I’m probably not the only one to have noticed that the snow isn’t the only overwhelmingly white thing at the winter Olympics. The majority of athletes competing in the games are fair-skinned lads and lasses from the northern reaches of the globe, whose imposing skills and physiques give new meaning to the powers associated with the tall blonde. It wasn’t until 2002 that a black athlete from any country won gold in the winter Olympics—American Vonetta Flowers in the bobsled competition.
To be fair, this Olympics has been called by some the most diverse yet. The U.S. alone has six black athletes on its roster. American speed skater Shani Davis (who is black) recently won the gold for his performance in the 1,000-meter speed skating competition; his rival skaters were all white. Granted, most of the winter sports are a little more obscure than the competitions found at the summer games, but I’m pretty sure that skin color has very little to do with one’s ability to sweep the ice in curling or hurl headfirst down a chute coated in ice.
Do we push athletes of a certain race to compete in certain sports outside the stratospheric level of the Olympics? In my humble experience, yes, we do. From third grade onwards, I pursued my tall-girl hoop dreams with a passion, as did my CYO teammates. All of us, black and white, had game. Needless to say, I looked forward to playing with the big dogs at my public middle school. During tryouts and at the beginning of the season, it didn’t faze me that I was one of only two white girls. My translucent Irish skin had always made me the palest person in the room anyway.
Then one day, in the middle of a lay-up drill, I heard one of the girls proclaim in a stage whisper “I see white people,” a la The Sixth Sense. Chalk the comment up to adolescent girl cattiness if you will, but the next year I abandoned my jump shot and joined the swim team, along with every other white girl I knew.
Sophomore year of high school, I tried again and joined the track team. Although my school is nationally recognized as a model of diversity and has close to an equal balance of black and white students, track was one of the few sports that reflected that racial mix. The first day of practice, the coach took one look at me and said, “Why don’t you try long-distance?” At first, I was impressed that he could seemingly tell where my running prowess would lie, simply by looking at me (I don’t exactly have the whole marathon-runner build going on). But when I met the distance team, I understood perfectly—they were the white girls. He had assumed slow-twitch muscles in me because of the color of my skin, rather than the bulk of my fast-twitch sprinter’s thighs. The distance team was a separate entity from the generally black sprinters. The most contact I had all season with the girls who ran the hurdles was an awkward hello as we changed into tiny track shorts in the cramped locker-room.
After that one season, I stuck to the sports that my friends played, friends who, for the most part, were white. Throughout my high school field hockey and swimming careers, I can count only three black girls as having been my teammates. We were all friends—we hung out, we talked smack about the skinny cross-country boys who ran by to ogle us in our kilts, we were a team together. But I also know that those girls caught a lot of flack from other black girls who called them “Oreos” just as white girls who played basketball were now crudely referred to as “wiggers.”
I now row crew for Georgetown and at this school, which prides itself on multi-culturalism, there is a single black rower in a program of 143 athletes.
The media has given a lot of coverage to the diversity of this year’s American Olympic squad, but that “diversity” consists of six athletes out of a contingent of 200. The numbers speak for themselves.
If we continue to push kids in middle school, high school and collge toward “white” or “black” sports, it will be a long time before that changes.
