Category: Biography

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Getting in the Game

(Clockwise, left): Sha’Carri Richardson, Ryan Crouse, Colin Duffy, and Jess Davis going to Paris. Photos from AP, olympics.com, msn.com, and USAPenathlon.

NBC is marketing their end-of-June Road to Paris coverage of the swimming, sprinting, and gymnastics USA Olympics Trials by calling it “the toughest team” to make. It’s probably true. But not in the way that they mean. Some slots on Team USA are extremely hard to make. Some are under the glare of some very bright spotlights. If you, budding Olympic athlete, participate in one of the marquee sports for U.S. on prime time, then you have to do your sport while everyone’s watching, and with cameras shoved in your face.

But there are 48 sports, with 329 separate events, scheduled for the Summer Games. Once you factor out swimming, track and field, gymnastics, and basketball–the sports that are talked about incessantly–that leaves 44 more. It can also be hard to be one of the best in the world in a discipline that garners almost no attention and little support. What if you’re on a U.S. team that is going for a four-peat and no one outside your sport even knows that it’s played? Or worse–what if you have no chance of medaling? And the only people watching you qualify share your last name because they’re you’re family? That might be just as tough.

Suppose you’re really popular *coff Caitlin Clark* but you don’t get a slot. Don’t the teams just choose whoever they like? it’s not that simple. There are rules for who gets to compete.

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The Disney Treatment

A mix of reality, falsehood, emotional manipulation, and darned good storytelling. Photo is Disney promo materials.

If you see the new biopic Young Woman and the Sea–and I do recommended you see it–you should be aware that the actual James Sullivan, head of the American Athletic Union, was dead twelve years before the key events in the movie take place. It’s what ticks me off about these sports movies. What happened is fascinating in its own right, so why do they make up stuff? Why do they have to create false emotional tension, when the real tension is already in the story? And why do I cry every time when the athlete does the thing that I knew that they would do, all along?

Young Woman and the Sea is one of three Disney sports movies that I particularly like, the other two being Dangal and McFarland USA. All three might be termed shamelessly manipulative, but perhaps that’s the nature of our response to humans overcoming obstacles. In this post, I will point out some of the good and the bad about these movies, set the record straight for the “um, actually” crowd, but still give these all a thumb’s up. They deserve watching.

Historical Inaccuracy

Young Woman is about Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. Without giving away too many spoilers, fact checking of the movie details reveals that Trudy did have a near-death case of the measles as a child (vaccinate people!), she did swim with her sister, and her “coaches” did work to disqualify her in her Channel swim, though not the way the movie showed. And she did have a giant ticker tape parade, one of the biggest ever in New York.

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M is for Mary Anning

Mary Anning statue in Bristol, bristol.acl.uk

She sells seashells by the seashore,
The shells she sells are seashells, I’m sure.
So if she sells seashells on the seashore,
Then I’m sure she sells seashore shells. 

Mary did sell seashells. She was well-known for doing it at the time, though only locally, and never credited by the male scientists who took her work and used it to gain their own notoriety. They say the poem is about her, although it probably was not. Yet she did, indeed, sell seashells, found seashells, drew seashells, theorized about the age of seashells, and drew plesiosaurs. By the Lyme Regis seashore.

She also invented paleontology.

Current Lyme Regis map, southampton.ac.uk.

Mary, Mary

No, that’s another rhyme…. although her garden grows with cockle shells, so maybe… And it may be that she did not exactly invent paleontology, but paleontology didn’t exist as a scientific discipline until she collected hundreds of fossils and starting drawing, mounting, and discussing them with others. And after that it did.

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