From the Edmonton Sun:
Earlier this week three veteran track athletes suggested that Athletics Canada is sending the wrong message: that you can’t be both a parent and a serious athlete.
Leah Pells of Langley, B.C., and Calgary’s Lisa Harvey and Jeremy Deere – all three parents – were left off the Canadian team for the world cross-country championships for refusing to attend a pre-meet training camp because of parental obligations.
“It’s so 1950s,” said Pells.
“They’re basically telling athletes that once you are a parent, you are off the national team, and that we (Athletics Canada) do not value your experience at all. It makes me very angry to work so hard, and deserve to be on a team, and then be left at home because I am a mother.”
The article writer goes on to say that the parents are just being whiney:
Firstly, to get to the top of the podium there are sacrifices. This, in my estimation, is one of them. Organize child care at home, Leah Pells. And take a number.
However, this same logic could be used to justify virtually any sacrifice demanded of athletes. What if the Canadian track team demanded that all athletes on the team had to – I don’t know – get massive facial tattoos, or have a finger cut off, or murder their dads? Anyone not willing to do this could be told “to get to the top of the podium there are sacrifices.”
What’s missing from this “top of the podium” analysis is the question of which sacrifices are reasonable to ask of athletes, and which are not. Asking them to spend insanely long hours in practice and training is not unreasonable, since that’s what it takes to be a star athlete.
Refusing to allow them to schedule their insanely long hours of practice in a way that accomidates their responsibilities as parents, however, is not reasonable. For any reasonable parent – including a star athlete – parental obligations sometimes have to come before everything else, including work. It’s quite possible that the Canadian cross-country team, by refusing to build their training schedule around that reality, is cutting out some of its best athletes for no good reason – and denying Canadian track fans the chance to see the very best Canadian athletes at work.
Via Family Scholars Blog.
What? Canada sucks.
(Cue “The more you know…” music.)
At least they’re denying men too due to having children (assuming Jeremy is a male) and not just women. Should we break out the champagne?
And this statement: “National programs shouldn’t be in the business of day care. Their obligation, through taxpayers’ dollars, is to win medals and properly manage the money it takes to get there. That simple.”
I’m not an expert, and the author of that quote might be one (clearly is aching to be one), but I don’t know. Sounds like someone talking out of their backside to me.
Questions of justice aside, it’s hard for me to see how you serve the goal of winning medals by arbitrarily disqualifying people because they’re responsible parents.
The writer might mention men, but focuses “scolding” on Leah Pells, who ‘s actually a very reknowned distance runner in Canada and was nice when I ran into her before the 1996 olympics at Vancouver’s airport. Lisa Harvey’s great as well. They’re cutting their noses to spite their faces on this one.
And it’s 2005, just so they know…
all this in the age of tele-conferencing too. Sheesh.
I don’t know a lot about this, but anecdotally I have heard some rumbles of prejudice among athletes that, once women have children, they lose focus and are finished. I have never heard that about men. I wonder if this is a common prejudice, that feeds this decision: that this jerk assumes without evidence, based on a prejudice common among people (or maybe just men) that he deals with, that women with children just are not winners anymore.
Has anyone else heard that prejudice expressed?
Well, men ALWAYS think women are finished after they bear children.
But, you know what in actuality, in athletics(track and field), many women actually perform better after childbirth particularly in distance running. Not every women, but physiologically pregnancy creates bodily changes, some permanent. Also, women learn to manage their time and focus on doing more with training, in less available time.
for refusing to attend a pre-meet training camp
I suppose my stance would depend on how long this camp was supposed to last and how critical it was to the training regimen. If you leave off “because of parental obligations”, you’re left with them refusing to attend something that someone considered mandatory. If it’s mandatory and you refuse to attend, the reason isn’t important to me.
So much for competitive athletics being a meritocracy. If yer the fastest amature (sic) distance runner around, but can’t make it to a camp, yer disqualified?
There may be something to this “gotta show up” rule, since failing to show up for a race means the country is not represented, but a history of showing up and clocking good times should weigh very heavily in deciding who runs.
(responding to Thomas)
Hm. Suggestive: athletes are Winners. Winners require Focus. Children = No Focus. An interesting headline occurs to me:
“Why Are We Making Losers Out of Our Women?”
Tongue in cheek, but then again, a real argument to be made?
I think the real argument to be made is that parenting does not destroy women’s focus. Complicating someone’s schedule is not the same as impeding their ability to focus. I’m a parent, and my profession requires focus. Parenting has changed my work patterns, but it hasn’t dulled my edge. Why shouldn’t the same be true of distance runners?
Cross country might not be the best example, but in team sports, practicing as a TEAM is very important. If 4 people on the basketball team are required to show up at 6am M-F for team practice but the 5th guy wont (for any reason, not just parental) its detremental to the team. And if you reschedual the practice to a time thats more accomodating to the one guy but might potentially be less for the other four, its a little resentful.
Being an althete isnt any different than having a job. There are certain obligations that have to be met. If a companies prime business hours are 6-3 M-F but the front desk receptionist can only work 10-6 T-Sat, should i be expected to compromise for them or find a new receptionist?
If they have parental obligations that prevent them from going to a meeting, they made the right decision for their family. And the team made the right decision by cutting them to make room for players who CAN dedicate all their time to the team.
When I ran cross-country, we had female parents on my team and they do juggle more and occasionally miss practices. Cross-country does require quite a bit of team work for the team to do its best(much more than track and field, f.e.)but it’s fairly flexible. My 42.5 work week spent entirely on my feet probably had some negatives for my team as well, but you do the best you can with what you got. For me, cut a 1/3 off the weekly milage, put in more rest days and focus on quality. Distance runners are very adaptable creatures. :-)
I was the first female all-state cross-country runner in my school’s history so all that juggling with the work, school, etc. came together all right, fortunately. Our team was highest placed(3rd) female team so we all came together, supported each other on and off the team, pretty well. Often challenges bring teams closer together.
The national teams(esp. the U.S., for example) don’t do hardly any teamwork. They just all qualify separately in regionals and nationals, then meet up at the Worlds, with maybe SOME working together but not much. That’s the biggest problem in U.S. Track though, is teamwork. Just watch our relays, LOL. Fastest runners in the world, NOT the fastest traveling baton, if you get my drift.
Training camps for us are important, certainly at the national level. We had them at the college level and I attended mine, though my job was accomodating on that end. But you don’t really do anything that makes you more cohesive as a team. For Leah Pells, etal, they could have worked something out and been fine.
David: efficient businesses learn to accomodate talented people. White & Case accomodated Richard Casey, a blind lawyer and now a federal judge. My office has a wheelchair-bound lawyer, and my secretary has a job-share arrangement so she can get another degree. Big firms now have “senior counsel” slots for talented folks who don’t want the obligations of partnership. National teams deal with obligations to clubs all the time.
The Canadian team couldn’t move a meeting for a world-class runner?
Thomas, the performance differential between the runner with the family commitment and the runner without the family commitment is (presumably) very, very small. If the team believes that the camp is worth a certain amount of performance from their athletes, then it is entirely possible that [Skill Of Family Runner] + 0 < [Skill Of Non-Family Runner] + [Benefit of Training Camp] I think they should have made an accommodation, myself, but it is quite possible that they have logical reasons for not doing so.
Robert, the equasion may not be as simple as the value of the camp versus the marginal value of the athlete’s performance. I think it’s probably the marginal value of performance versus accomodating the athletes so they can attend the camp. There are no details in the article, but I didn’t get the sense it was about a flat refusal. I got the sense that it was a childcare/scheduling problem.
If athletes just refuse to deal with team interaction and insist on doing their own training on their own schedule with their own coaches, that’s a different analysis. That’s not what the article says happened.
First, here’s a link to a longer version of that Canadian Press article at Sportsnet.ca. It gives a lot more detail on what the situation actually is.
Athletics Canada is not the first Canadian atheletic institution to be involved in controversy over dropping good athletes. The Candian Olympic Committee raised their standards just before the Athens Olympics so that athletes who qualified under the regulations of their international federations and the IOC failed to qualify under COC regulations. Compared to athletics in other countries, Canadian athletics are chronically underfunded. The various national agencies seem to look for ways to disqualify some athletes from competition in order to concentrate their funds on a smaller pool of athletes.
I agree that Pells, Harvey and Deere should have been given a better deal. Their needs were ignored because, in the minds of the coaches, being a good parent = being an unfosed athlete. I can understand why Athletics Canada would have refused to pay for childcare for them, but why didn’t they just allow them to miss the training camp but run anyway? Deere and Harvey weren’t even being funded, so even if they performed poorly due to missing the camp, Athletics Canada would have lost nothing.