Column:

Female athletes change sports

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Nov. 13, 2009

I usually never watch horse racing. I can't relate to the fan culture and even if I could afford to, I would never drop 10 grand on a mint julep. But last Saturday, sick of football after our abysmal loss to Baylor, I decided to watch the Breeders' Cup.

In horse racing, the horses are venerated as athletes, and their stories are framed as sports stories would be in football or baseball. I noticed this as the ESPN commentators were offering the horses' back stories — discussing their hometowns, family histories and past performances. They could have been talking about Tim Tebow.

But I was drawn to the story of one horse in particular. Zenyatta, the lean 4-year-old filly named for the Sting & the Police album with "Don't Stand so Close to Me" on it (much to my approval), was labeled as the hometown favorite, but what was far more intriguing in the framing of her story was the emphasis on "girl power." The camera panned to race-goers brandishing pink signs that read, "Go Zenyatta, girl power!" And the emphasis within the broadcast was on her gender as opposed to her record: She was unstoppable when racing other females, but now here she was, the only gal in an otherwise all-male field of competition — could she measure up to her male counterparts?

I got into it. I couldn't resist the idea of a racehorse as a feminist icon, as silly as that might sound, especially because female athletes in male-dominated sports tend to be framed in certain ways. That manner is usually hypersexualized (Danica Patrick's skanky godaddy.com ads, Brandi Chastain triumphantly ripping her shirt off) or as some sort of novelty (the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs Battle of the Sexes, Japanese pro baseball pitcher Eri Yoshida being compared to Amanda Wurlitzer from "The Bad News Bears" in a Yahoo.com article). Or women in sports end up as victims, as in the University of Colorado football rape case several years ago or the recent reports of harassment of female sports journalists. I wondered if Zenyatta not being a human athlete would make a difference.

The ESPN commentators, at least in my opinion, played the "Amanda Wurlitzer" card a bit, focusing on the novelty of having a filly talented enough to run with the big boys. But the way they did it also made you root for her. They also focused on crowd support and the fact she was the hometown favorite.

Zenyatta came from behind to win, making her the first filly to ever win the Cup and a contender for Horse of the Year (a title I didn't even know existed). After she won, the conversation switched almost immediately to her undefeated record and her ability as a racehorse. So the framing changed to focus on skill as opposed to gender. But need I remind the readers this was sports coverage about a horse. And yet, it was the horse that got a better narrative frame than most female figures in male-dominated sports.

Which makes me wonder — if talented female athletes had a stronger presence in male-dominated sports and proved they could compete alongside their male counterparts, if our ideas of athletic prowess were less rigidly gendered — the conversation and framing sportswriters would give them would change, not just for horses, but for human athletes as well.