How Do You Promote Women in Sports?

Past the link below, you’ll find a short post on SB*Nation’s pro-cycling blog written by a female pro cyclist, along with a bunch of pics of various women of pro cycling in various states of undress (all quite safe for work).  Sure you can enjoy the pics—and to be clear, everyone involved in the discussion past the link seems to take pleasure in doing so—but the issue at hand is a little more interesting.  The writer asks whether the girls taking these pics are basically doing a disservice to the seriousness of their sport by selling themselves as sex symbols instead of as professional athletes.  The issue comes up because the writer herself was asked to do a pin-up shoot, and while she was happy to be sexy enough to be asked, she ultimately wanted to sell herself as an athlete first—albeit one with a drool-worthy body.

Thus the question, which I think is a fine topic for the football offseason: What do you think?  Can women athletes who sell themselves primarily with their physical attractiveness still be taken seriously as athletes, or do they at that point become little more than highly skilled fitness models?  I mean, can you even imagine Tom Brady or someone of his caliber posing for Playgirl?

Here’s the link, titled “The Elephant in the Room”.

For the curious, my answer is different depending on whose benefit we’re worried about.  If you’re a female pro-cyclist (or triathlete or bobsledder or whatever), and you want to make a living from your sport, then I think, yeah, you have to do whatever you have to in order to put food on your table and pay your mortgage.  Pro-sports people are basically entertainers, they get paid to a large extent according to the amount of interest and publicity—and thus sponsorship—they generate, and that’s just the way it is.  You don’t like it?  Go sell insurance for a living. 

I mean, I’m not saying that every female athlete—or every male athlete, for that matter—ought to basically pose nude, but I do think that athletes are like any other celebrity, and that they’re therefore justified in doing whatever will keep their names and faces in the papers so long as they’re comfortable with it.  Bottom line, that’s how they make their money. 

Does it help if they can get on the podium occasionally?  Of course it does.  That’s the object of the sport, and then, too, there’s the prize money to consider.  I think winning should always be the primary objective of any professional athlete.  My only point here is that if you’re struggling to make a living as a professional athlete in a small market sport—and there are lots of sports out there with athletes that fit that description—then you’re justified in doing whatever you can to make your living.  Beyond that, you can only hope that your success on the field (or the track or the pool or wherever) is enough that folks see you as an athlete first and not just as a sex symbol.

The other side of the equation, then, is what’s best for the sport.

Here, I gotta say that I think all those glamour shots are poison.  Lindsey Vonn is one of the most successful skiers in American history, but then she posed in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, and even her fellow competitors wondered if she was still taking the sport seriously.  But while I think the move was a no-brainer in terms of Vonn’s personal finances and her personal ability to attract sponsorship, I think that the real damage those shots did was to the sport as a whole.  I mean, why take any of it seriously when the best woman is the world is better known for what she looks like in a bikini than she is for her actual skiing?  Because look, regardless of the quality of the athletes involved, there’s a reason why folks don’t watch the Lingerie Bowl to see quality football.  Bottom line, football isn’t fundamentally what’s on display there.  In marketing terms, the football isn’t where the Value Proposition is most closely focused.  And if that’s maybe not such a big deal to specific individuals participating in sport, I think it’s an absolute deal-breaker for the sports themselves.  People go to a bike race to see bike racing.  If what you’re really selling is boobs, then that’s a problem.  There are lots of other, better places to see boobs than at a bike race, even a bike race with a lot of hot female racers.

These sports need to know what their value propositions are, and they need to sell on them rather than the sex appeal of their stars.  The sex appeal is just a bonus.  It doesn’t hurt, but if it becomes the point, it actually damages the value of the brand.  That’s as true in bike racing as it is in anything else.