No one tell Dorothy Hamill
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Ice skating is racist? Why not? Everything is racist
The prognosis for fixing American figure skating is bleak: In order to be competitive with the Russians, who have dominated the sport by building elite state-sponsored academies to churn out Olympic contenders, the US would have to dramatically alter the way it approaches both figure skating and youth sports in general, so that children beyond the most privileged could have a real shot.
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Figure skating has more or less always been this way. “The skating that turned into figure skating over a couple of centuries really does have roots among elite white European men,” explains Mary Louise Adams, a professor of kinesiology at Queen’s University and author of Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport. Evolving in the UK as a popular amusement for the aristocracy in the late 18th century, skating clubs typically excluded women, Jews, people of color, and low-income people. “The aesthetics of the sport itself developed in line with that,” Adams says.
Twitchy’s Brett T sums it up nicely:
The thing about academia is you can always find a professor to say exactly what you need her to say, regardless of how stupid it is.
