Jennifer Heil of Spruce Grove, Alta., celebrates winning gold in freestyle women’s moguls at the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin, Italy. (Greg Baker/The Associated Press)
Two articles on sport-wide and individual victories.
CBC Sports Commits to Gender-balanced Coverage Across All Platforms
By Signa Butler, CBC, March 06, 2020
https://www.cbc.ca/sports/iwd/cbc-sports-commits-to-gender-balanced-sports-coverage-1.5487976
‘One of the critical pieces to keeping girls in sport is representation’
All it took for Olympic moguls champion Jennifer Heil to get into sports was a Sports Illustrated cover at an Edmonton gas station 28 years ago.
She was out running around doing errands with her mother in the summer of 1992 when a photo of American heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee caught her eye.
“It sold me,” Heil said about SI’s Barcelona Olympic preview issue. “A woman on the cover doing her sport and the focus on her face. She was the whole package. It was her body, her fierce determination. Right then I knew I wanted to go to the Olympics. I just had to go out and find a sport.”
Of the 52 issues Sports Illustrated published that year, just four featured women on the cover. But only one — that of Joyner-Kersee — showed a woman actually performing her sport. It was enough to ignite a dream in nine-year-old Heil.
So imagine what it will be like for young Canadian women to see themselves on a daily basis.
CBC Sports is aiming to do just that. On the eve of International Women’s Day, the network is committing to gender-balanced sports coverage across all of its platforms.
“We’re committed to providing audiences with equal opportunity to watch, read about, meet and hear from female sporting heroes and as a result, allow more young women to visualize themselves achieving great things through sport,” said Chris Wilson, CBC’s executive director of Sports and Olympics.
In addition to the weekly broadcast of Road to the Olympic Games, the commitment will be reflected through digital streams, online articles at CBCSports.ca and social media content.
Wilson said this priority has already become a decision-making tool for the events they acquire and which stories they pursue, as well as their hiring and professional development going forward.
“This is really significant,” said Heil, who also serves as a CBC Olympics freestyle skiing analyst and special advisor to viaSport BC.
“Small signals over a lifetime can make a big impact. And this is not a small signal. As a girl, to see yourself [on TV, on the web], day to day or week to week, it will become the new normal.”
According to a 2016 report put out by Canadian Women & Sport, an analysis of Canada’s primary national sports networks in 2014 (both French and English) showed that men’s sport coverage significantly outweighed that of women’s coverage.
Of approximately 35,000 hours of sports programming, only four per cent featured women’s sports, with approximately 11 per cent of the coverage devoted to sport that featured both genders (something like figure skating or equestrian, for example).
And that was an Olympic year.
Heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee launches a javelin during U.S. track and field trials in 1992. Joyner-Kersee won six Olympic medals in her career, including three golds. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
That same report suggests girls’ participation in sport drops by 22 per cent when they hit teenage years. That means one quarter of every soccer team, hockey team or swim team quits during those impressionable adolescent years.
As for why, some of the contributing factors include peer influence, lack of social support, encouragement, funding, positive role models and self-confidence.
That seeps into adulthood. In fact, 84 per cent of adult women don’t participate in sport at all.
“One of the critical pieces to keeping girls in sport is representation,” Heil said. “Making them more visible will help address that.”
The announcement comes following the launch of CBC Sports’ “I Commit” digital campaign, an initiative in partnership with Canadian Women & Sport that asks audiences to increase their support of girls in sport by making their own commitments to enacting change, posting them to social media and challenging friends, colleagues and organizations to do the same.
My feminist dad is the reason I got to play hockey
I’ve never forgotten his fierce support and weekly rides to practice
Trish Thornton, Broadview, March 6, 2020
https://broadview.org/feminist-hockey-dad/
My dad is a feminist. Always has been. You won’t see him wearing a pussy hat and marching in the Women’s March — just getting to the retirement home’s dining room with his walker is a workout and a half for him. But 90-year-old Kirk Thornton has been a feminist for decades. Let me explain.
In the early 1960s, we lived in the pre-fab Toronto suburb of Don Mills, Ontario. My parents enjoyed their little bungalow with its postage-stamp lawn where their three young daughters played. Don Mills was growing fast. In fact at that time, the new community was raising funds for an impressive double-rink arena for the local hockey teams.
Dad answered the door when the canvassers came to ask for a donation. He was just about to open his wallet when he asked, “Will there be girls’ hockey as well?” He didn’t get the answer he had hoped for. “Oh no, girls can still go figure skating at the old rink.” Dad told them he wasn’t interested after all, and sent them on their way.
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A decade later, we were living in Orillia, Ontario. I was 12 years old, and Dad knew I was a big hockey fan and self-professed star of our street hockey gang. There was no ice hockey team in town for me to play on, but Dad had a colleague whose daughter played on a girls’ team just down Highway 11 in what was then Oro Township. He asked me if I wanted to check it out. DID I? I couldn’t wait!
It was the beginning of a special relationship between him and I. He would come home from work early on Monday afternoons to drive me to the weekly team practice for 6 p.m. Anyone familiar with Highway 11 between Orillia and Barrie will know that it has its own weather system, and is snowbelt central in the winter.
There were a few white-knuckle drives, Dad keeping his eyes on the road as I prattled on about the team, bragging that I was now on the power play AND the penalty kill. On Mondays when it didn’t snow, Dad would drive straight on into the setting sun. I couldn’t see a thing through the blinding light, but somehow, we always made it to practice on time.
The author (left) on her dad’s lap with the rest of her family. (Photo courtesy Trish Thornton)
My team, the Oro Rockets, played in the boys’ house league. We had a game every Saturday morning against boys a year or two younger than us. Dad got up early to get me dressed — we didn’t have a real changeroom at the arena — and to the game on time. I loved it. Opportunities for girls and women to play organized hockey in the mid-‘70s were few, so I felt sort of special.
After the game, it was back up the highway. We discussed my play and the team’s. Dad was never mean and never said a bad thing about any of the players, even the weakest one. He knew I was pretty good, but not the superstar. He always said I had “good hockey sense.” Our Saturday ritual included a stop at a bakery outlet where we picked up fresh butter tarts. Raisins for him, none for me, although I have come around to them as an adult.
I’ve been thinking of those days a lot lately. My dad has recently been diagnosed with cancer. It’s treatable, which is good news. And now it’s me who does the driving down Highway 11 to take him to his weekly radiation treatment in Barrie, just south of what is now Oro-Medonte. We talk about my old team, wondering where those girls — women — are now.
He brings up the time I got the wind knocked out of me, “You shouldn’t have tried to check that boy into the boards,” he says. He remembers all my plays. I point to the spot where the bakery used to be. It’s a gas station now. With the sun now in my eyes, I get him back to his home and he tries to give me money for gas and parking. A gentleman? Yes. A feminist? Through thick and thin.
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