When Clare Balding is eventually canonised, she should be remembered as the patron saint of women’s sport. Last week the woman who confesses in her autobiography to marking the years by Grand National winner opted not to be at Aintree (causing disgruntlement in the horse racing world) and instead front the BBC’s coverage of the women’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race – sharing the water and the airwaves with the men’s crews for the first time since the women’s race was introduced in 1927. It is the sort of move to convince the jaded among us that this might, after all, be the point at which women’s events become part of the sports-media nexus from which they have been excluded for so long.
“This is the year we change things,” Balding said. “This will have a ripple effect all across society, business, and sport.” This is something that’s been heard before, on more occasions than is wise to count. My first recollection of discussions along such lines dates to 1999, when the USA hosted the Fifa Women’s World Cup; more than 90,000 people were inside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to see the USWNT triumph on penalties. The images of Brandi Chastain tearing off her jersey and raising her fists to the air to celebrate scoring the winning kick made their way around the world. A few decades previously, women had been playing unofficial tournaments outside of the auspices of national and international associations. How could this not be the moment?
Most likely there were some before then, and certainly many since. London 2012 was dubbed ‘the women’s Olympics’, being the first event at which all competing nations included women in their teams. The success of British female athletes – Helen Glover and Heather Stanning claiming Britain’s first gold of the Games – lent credibility to the idea that women and women’s sports were going to be taken seriously by the media. “Here come the girls!” proclaimed the Daily Mirror, picturing the rowers plus Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton on the front page. The hackneyed headline is forgivable if it foreshadows a change in the quantity and quality of the coverage of the achievements of female athletes. Yet Packer and colleagues are not the only ones to report no improvement in (UK) news coverage of women’s sports since; in fact the authors find the proportion of articles about women’s sports is lower after the Olympic Games than it was beforehand.
So why might 2015 and the Boat Race be the tipping point when other, far larger events have changed little?
Well, of course it’s now the latest event in an increasingly visible chronicle of the recent history of women’s sport. It has behind it things such as the women’s Rugby World Cup, shown for the first time on Sky Sports in 2014 (and, crucially for the prospects for local coverage, won by England). Last year also saw female cyclists complete La Course, alongside the final stage of the men’s Tour de France after successful petitioning. This summer the BBC will show every game of the Fifa Women’s World Cup taking place in Canada (in front of sold out stadia), having previously tended to air only England matches and the very final stages of European and world tournaments. You can even find AP reports from the LPGA Tour on the MailOnline these days. It is beginning to feel as though coverage of major women’s sporting events is the norm, rather than the exception.
The Boat Race also seems symbolic in itself. In 1927 the women’s race reportedly took place in front of large but “hostile” crowds; in 2015 the crowds were so unusually large that dozens of eager spectators who had made their way to the Thames foreshore to find a vantage point had to be rescued from the incoming tide. The BBC recorded viewing figures of 4.8 million for the women’s race (six million for the men’s race), and they reported that more than four million people watched for two hours to see both races.
The significance of these things should not be understated. The perennial argument against women’s sports being adequately (let alone well) covered is that no one is interested; the crowds in southwest London and the sizeable television audience make nonsense of that. The fact that in excess of four million viewers watched both races also undermines any suggestion that the audience for women’s sport is a different, niche group to whom the mainstream media are not accountable – the vast majority of those tuning in for the women’s race also watched the men.
In the case of the print media, I’ve argued before that it is grossly unfair to judge the appetite for women’s sports based on the response to measly and unpredictable levels of coverage; few of us keep going back to eat somewhere that serves us badly. Only when the audience is offered consistent coverage of women’s sports, coverage that continues in the gaps between marquee events, and only when that kind of coverage has been on offer for some time, can we really say anything.
The familiar comeback to this argument is that ‘newspapers don’t owe women’s sports anything’ – come back when you’re somebody, basically. It is an inconvenient truth that (in the UK, certainly) men’s sports owe newspapers a great deal. As Tony Schirato says in his recent book Sports Discourse, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries newspapers “[inserted] themselves into the field by informing readers about and helping to develop an interest in, identification with, and literacy with regard to, sports, teams, players, traditions and forms of spectatorship” (p.63).
To suggest that mainstream media might do the same for women’s sport now is apparently to expect special favours, but this week I’m more hopeful than ever. Certainly more hopeful than I was a year ago when, presenting at an event on Gender, Language and the Media, I rued the fact that covering women’s sports is still too often seen in newsrooms not as a matter of course, but an optional extra. In that kind of climate, reporting on women’s sports comes with fears about being pigeonholed, particularly if the journalists are women. (And inwardly those fears multiply – how can you complain about ‘only’ doing women’s sport without casting it as somehow inferior?) It can be a silent, vicious circle of non-commitment, from editors and journalists alike.
Clare Balding’s profile is such that she is probably not troubled by worries about being pigeonholed (in a recent interview with the Radio Times, she describes over-exposure as being her biggest problem), but her actions inspire confidence nonetheless. She not only stepped away from her habitual and much-loved horse racing duties to be by the Thames, but was also vocal about why she had done so: “There’s not much point me doing all of these events and saying all the things I say if I don’t do something that says: I am with you,” she told the Guardian.
This wasn’t just about bringing gravitas to the broadcast of this historic women’s race, but also about making a choice that would make the dilemma plain, and make a point of discussion of the need for commitment to women’s sport for its own sake. Perhaps it is overly optimistic to imagine that this might hasten along a better relationship between the mainstream media and women’s sport – especially as the chicken-and-egg discussion of audiences has prevailed this long. I think, though, that Balding is right to recognise that broadcast must lead, and make a noise about doing so.
Broadcast is clearly outstripping newspapers for coverage of women’s sports in part because there is overt pressure on public sector broadcasters like the BBC to do the right thing, but they can also bring that pressure to bear on others. Though the newspapers often have a big say in what ends up on our screens during the six o’clock news, in sport it is television that has the stronger influence; we only have to look at the mushrooming of print coverage of football’s top flight since Sky and the Premier League joined forces in the early 1990s to see that. Broadcast exposure bestows validation on sports, and encourages the commercial investment that female athletes and their sports have previously struggled to secure. A more virtuous circle starts to turn.
Georgina Turner
Media/Pool 