Episode 239: 2022 Winter Paralympics Preview & the Impact of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine on the Paralympic Games
In this episode Lindsay Gibbs, Jessica Luther, Amira Rose Davis, Shireen Ahmed and Brenda Elsey preview the 2022 Winter Paralympics! First, they take a moment to acknowledge the most recent horrific legislature harming trans youth. Next, they discuss Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine, including it's impact on Paralympic athletes and the upcoming Beijing Games, and the IOC and IPC's reactions.
Then they preview the five events at the 2022 Winter Paralympics, which run from March 4 to March 13 in Beijing. The events are sledge hockey (para ice hockey), para alpine skiing, para snowboarding, wheelchair curling and para Nordic skiing. They discuss athletes to watch, history of the events and they ways impairment classification works in each sport.
Following this discussion, you'll hear a preview of Brenda's interview with scholar Dr. Bob Edelman on Russian and Ukrainian athletes' and sport communities' responses to the Russia's invasion.
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.
Transcript
Lindsay: All of us here at Burn It All Down want to send our love to the transgender community, particularly to trans youth in Texas, in the wake of the horrific directive issued by Texas governor Greg Abbott last week, stating that parents of trans minors should be reported to state authorities for child abuse if it appears they are allowing their children to get gender affirming care. As gut wrenching is this directive is, it did not come out of nowhere. It is merely a continuation of the onslaught of legislation in recent years targeting the rights of trans and non-binary people, particularly children. As we have covered on the show before, many of these bills use the deceptive and frankly bullshit framing of “saving women's sports” as an excuse to enact transphobia into law. In January, Texas became the 10th state to enact a law banning transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams and transgender boys from playing on boys sports teams.
Here at Burn It All Down, we support transgender inclusion in sports. Today's episode is about the Paralympics, but we will continue to cover these attacks against trans youth and trans athletes on the podcast, and we want to direct you to two websites: transtexas.org, and equalitytexas.org, where you can go and directly make donations to help protect trans kids in Texas. Also wanted to mention that on February 17th, we published an interview with Julie Kliegman, the chief copy editor at Sports Illustrated, on trans athletes in the NCAA. We discussed the fight to stop trans swimmer Lia Thomas from competing, and the importance of loudly fighting against the trans sports bans sweeping the nation.
Hello friends, welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Lindsay Gibbs, captain of the ship today, and I'm so thrilled to be joined by all four of my co-hosts: Dr. Amira Rose Davis, Shireen Ahmed, Jessica Luther and Dr. Brenda Elsey. Today, we're all together because we're doing a mega Paralympics preview. The Paralympics are in Beijing from March 4th, which is this Friday, through March 13th. There are five sports: Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, para ice hockey, snowboarding, and wheelchair curling. And we're going to be giving a breakdown of all five today.
But before we get into our sport by sport preview, we're going to take a few minutes to discuss Russia's devastating invasion of Ukraine, and look at its impact on the Paralympics, the sports world at large, and also just hold some space for all of our thoughts and feelings. I want to note that we recorded this episode on Sunday morning, February 27th, and I'm re-recording this intro on Tuesday, March 1st, right before it publishes. I wanted to give you an update on where things stand right now. On Monday, the IOC, International Olympic Committee, advised that athletes and officials from Russia and Belarus should be banned from all international sporting events.
In instances where Russian and Belarusian athletes can not be removed from competition, the IOC recommended that they should compete as neutrals, meaning no athlete or team should be able to use the name Russia or Belarus, and also to take away all national symbols, colors, flags, anthems, et cetera. However, the IOC did say that if all of this is not possible on short notice, such as the Paralympics this week, then they leave the decision to the relevant event organizers to address the issue. Right now, officials from around the world are en route to Beijing, and so the International Paralympic Committee will not meet until Wednesday to discuss whether it will ban Russia and Belarus from the Paralympics. There should be a decision early Wednesday morning, or even possibly Tuesday night here in the States.
I also wanted to add that on Monday, Ukrainian athletes wrote an open letter to IOC president Thomas Bach and International Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons, urging them to immediately suspend the Russian and Belarusian national Olympic and Paralympic committees. The letter was also signed by fencer, Sofya Velikaia, a two time Olympic champion from Russia and the chair of the Russian Olympic Committee’s Athletes' Commission. So, that's a big deal. “If the IOC and IPC refuse to take swift action, you're clearly emboldening both Russia and Belarus’s violation of international law and your own charters,” the letter said. “Your legacy will be defined by your actions.”
Okay, friends. So, as we know this week, Russia invaded Ukraine. This is technically a break of the Olympic truce, which starts a week before the Olympics and ends a week after the Paralympics. Russia has violated the Olympic truce three times in 14 years, fighting a war with Georgia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, and then launching a military takeover that annexed the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine after the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, but during the Paralympic Games.
We talked in our show last week, when we were talking about doping, about how little the IOC has done to stand up to Russia in any meaningful way. And I think, while a much more extreme example, this would be another example of how violating this Olympic truce has really impacted nothing. The Ukrainian Paralympic team has 29 people in it. They are still trying to get to Beijing, but are saying that it's going to be obviously a mammoth challenge and, you know, a big part of the Olympic truce is making sure there’s safe passage for all the athletes to the Games. But I just kind of wanna go around and ask everyone kind of for their thoughts and feelings. Jess, want to get us started?
Jessica: Yeah. I want to let everyone know that the IOC has “strongly condemned” what Russia is doing, for whatever that…Whatever that means. Yeah, I think this is incredibly distressing. I am concerned about all of these athletes. I think there's been talk about whether or not Russia and Belarus, whether or not their athletes will be allowed to compete in the Paralympics, and that's still up in the air. And worrying about the Ukrainian athletes trying to get to the Paralympics – even if they do, what does that mean for their ability to focus and compete when who knows what's happening with their families and their friends and their homes? It's a reminder, again, that sports are always political, especially for the athletes who are living through these moments and facing the ramifications of them in their daily lives. So again, the IOC trying to remain neutral in these moments is so ridiculous on its face.
Lindsay: Shireen?
Shireen: Yeah, the whole invasion process…And not just within sports but, you know, it obviously affects the lives of athletes, their families, and whatnot. And there's been so many conversations gearing up before the Paralympics. And we'll talk about the importance of this region within the Paralympics, and particularly in winter sports. But I mean, there's things that I think about. I think about the ways that athletes are questioned, Russian athletes in particular. The way that Alex Ovechkin was asked questions in a presser…And I think that, you know, he has had a longstanding public support of Putin. I think that's important to address. But at the same time, he mentioned three times in the interview that his family is still in Russia. So, these demands from Western audiences, to have players that are Russian or from that region say what they want is unacceptable.
Like, it's more complicated than that. There's safety, there's panic. And I think that that is hard. There's WNBA players who are playing right now in the offseason in Russia. Are they safe? Are they okay? What is happening? Can they come back? You know, I think about the evacuation of athletes a lot, as someone who has worked directly with the evacuation of Afghan refugees and athletes very recently. There was not this outcry. And I do have to say that, as someone who comes from a community, there was a huge call for refugees and asylum seekers. The response is not the same. And I mean, don't get me wrong – I am so excited to see Robert Lewandowski, one of the world's top footballers, call for not playing Russia.
But quite frankly, where is the call for boycotting Israel? Where's the call for that? I can’t help…I’m never going to discourage refugees from being accepted anywhere. This is a right of humanity. But it makes me think of the double standards and the gates that are put up for different communities, and whiteness plays a part here, definitely. I'm also reading reports of Nigerian students who are trying to evacuate Ukraine being rejected in Poland at the border. And this is unacceptable on many, many levels. Like, are we really accepting, embracing people? Or are we really accepting whiteness? And this is something within sport we also have to look at.
Amira: Yeah, certainly. And I think it's really important to point out that we can't afford to be ahistorical at this time. There was a tweet that made my blood boil because it was like, “I can't think of any historical parallel for the way that Ukrainians are standing up for themselves against an aggressor, ever.” And this, mind you, is a top policy advisor for the United States. [laughs] Like, it's scary, right? And like, under the tweet was a number of examples, from Palestinians to Apaches, to actually a million First Nations and Indigenous people, Maoris, like, just on and on; obviously Black Americans. And I think you're absolutely right, Shireen. There's a way that you have all the empathy and resolve and pour resources into and towards Ukrainians at this moment. I know I've been checking in with my contacts in Ukraine, scholars that I've worked with. And you want safety and health and all of that. And also, as we do, you think about media and framing. And I think all of that is really important.
And then it's also like, the jest of it. I sent this to Brenda and Jess; in that long thread, somebody popped a graphic – this will bring it back to sports – about people who have withheld or stood up to assaults they've never seen, and it was the Celtic-Barcelona graphic when Barcelona had had like 955 passes, 89% possession, like 23 attempts on goal, and they still lost. [laughter]
And it was just like, you know, there's always a way that people, whether even in the thread or what we're talking about geopolitically, are going to tie it back to sports. And I wanted to affirm that, when we say sports is political, these are the moments we're talking about. Lindsay, at the top of the show, talked about all of these actions that Putin has taken around the Winter Games and in violation of the Olympic ordinances.
And I think the last thing that I'll say about that is that we have looked at the Olympics to watch how Russia has been unchecked, and even sanctions there, right? I mean, just a few weeks ago during the opening ceremonies, we saw the athletes from Russia walking in with their flag on their sleeve, which is a violation of the sanctions that they got for doping in the Games. Nobody did anything about it. The IOC didn't do anything, right? And on a small level, we can see what happens when there are sanctions or, you know, violations that everybody's like, oh, don't do that. And they just do anyways. And this is, on a larger scale, what we've been seeing is a pattern for years.
Brenda: I mean, obviously that images and the reports and the interviews that are coming out of Ukraine are terrible and really disturbing and distressing, looking at lines of people trying to get out of the country. So, let me just preface what I'm about to say by saying obviously we care very much about victims of the Russian invasion. At the same time, if I could count the number of times that the US violated the Olympic truce, I couldn’t. I don't have that many fingers. You know, years and years of invasion of Afghanistan, violations of every kind of human rights. Drones, weddings. I just…The flashes of the last 25 years of the United States invading country upon country upon country, much less when I was a child and it was Nicaragua and it was El Salvador, and supporting dictatorships all over the world. And I just have to say, those same people are bemoaning this, and I just…It’s so frustrating to see it.
So I guess it's about fraught solidarity. It doesn't make me hurt any less or feel any less sad for what's going on. But I think what we can do is what a lot of times we don't do, is pay attention to the democratic and anti-authoritarian movements in Russia. In 2018 at the World Cup, we saw Pussy Riot – people just let that go by. People didn't look at that. People didn't care that they ended up in jail right after. Those are the type of people we have to start to support. Fyodor Smolov, the Dynamo striker, the footballer who played every single match for Russia in 2018, has spoken out, and it's incredibly dangerous. He's in Moscow right now suiting up, and he's saying this is wrong, I oppose the war, I'm Russian. He is a major Russian footballer. So I guess I'm really heartened to see this, and I wish we were paying more and more attention, because what I think we really want is for this to be damaging to Putin internally in Russia, because that's what's going to make him come to the table and stop these terrible things that are happening.
And just to say, one last thing: working for Fare, there are steps that organizations with people on the ground in sports are calling for and asking for, and they aren’t asking for the United States to invade Russia, okay? [laughter] So like, first of all, no one’s saying that. So stop listening to Tucker Carlson. Don’t wait for this to be used against Biden, because it will be by conservatives here. What you should be doing is looking at the organizations that are there. I feel like we should all be doing that. And so Fare did put out a statement as to what we could do, things like definitely cutting the Russian Federation from being able to compete in anything, whatever about the individual athletes. These individual athletes, including Fyodor Smolov, are saying it's okay, cut ties with them, you know? [laughs]
Jessica: Can I just say, right on top of that, because this matters to Putin. Sochi happened, doping happened in 2014, because these sports matter on a political level to the ruler of this country. So like, that is incredibly important.
Shireen: I was just going to say that, in addition to all the other organizations speaking out, the FIS, Fédération Internationale de Ski, the governing body, postponed all qualifications and tournaments and events in Russia. And I mean, this is important because what it does is it takes it away. But I think I'd like to see consistency too, as opposed to helicopter and bandaid solutions, and think of something a little more consistent. Solidarity is important and safety of athletes is paramount, but I think that this speaks to it. Like, taking things away and saying this is not normal is something that, you know, Russia may not be used to in terms of rules and rule following. And I'd like to see it happen more in the future.
Amira: And the camaraderie that Brenda is gesturing to is like the worst fear for oligarch and totalitarian leaders, right? And so when we say war is everywhere, when we talk about airstrikes like Brenda brings up – I mean, hello! In the last 48 hours, the United States has started to do airstrikes in Somalia again. There has been 37 Saudi airstrikes in Yemen. Israeli airstrikes have rained down in Damascus in the last 48 hours, along with what we're seeing in Ukraine. And when we bring that up it’s because, by pointing to that, we can unite the voices of athletes, of lay citizens across the world, who are condemning war, condemning authoritarian regimes, condemning oligarchs in power. And like, that is what movement building looks like. So when we say we can't be ahistorical, when we say we can't invisibilize the rest of this, it’s because it's all connected.
And I’ll leave you with this really great tweet I saw, which was like, if it all feels too much, if it feels like too many things in the world are happening, the good news is that they're all connected. So if you can only work on your little thread in your quarter, and you can pull that one thread of what you work on, what you're focusing on, what you're expert in, you're still helping to unravel this entire yarn ball of fucked up worldliness that we're all contending with. So if you're new to thinking about Ukraine and Russia, or if you're new to thinking about refugees in a larger sense, right? If you're new to doing media analysis, keep pulling on that thread while you learn about others, and together we can hope to unravel this mess a little bit more.
Lindsay: I want to talk a little bit about the Ukrainian Paralympic team, since we're about to go into a Paralympic preview because, as Amira just so brilliantly said, this is all connected. So, one thing is Ukraine is actually like a very, very good Paralympic team, which is, given their size, and also apparently the way they actually treat people with disabilities and the disabled within their own country, it would not be expected that they would be this good of a team. But they've been in the top six countries in the medal count at nine consecutive Paralympic Games, summer and winter, despite consistently being ranked among the poorest countries in Europe and cited by the United Nations as a difficult home for people with disabilities. That's from the New York Times. One of the reasons it's so shocking that they've been so successful is because when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, they effectively cut Ukraine's Paralympic contenders off from their high performance training center on the Black Sea full of the adaptive equipment. They had to figure out how to get that into a government controlled part of eastern Ukraine. And it's still in the process of being rebuilt, and obviously this will impact that so much more.
And the president of the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee, Valeriy Sushkevych, put out a statement on Facebook that's been translated, but I’m gonna read it to you. She said, “I want to point out that this is the second time during the Paralympic Games that Russia has attacked Ukraine. The situation is especially cynical to start a war during the Paralympic Games. Most of all, from war, from bombs, shells and rockets that fall on Ukrainian soil, people with disabilities suffer.” And the Paralympic Games themselves came out after…A lot of these sports, adaptive sports, came after World War II when the soldiers came home and were missing limbs. So it's just another kind of connection to this all. But we want to talk about these sports. We want to talk about these athletes. And I think let's just dive right in. Shireen, can you get started with sledge hockey, please?
Shireen: So, fun fact: it's actually known as para ice hockey, and in the US it's called sled hockey. In Canada, in Europe, it’s called sledge. I also love you for saying “sledge hockey.” I'm glad that I'm converting all the Americans into saying sledge – kind of like the toque/beanie conversation.
Lindsay: It’s because Shireen wrote it in the preview as sledge hockey! [Shireen laughs] I really did not. Oh, we just found…Tressa, our producer, actually wrote sledge hockey. You're right, Shireen. This is how change happens.
Shireen: I've been working on Tressa. [Lindsay laughs] I’ve been working on Tressa. So, there's so many interesting things. And first I'm going to start off by saying I interviewed Canadian sledge hockey legend Billy Bridges last week, a fantastic interview, just before he left for Beijing. And that is so informative. So, I really, really encourage people to listen to that. He talks about his journey. He talks about the process of being a Paralympian, and of a sport that is on the rise. And one of the things I want to say is, the only requirement – according to the research I've done for this – to play sledge hockey is that you have to have a disability that prohibits you from playing standup. Now, they do encourage able-bodied players to play sledge hockey as well, but just not in the elite competitions. So like, in terms of local leagues and stuff, you're more than welcome.
Also, sledge and sled hockey in Canada and the US respectively are actually governed by Hockey Canada and USA Hockey. They don't have their own federation or association. They’re funded and supported by those main organizations that you have heard a lot about on the show. So, sledge hockey is really interesting. It actually originated in the 1960s in Sweden, and it was a form of rehabilitation and exercise created by physicians and physiotherapists for those with injuries or with disabilities. And it actually started to pick up. So, by 1969, Stockholm, Sweden had like a five team league. So then it just really gradually started to come up, and it was first demonstrated at the Paralympic Winter Games in Sweden in 1976, and then again at the 1988 Paralympic Games in Innsbruck – where's Innsbruck? What is Innsbruck? Do we know? The fuck is Innsbruck?
Brenda: It sounds like it's in Massachusetts. [laughter]
Lindsay: [laughing] I feel like that’s a different podcast!
Amira: It's in Austria. [laughter]
Shireen: [laughing] Well, we’re not geographers up in here, okay?
Amira: It's in the Alps, and it’s long been a destination for winter sports. There you go.
Shireen: Okay! It became an official event in Lillehammer in 1994. I know where Lillehammer is. [laughter] There have been huge advances in player skill and within equipment, something Billy also did speak about. And for many para athletes in sledge hockey, they create their own sleds. They literally…He talks about creating his own stick. And on the end of the stick, there are little like teeth that help you, because you navigate using your arms and the stick. I think that that's super cool. And it is actually a sit-down version of hockey. Like, you see sitting volleyball and stuff. This is very similar, but obviously it's on ice. And the same rules apply. There's six players to each team, three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie; substitutes made, et cetera.
Periods used to be 15 minutes in length, but now there's three periods of 20, and it's played on a regulation-sized rink with standard nets and pucks. The critique that I have of this, obviously, because we're not BIAD if we don't have that, is that sledge hockey does not have a women's event. That's something that again was referenced in my discussion with Billy. I do really want to say that the hockey US-Canada hype is real here. And the first game starts on March 5th, and the US has been probably the strongest team in the world for the last six years. So we'll be really excited. I will be watching this. I also really want to encourage people to watch this. I believe you can watch it on CBC Gem on streaming and NBC Peacock.
Other thing I just want to say really, really quickly, if you're interested, the USA has a sled lending program. So if you have someone in your community that's interested, we'll add these links in the show notes. You can actually borrow equipment and look at it. And there's leagues in Ontario, Saskatchewan, BC for sledge hockey that I think, if you know somebody or have somebody in your community or in your family that you want to introduce to this, it would be amazing. So, I'm a big fan. So, the teams competing in sledge hockey: the Russian Paralympic committee – for now, but we'll keep you updated – and South Korea, USA, Canada, Czech Republic, Italy, and Slovakia. And for the first time ever, China is sending a sledge hockey team, which is going to be great. And again, these Games are from the 5th of March through the 13th.
Lindsay: That's awesome. I got a geography lesson and so much more. I do want to…Look, am I going to plug my own work here for a second? Yes. But in 2018 when I was still with ThinkProgress, right before the Pyeongchang Olympics, I did an article about women's sled hockey, which was fighting USA Hockey for recognition. But I learned a lot from that about sexism in the sport, and I think it's important to be thinking about that as we watch these Para Games.
So, I'm breaking down Alpine skiing here at the Paralympics. There's going to be 220 male and female athletes. I do not have the exact gender breakdown here, but there are an equal number of events. This sport in particular, as I was mentioning in the intro, it evolved from the efforts of disabled veterans in Germany and Austria during and after the second World War. And it was in 1976, I think that was the first Winter Paralympics, there were two Paralympic Alpine events. They've got downhill, slalom, giant slalom, super-G, super combined, and team events. Historically, Austria, USA, and Germany do really, really well. There are three categories of impairment. You have the standing skiers, the sitting skiers and the vision impairment. I took a big detour looking into these sit skis or mono skis as they're called. Oh my gosh. These things are really cool!
I was looking at a photo from one of the first sit skis where it literally looked like there's just like this tiny strap, like, they’re strung on top of this mono ski, and now it's like this device that bends and moves with their body and absorbs impact. So, lots of scientific advancements there, which I love to see. So, within each of those categories, there are sub categories. So for example, in standing, one category is just for double leg amputation above the knee and moderate to severe cerebral palsy. Another category is single leg amputation above the knee for sitting. The different categories have to do with how much mobility and abdominal function you have. So, you're competing directly against athletes of all different abilities, even within the standing, sitting and visually impaired categories. So, there's like a factoring system, so I'm going to try and explain this simply, even though I don't fully understand it.
So, what we've got is we've got the three categories of standing, sitting and vision impairment. But within those categories, you have a wide range of impairments, and it's hard to find enough competition to compete against people with exactly the same impairment as you do. And yet it's not always equal in the standing category. You know, you can have someone who has a leg amputation racing against someone with an arm amputation. So the factoring system is a mathematical equation done by the people behind the scenes, looking at all sorts of times, that essentially is factored in to the final time to try and even the playing field. And this allows a lot more competition, which the athletes seem to love. It's not that controversial. And the cool thing is it's included in the times we are watching.
So if you're just watching it, unless you have your stopwatch out, you're probably not going to notice that there's a difference, because the time shown on the screen will be the time that already includes the factor via impairment. So, I want to talk a little bit about how, you know, we talk about how everything's connected. And I was reading a story about a US Paralympian, Thomas Walsh, who got COVID earlier this year, recovered from it. It was a very tough recovery because he’s a sarcoma cancer survivor, and recovering from COVID period was so much more difficult. And even after he recovered, he was still testing positive, because we know that happens in some cases, and it took a lot for him to finally get the negative. But he just got the negatives, he will be able to compete. That's a good story.
On the US team, Laurie Stephens is 37 and has been in four Paralympics, seven Paralympic medals. And we love rooting for our late thirties and up people. So we'll be cheering on Laurie. And the youngest Paralympian on the US team is 17 on this Alpine skiing team. So, wide range there. And the real star to look out for is Anna-Lena Forster of Germany. She’s a sit skier and should win some golds, a dominating force.
And one last thing: the New York Times – I can't believe I just keep plugging – but they actually did this phenomenal interactive piece with Millie Knight, a British Paralympic skier who competes in all five disciplines. She lost most of her sight by the age of six, and it simulates what it's like to ski downhill blind. Like, they've got sounds…Oh – for the visually impaired skiers, they ski with a guide who's giving them audio clues, they take you off the hills. It’s a phenomenal piece of interactive journalism. It really makes you feel like…Which, honestly, I don't know if you want to feel like you're skiing downhill blind, because that's just terrifying. [Amira laughs] But it gives you quite an appreciation. All right, next up we're going to go to snowboarding.
Amira: Yes. So, I want to talk to you about para snowboarding, which is also called adaptive snowboarding when we're talking about it outside of the Olympic context. The event is currently made up of two different parts. The first one is snowboard cross, and this is all about speed, it is a time trial. You get three runs, and at the first time trials you're doing it by yourself. It's just about you and the clock. And then the fastest times from those early time trials places you into the head to head brackets. And so these finals consist of two people going head to head down the course. The fastest rider advances to the next round until you get a champion. And then, in addition to snowboard cross, you also have banked slalom. This is only one person at a time, and it's still a time thing, but this is what we've come to associate with slaloms. You're going to have lots of bumps and dips and kind of chaos, right? Lots of obstacles to get through as you're coming down to try to get the fastest time.
Before I go much further, I did want to talk about and pay homage to a very important woman who really is the pioneer of para snowboarding, and that is Bibian Mentel-Spee. Bibian Mentel-Spee was a snowboarder, and while training for the 2002 Winter Olympics, which she had qualified for, she discovered that she had a bone tumor. It was very apparent that this tumor was growing quite fast, and she actually had to pull out of the Olympic trial process and have her leg amputated. Shortly after amputation, like within six months, she was back on a snowboard again and trying to figure out how she could still do the sport she loved. And she started to compete in the Dutch snowboard cross championships – she’s a Dutch woman – and it inspired her to work with the International Paralympic Committee in the Netherlands to figure out how to get snowboard adopted as a medal event at the Paralympic Winter Games.
At this time, it was only in the world kind of federation games and not at the Olympic level. And this is something that she lobbied for for 10 years, and it was finally included in the 2014 Winter Para Games, which she qualified for. She was the flag bearer for the Netherlands and she took home the gold medal in the snowboard cross. She continued to work hard at getting adaptive snowboarding included in the Paralympic movement and expand it. However, in the lead up to the 2018 Games, she was unable to participate in any of the lead-up events due to recurring medical complications. Even though the sport will continue to expand because of her lobbying – they even added banked slalom.
But her sponsors had given up on her, including the Dutch sports federation who didn't support her at all. So she crowdfunded her way to Pyeongchang in 2018 where she once again was elected flag bear and once again won the gold medal in snowboard cross and the gold medal in the new banked slalom event. I bring this up because she continued to be battling cancer through all of this, and last year in 2021 she had terminal brain cancer and passed away. And so this will be the first Olympic Games in which we don't see her, but the legacy that she's given to this sport is so apparent, and many of the para snowboarders are lifting her up as we move into these competitions.
So what we will see this year at the 2022 Paralympics are those two events, banked slalom and snowboard cross. What we won't see is equitable representation of women as we've come to be a pretty old record at this time. In particular, there's one fight for inclusion that I really want to draw your attention to, because I think it paints a larger picture of some of the barriers to participation in Para Games that we want to talk about, and that's the matter of classification. So, at the Winter Games, we will see para snowboarders competing in the SBLL-1 – that's a significant impairment to one leg. There are no women in that event. We'll get right back to that in a second. The SBLL-2, which is impairment in one or both legs, which is a little less limitations. And then SB-UL, which is upper limb impairment, that affects balance.
So, two years ago they removed female athletes from the LL-1 classification, saying there wasn't enough numbers to have that event. However, para snowborders Brenna Huckaby and Cécile Hernandez petitioned to still be included because that would cut their category out of the Olympics. They are medalists, they are reigning Olympians. And they were told that they could either compete with the women's LL-2 or the men's LL-1, but there wasn't a space for them in the run-up of it. And actually the federations used their fast times to say that even though they were more disabled than the women they would compete against, their times really were competitive and so they were strong enough to compete.
But when the actual Olympic qualifications came up, those provisions about allowing them to compete in the men's LL-1 or the women's LL-2 were left out. They actually were told they were “too disabled” to compete in Beijing in 2022. So they have been petitioning the Paralympic Games with the help of para snowboarders from 12 different countries. They signed appeals, they wrote letters. And just recently, in January, they were given the notice that they were both allowed to compete in Beijing, either against the men in in LL-1 or the women in LL-2. And I'll leave you with this quote from them. They said, “Since 2014, the Paralympic movement has aimed to include women with leg impairments in the Winter Paralympic Games. We believe having only one category competing in Beijing does not represent inclusion in our sport. We, as women competitors, are united in promoting our sport, and we believe it would be unfair to exclude women with the highest degree of impairment from the most important event.”
So, please join me in watching and cheering them on. I think that, as I pass the torch on now to whoever's talking about a sport next, I do want to leave us with thinking about the way that classifications can actually really put up barriers. We know at the world adaptive snowboarding level there are double the amount of things you can compete in, including categories for being blind, being deaf or hard of hearing. There's a lot more opportunities. And then at the Olympic level, the focus on how many numbers they have to compete for medaling events really closes that down. So there's a lot of world-class Paralympic athletes or would be Paralympic athletes who compete in these events who are unable to actually medal or go to the Olympic Games because their classification of disability is not included in the Olympic competition. I'm thankful that Cécile and Brenna will be able to compete, but it's definitely something to watch for. Thank you. I don't know why I said “thank you” like I was giving a talk. [laughs]
Lindsay: Because you're Amira Rose Davis, you’re Dr. Amira Rose Davis! [laughter] And you're always giving a talk, and we are always grateful for you. [laughs] Bren, wheelchair curling.
Brenda: Yeah, I'm whoever's talking about a sport next. [laughter] That’d be me, talking about a sport that I really have learned a lot about over the last 72 hours. And I'm ashamed to say I've never been interested in curling at all. I've always kind of thought chores should be Olympic sports, and bar games. And I’ve always thought this might be in that category, and I was really wrong. It's not the first time today. [laughter] This is the thing about curling…Amira’s story about snowboarding was really important and moving, and this might be a sport where you feel like supporting it for the opposite reason, which is that mixed gender is mandatory in wheelchair curling. You have to have mixed genders.
And I also love, I realized this, because I can watch wheelchair curling and curling, period, without really being terrified as I am with every single other Olympic winter sport. So I had skeleton for our other Winter Olympics, which I'm still reeling from. And I really do feel kind of relaxed, in the sense that they aren't probably going to get injured, hopefully, you know? Whereas the other sports, I feel like it's just likely. And so this felt really nice because I could just watch it and just concentrate on their talent. They're going to be playing from the 5th to the 12th of March. It's at the Beijing National Aquatics Center, which you're probably familiar with if you watched last month. And basically how you get in there is the rankings of the last three years of the world wheelchair curling competition. They basically then allot you a space based on that.
The difference with wheelchair curling is that there's no sweeping. So, none of those brooms, no broom jokes, which is what I was hoping I could do as a shtick here. But nope, you just actually have to throw those stones, super super precisely. And here's another funny thing I found out: you know those stones? Like, the rocks that are attached to the handles. So, there's only two places where the material is made, and they're running out of it. So, anyway, this is one of the climate change challenges or whatever, as we've stripped the world of resources under global capitalism. Curling is evidently really in a problematic place in that sense. So, the whole curling world right now is kind of thinking about how it might change, which I found really interesting.
Okay. Anyway, other things about this: wheelchair curling can be played by a really wide range of people with disabilities, like, all kinds of disabilities. Basically what you need is a lot of force, a tolerance for cold, precise throwing. It used to be dominated by Canada, Great Britain and Sweden, but now China has really become a dominant force. They won the world championships. There's a person, Wang Haitao of China – he won the gold medal with his team at Pyeongchang, and he has been on the wheelchair curling team since 2007. And I just want to say it was really remarkable, reading his story, how in 2007, when he started to first do wheelchair curling, the infrastructure was so bad that he and his teammates had to be carried up and down the stairs by their coach. There weren't even elevators in the training centers that they could get into.
He has really remarked upon how over the last years their success in curling has caused all this push for change, right? So they become these kinds of disability advocates. And he's talked about how much the situation has changed for them. So, it was really actually kind of heartwarming to think about how they were able to kind of push for these new facilities. And he says that now they’re top, you know? Everyone’s just out there, the Canadian journalists and stuff, saying, like, look at these facilities, they’re amazing. So that's pretty awesome that sports can contribute to that.
Just by the way, if you are a US listener, the US will open its attempt to win a medal – they're not likely to succeed. But hey, whenever the US is an underdog, I like it. Let's do it. They are going to open on March 5th against Slovakia. We can all watch that on Peacock and the Olympic Channel. I know it's really kind of difficult sometimes to find out information, and that's one of the frustrating things about these athletes who seem so interesting, but there is a medical doctor during the day by day, Dr. Pamela Wilson, on the USA team, who seems just like a super fascinating and fantastic person. So I'm kind of psyched to watch this now that I know more/something [laughs] about wheelchair curling, and it seems really cool. So, check out the Olympic Channel too for these cool instructional videos that'll get you hyped to watch it.
Lindsay: Incredible. Jess, can you take us home? Grand finale.
Jessica: All right. I have Nordic skiing, biathlon, and cross country skiing. I just want to start with a caveat that both of these sports are dominated by the Ukrainians and the Russians, and so it's unclear at the time of this recording who of these athletes will actually make it to these Paralympics. So I'm going to give you the rundown, but just know that we don't know at this point who will actually be competing in these two events. I want to start with the para biathlon – it's cross country skiing and shooting. They have two categories for physical impairments, the sitting and the standing, and then they have vision impairments that compete in one category supported by a guide. So, they do the same thing where you ski three to five times in a loop; in between, you stop to shoot a target. If you miss one of the five shots that you take, they immediately punish you and you have to do a little loop, one for each of them targets that you missed. And then you go back into it.
For the para biathlon, the targets are 10 meters away from you when you go to shoot. There are different sizes for the targets. If you're visually impaired, they're 21 millimeters. If you're physically impaired, it’s 13 millimeters, the size of the actual target. If you are vision impaired – these athletes are spectacular! – you aim with your ears. You shoot at the target with an electronic signal. The closer to the center of the target, the higher, the tone emitted. And that's how they know when to shoot. Incredible. So, they do the sprint, the medium distance, the long distance. The men and women do the same distances – this will be different in cross country skiing. One of the things about this I'm going to mention, a bunch of athletes, a lot of them do both of these events, the biathlon and cross country skiing, the sprint, middle and long distances. They do a ton of them.
So, I want to mention Liudmyla Liashenko from Ukraine. She's been at the top of the biathlon for three years. She won a gold, silver and bronze at the Lillehammer 2021 world para snow sports championships. I'm going to be talking about Lillehammer a lot, because this is sort of the preview event that tells us where everyone is within the sport. In Pyeongchang, Liashenko won two biathlon bronzes and a gold, and a bronze in cross country skiing. She is currently the back-to-back world champion in the 10 kilometer standing biathlon event. For the sitting biathlon, I want to mention the USA's Kendall Gretsch. She won the gold medal for the women's sprint ahead of her idol and teammate Oksana Masters at the Pyeongchang 2018 Paralympic Winter Games. Gretsch is so interesting because she just competed in Tokyo. She won a gold medal in the summer Olympics in the triathlon there. So, that's pretty incredible.
On the men's side, we have the USA's Daniel Cnossen, who won the gold in Beijing, but he is up against some new, good competitors. He finished 14th at Lillehammer, which gives you a sign of how he's struggling within the sport at this point. There'll be two debuts of people who can make the medal stand for the men's biathlon. RPC, the Russian Paralympic Committee’s Ivan Golubkov, and Ukraine's Vasyl Kravchuk. They won gold and silver respectively in Lillehammer, so there are people to look out for. For standing biathlon, we just have RPC and Ukraine all over this. In 2018, two RPC athletes, Ekaterina Rumyantseva and Anna Milenina won ahead of Ukraine's Liashenko, who I talked about before. But in Lillehammer 2021, it was a full Ukrainian podium. Oleksandra Kononova, Liashenko and Yuliia Batenkova-Bauman, they had a perfect race for Ukraine, gold, silver and bronze. They're hoping to do this for the six meters. Also, Ukraine did this for the biathlon, standing, ten meters. They swept the podium.
On the men's side for the standing biathlon, I do want to mention France’s Benjamin Daviet, who won gold in Beijing. But again, he struggled against the up-and-comers, RPC's Vladislav Lekomtsev, who won seven golds, three in para biathlon and four in para cross-country skiing at Lillehammer. So he's really coming up behind this French guy. And in the vision impaired part of the biathlon, we have another swept podium, but this time it was the Russians who swept the podium. Vera Khlyzova won gold in front of her teammates, Ekaterina Razumnaya in silver, and Anna Panferova in bronze. So, if you want to watch the biathlon, it will be happening starting Friday, March 4th, and it'll run an entire week until March 11th, because there's so many events. On the other side of this is just straight up cross country skiing, possibly the most popular event in the Paralympics. It is exactly what you think it is, where they just ski like hell.
Physical impairments compete in two categories, sitting and standing, while those with vision impairments compete in one category and have a guide. If you are using a sit ski, it's on a frame mounted with bindings onto two cross-country skis. The Paralympic quality sit skis are made of ultra lightweight materials and they're custom made to fit each athlete. Skiers use the classical technique in all cross country distances, until skating was introduced by athletes at the Innsbruck 1984 Paralympic Games. Since then, events have been split into two separate races: classical and free technique.
Okay. So, this is where we get the sexism in this sport. We have the sprint, the short distance, the middle distance, the long distance, and then we have a mixed relay. But when it comes to the men and women, the men just go for longer? [laughs] Like, again, there's no real explanation. So, they'll do 20 kilometers, the women will do 15. They'll do 18 and the women will do 15. That kind of thing. So, like I said, it's very popular. And because of the biathlon and the cross country, you get athletes who just rack up the medals when they're good at these sports. So the world's most decorated Winter Paralympian is a Nordic skier, Norway's Ragnhild Myklebust, who won 27 medals, including 22 golds as a Paralympian.
The USA's eight time Paralympic wheelchair racing champion, Tatyana McFadden, has actually raced as a cross-country skier before. And then as I mentioned her before, Oksana Masters, she's actually a Paralympic cycling gold medalist, and then also races in cross-country and biathlon. I want to also mention Canada's Brian McKeever, who is the most decorated male para cross country skier. He has 16 medals. This will be his sixth Games. He's 42. He has 13 gold medals, two silvers and two bronze. That's 17 total. That makes him Canada's most decorated Paralympian ever. At Pyeongchang, alongside his guides, Russell Kennedy and Graham Nishikawa, he won three gold medals, one in the long distance, the middle and the sprint version. He also won a bronze in the open relay.
In Shireen’s excellent interview with Billy Bridges, which I really think everyone needs to listen to, he mentioned Canada's Christina Picton. He said,“She is one of the best sledge hockey players out there, but because they do not allow women or they do not have a space for women to compete, she switched over into cross country skiing.” Her first time on the snow was in December of 2018. In January of 2020, one year after her first skiing competition, Picton traveled to her first international event in Utah – that was in 2020 – where she took third place in the sprint event and middle distance race. So, look out for Canada's Christina Picton coming up.
And finally, I want to mention Clara Klug, who has a guide named Martin Härtl. They're from Germany, and they actually don't have a normal guide-athlete relationship in that he is also her coach. So, it works for them. She's a triple world champion in the women's vision impaired events. She's hoping to improve on her bronze medals in the middle and long distance from the last Winter Olympics in 2018. So you have just an amazing assortment of athletes from all over, but especially from Russia and Ukraine. So it will be interesting to see how, in these two different events, who actually gets to compete and who actually wins.
Lindsay: On this week's interview, which will be out in full on Thursday, Brenda interviews Dr. Bob Edelman on the Russian and Ukrainian sports communities’ responses to the invasion, and how athletes and fans might turn the tide of sportswashing.
Brenda: And it was brought up, the concept of an Olympic truce, and–
Bob: Oh, gosh, yes.
Brenda: [laughs] Okay. And what's your reaction to that?
Bob: As we say in scientific circles, the Olympic truce is a pile of crap.
Lindsay: Because we wanted to give extra time to our Paralympic preview, we're going to be skipping over the burn pile this week, but do you want to give a quick torchbearers. First of all, I wanted to shout out my co-hosts a little bit. Want to make sure you're listening to the new season of American Prodigies, which Jessica Luther worked on and Amira Rose Davis is hosting. It is so, so, so good. All about Black gymnasts. Also, our own Jessica Luther, just racking them up. The Associated Press sports editors announced their 2021 awards, and in the investigative top 10 Jessica Luther, along with Nancy Armour, Kenny Jacoby, and Dan Wilkins at USA Today were in the investigative top 10.
And also some other writers we love were in that group as well – Jenny Vrentas at Sports Illustrated; at the Athletic, Meg Linehan, Katie Strang, Steph Yang, and Pablo Maurer for their work on what's been going on in the NWSL and corruption in the NWSL. And then at the Washington Post, Molly Hensley-Clancy and Steven Goff, also for their reporting on abuse within the NWSL. So, it's just great to see a lot of women and a lot of really important work about women’s sports get honored. So, that's really cool. And then can I get a little drumroll, please? A little mini drumroll for this week.
[drumroll]
We had to mention the US women's national team, which reached a settlement with US Soccer Federation this week. It's a $24 million settlement. So, this is US Soccer saying, yeah, you're right, we were not paying them equally. [laughs] Of US Soccer's defeat, $22 million will go to the players behind the suit. So, congratulations to them. It's definitely a landmark moment. What's good is these amazing Paralympians. We cannot wait to watch them. Peacock will have a lot of the coverage of here in the US, and we'll try and put links in the show notes where you can find coverage wherever you are. You know, it looks like a lot of countries are upping their coverage of the Paralympics, which we absolutely love to see. I will also be keeping an eye on all the conference tournaments in women's basketball. Those are kind of the biggest things.
And that's it for this week's episode of Burn It All Down. The episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. We are part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe, rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, you know, all the places. For show links and transcripts, burnitalldownpod.com. There's also a link to merch at our Bonfire store. And of course, thank you, thank you to our patrons who make all of this work possible – patreon.com/burnitalldown. It is always a special day when the five of us get together, so thank you all for being here today. Burn on, and not out.