big one, and it's a very scary time to be taking a work trip and I would not be taking it unless it was really super important. And so, you know, send me some good vibes. I mean, send everybody good vibes. God, we all need good vibes. But you know, it's fun to have stuff to look forward to at the end of the year, despite how stressful it is.
Jessica: Yes. Agreed. Shireen, what’s good with you?
Shireen: Friends, I found a podcast on coffee.
Lindsay: Oh no.
Shireen: It’s called Adventures in Coffee. It's produced in England. Scott Bentley, Jools Walker, whom I love, and James Harper do it. And James Harper also does the piano music for it. I love it when stuff happens internally, like, he plays the piano music during it. It started last year and I've started going through all the episodes. And I think I just really, really love it. I do have some really exciting news: Jack McCoy is coming back in the Law & Order reboot on February 8th, 2022. I do realize this is smack dab in the middle of the Olympics…Well, in the beginning, rather. And I really wish Dick Wolf would have called me about this, because I'm going to be super busy during that time.
But still, I'm very excited. I'm hoping to have a watch party. And I got a really fun Santa sweater. I've never had a Santa sweater before, so I'm extremely excited about it. I don't want to give too much away, and I'm going to wear it to our BIAD holiday party, which I'm also excited for. And I know we love December and Christmas is really important, but this is all just to lead up to my birthday month, which is January. So, I'm super excited about that.
Jessica: I love it. That's all very good. So, as I said at the top of the show, we will be taking a three week break after this. In place of our regular episodes, you're going to get our best of episodes. We hope you enjoy revisiting highlights from 2021. In the meantime, during our break, we're going to be watching college football games, more women's college basketball, men's Champs League games – of course with the caveat that we have no idea what sporting events are going to be happening during this latest COVID surge. We hope that you all are able to stay safe and healthy through all of this. And also, let's just be honest here: we’re going to be watching Hallmark movies and Netflix holiday movies and Lifetime movies and all of that.
That's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. Follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn. For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find a link there to our merch at our Bonfire store. And thank you to our patrons – your support means the world. If you want to become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. For Lindsay and Shireen, I'm Jessica. As always: burn on, and not out.