THEME

Amanda Smith: Today, we're having sex on The Sports Factor!

Margaret Lindley: I find it stunning that people have this kind of moral code that means anything to do with sport must be sex-free. It's like sport must be politics-free, sex-free, as if to excuse the sheer pleasure and game in playing of it. If it's play, it must be clean, unpolitical, chaste play. I don't see why.

Amanda Smith: That's Margaret Lindley, one of the speakers at a conference on Gender, Sexualities and Sport held this week. And I'm going to delay the gratification of hearing more from Margaret, talking about the sex appeal of athletes, until later in the program.

Hi, I'm Amanda Smith and first today: murky waters of a different kind.

Isabelle Autissier, Tony Bullimore and Thierry du Bois have a lot in common. Each endures the perils of solo round-the-world yacht racing as their sport. All of them have braved four days in a crippled yacht, battling walls of waves and 60-knot winds. And each has been plucked from near-freezing waters by the Australian Defence Forces, in highly-publicised rescues.

But that's where the similarities end. In 1995, Autissier copped a bucketload for costing Australia a lot of money; while earlier this year, Bullimore was a hero; and du Bois was a bit forgotten.

For The Sports Factor, Chris Richards has been investigating these differences. First, let's listen back over some of the news reports, fast-forwarding and rewinding between the two rescues:

Newsreader: A solo French yachtswoman has told of how she battled dangerous seas before being rescued yesterday by Australia's armed forces. She's told Early 'A.M.' that she could have been killed by the powerful seas.

Reporter: Miss Autissier held a news conference in Sydney today after being rescued from her yacht in huge seas 1500-kilometres south-west of Adelaide in the Southern Ocean.

Reporter: And it was the cost of Isabelle Autissier's rescue which was of primary interest to members of the press. Eventually race director Mark Schrader, inserted the final word on the million-dollar price-tag.

Mark Schrader: The cost of not launching a rescue is a human life.

Reporter: After her press conference, Isabelle Autissier expressed surprise at the emphasis placed on the cost of her rescue.

Isabelle Autissier: Absolutely --

FX: FORWARDING TAPE

NEWS THEME

AM Presenter: Two weeks ago, Frenchman Thierry du Bois and Briton Tony Bullimore were unknown outside the small world of solo sailing. This morning, the world will be watching their return to land. HMAS 'Adelaide' is within hours of docking at Fremantle, where the yachtsmen are expected to receive a tumultuous welcome.

Reporter: Thousands of people, a huge world-wide media contingent and a long list of dignitaries headed by Defence Minister, Ian McLachlan, will greet them when they arrive in Fremantle aboard the Navy frigate.

Reporter: The Fremantle wharf, where the 'Adelaide' will dock, this morning's been a blur of movement, with television cameras elbowing each other for best position to gather in the action expected today. Behind the cameras, the chequebooks are being waved around, with talk of six-figure sums, in Mr Bullimore's case, for the exclusive right to his story. Politicians will be on hand; Defence Minister Ian McLachlan and West Australian Premier, Richard Court are due to make speeches and the marching band from Sterling Naval Base on Garden Island, south of Perth, will provide entertainment.

FX: REWINDING TAPE

Reporter: After her press conference, Isabelle Autissier expressed surprise at the emphasis placed on the cost of her rescue.

Isabelle Autissier: Yes absolutely, because in any other emergency situation, I've never heard any question like that. Everybody has to rescue everybody, that's solidarity amongst people.

Chris Richards: When Isabelle Autissier was rescued in January 1995, reporters and politicians talked dollars and cents. But in January this year, barely a second glance was given to the far more costly rescue bill notched up with Theirry du Bois and Tony Bullimore.

And last month, papers tabled in the Senate revealed that it cost the Australian taxpayer nearly three times as much to rescue Bullimore and du Bois, as it cost to rescue Isabelle Autissier. It seems that no price was too high to spend on the Bullimore rescue, yet two years earlier, Autissier was widely regarded as a costly nuisance to Australia. Why the difference? The case of an irresponsible and foolhardy woman compared to brave and daring men? That might have been the public perception, but it was never the view among solo racers, says round-the-world yacht racer, David Adams.

David Adams: The difference between this racing and 100 metres or weight-lifting is that it's more of a mental problem than a physical problem. So it's one of the few sports that the sexes can compete equally, and Isabelle had just won the first leg by five days, and just flawed all the blokes anyway.

Chris Richards: Then why the different attitude to the two rescues? Was it because Autissier was incompetent and shouldn't have been out there in the first place, while Bullimore and du Bois were old sea dogs who just struck a bit of bad luck in the Southern Ocean?

Before her rescue, Isabelle Autissier was competing in the 60-foot yacht class of the BOC solo round-the-world challenge. The 50-foot class of that race was won by Australian David Adams. So how does he rank Autissier's skills as a sailor, against those of Bullimore and du Bois?

David Adams: Oh Isabelle's in a completely different league. Isabelle's a very successful competitor, she's extremely well-respected by her peer group; she's continued to go on and achieve very good results and is very well-respected in France. And Tony and Thierry - Thierry's an up-and-comer in France, and will certainly be getting up there in the future. Tony's from England, he's been in this sort of racing for a long time; but he's one of the journeymen - he's there to make up the numbers.

Chris Richards: How is Isabelle Autissier regarded nationally in France?

David Adams: Well there's no doubt about it that Isabelle is a national hero. She's used in a lot of advertising campaigns, she's used as a positive role model to schoolkids, and she's used as a positive role model for women.

Chris Richards: Was there any great differences you could see between the du Bois-Bullimore rescue and the Autissier rescue? For instance, Bullimore's feat, his heroism, might have been greater than Autissier's?

David Adams: Well I don't think anybody in the sailing community consider those guys heroes for having an accident. Bullimore did exactly what he should have done, and stayed inside the boat. The two French guys who were rescued who went outside the boat, were in far more danger, and exposed themselves to the elements a lot more than Tony Bullimore did. Tony Bullimore, in his defence, had great courage to stay inside that little hole and say, 'Well I'm going to sit here and wait and if they don't come, well it's going to be a slow miserable death.' But that's what those boats are designed to do: you're supposed to be able to live in them for a great length of time.

Chris Richards: ABC radio news reporter, Ross Solly, covered the Autissier rescue.

Ross Solly: I've got no doubt that there is a gender issue involved to some extent; but I feel that it would be dangerous to just write it off as a gender problem. I didn't get the sense that people were angry at Isabelle Autissier because she was a woman. I think there were factors there that perhaps made it less of a hero's return when she got to shore, which perhaps gave the media reason to focus on other issues which did turn out to be the amount of money which it cost to rescue her.

Chris Richards: Ellen Fanning agrees that in explaining the difference in the way the two rescues were covered, gender was only one factor. She presented 'A.M.'s' coverage of the Bullimore/du Bois rescue. Like Ross Solly and David Adams, Ellen Fanning says there's a range of reasons why only Tony Bullimore was hailed as a hero. And all three say discrimination of a different sort was at play.

Ellen Fanning: I think that the direct comparison that you can draw between Autissier is with Raphael Donelli. Now at the same time as Bullimore was lost in the Southern Ocean, Raphael Donelli was in similar troubles, and another French yachtsman. Now you look at the coverage afforded to him: he was almost the forgotten man in the trio of people lost this year, and you have to think well why was that the case? There were no pictures of him, they weren't available. He gave a press conference - and sure there were lots of people turned up in Hobart to it - but it didn't elicit the sort of enthusiasm from the media as others did. And you would have to say, 'Well, was it because he was French?'; 'Was it because there were no available pictures of him lost at sea?' I mean I think all of those things play a part.

Ross Solly: The media doesn't seem to have the same empathy for people outside of other English-speaking nations, and especially Britain and the United States, and I think some of that drives the media, and perhaps colours the way they report issues.

Chris Richards: Does that, do you think, reflect on the way we generally report sports stories?

Ross Solly: Oh I think I can give you a comparison that comes to mind straight away: the coverage we give in Australia to an event like Wimbledon, compared to the coverage we give to the French Open tennis event, which has just finished. I mean there can be no doubt that the French Open is every bit as prestigious as Wimbledon, yet we get coverage of Wimbledon in prime time, the whole two weeks of the Wimbledon event. We send reporters over there, we have wall-to-wall coverage in the newspapers, on television. Whereas the French Open, you have to get up pretty early in the morning if you want to actually see any of the action. There's probably no real reason why there should be any difference - they're both grand slam events, they both attract similar prizemoney, and they both attract, certainly, similar standards of fields.

David Adams: If you put the French up against the English, we're always going to pick on the French. The French have been a bit harsh in our area - the nuclear testing and things like that. And so it's very easy to pick on them. I think that this last rescue, if they'd all been French competitors out there, they wouldn't have got anywhere near the coverage they got this time.

Chris Richards: Another reason for the way Autissier was treated is politics. Jocelyn Newman was the Opposition Spokesperson for Defence at the time, and she demanded that the costs of Autissier's rescue be repaid by race organisers and insurers. But two years later, Coalition Defence Minister, Ian McLachlan, had nothing but praise for the Bullimore rescue. 'A proud moment in Australia's history', he said.

According to David Adams, criticising the cost of the Autissier rescue was politically expedient for the then-Opposition, at a time when the whiff of a Federal election was in the air.

David Adams: The Opposition came up and said, 'Well look, we're spending an awful lot of money on here. We haven't got any roads, there's a black hole in our balance of trade deficits; and they really went for the jugular. At that stage they knew there was an election coming up and they'd obviously had words from above 'If there's a chance to get at the Government, you've got to go for it.'

Chris Richards: Then there's the media. Why didn't reporters pursue the cost angle with the Bullimore/Du Bois rescue, when it had been such a big issue two years earlier?

Ellen Fanning: My colleagues had not heard about this round-the-world yacht race, so that whole concept was new. The whole idea that an individual nation would be responsible for a group of adventurers who happened to get lost in their part of the world, that a nation would have to shell out millions of dollars in order to save those people, that wasn't well understood. The idea that Australia and other nations would have this sort of reciprocal agreement for bands of adventurers in the Southern Ocean, that wasn't understood, and that was debated through.

By the time Bullimore was lost, we understood the race, we understood the rules and we understood that millions of dollars would be spent. And so the media had a huge head start in terms of trying to cover it.

Chris Richards: Finally, the personalities of the sailors themselves affected the way they were represented to the world.

Ellen Fanning: You can't ignore the fact, particularly with Bullimore, that this was a great yarn. You know, if there had been a Frenchwoman in that upturned yacht, I would like to think it would have been exactly the same. It had everything. It had comedy, it had suspense. He was out there, Australia held its breath - I mean after all, we were just sitting on the beach anyway, we didn't have much else to think about. Nobody quite understood Wik or the ramifications of that. And here was this great adventure unfolding. He's out there. Is he under the upturned yacht? It's been four days, he couldn't possibly there. And then all of a sudden, everyone driving along - I was on the Harbour Bridge in Sydney, driving along, it was 33-degrees, it was hot and stinking - Tony Bullimore is there! He's under this thing, he's knocking and yelling, "Get me out of here guv!" It was a brilliant story. And everybody saw that it had the potential to be that brilliant story, and it just developed and galloped along.

Also the fact that he had this fantastic wife who had this great dialogue going on with him, saying, 'Oh, I told Tony' you know, 'don't you bloody do this again!' And he was blathering, 'Oh, better ask me wife next time!'. I mean you couldn't have scripted the damn thing better.

David Adams: Everybody I talked to just thought he was fantastic you know, and what a wonderful thing he'd done. And nobody realised that he was stone motherless last, that was totally lost you know. They liked him, he was a character, and he was English.

Chris Richards: David Adams visited Isabelle Autissier in France last month. He says that while Autissier wasn't given the kind of hero's welcome that Bullimore got, she's still grateful to those Australians who put her life before the cost.

David Adams: She has two cups in her limited supply of crockery - I remember it - one is from the Air Force and one is from the Navy, and she treasures them. And she always remembers those guys that rescued her, and she knows that she's there because of them.

Amanda Smith: Round-the-world yacht racer, David Adams, and ABC journalists Ross Solly and Ellen Fanning, speaking there with Chris Richards.

Now this week, Victoria University in Melbourne has been running a conference called Gender, Sexualities and Sport. And yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing a session there, where one of the speakers was Dr Margaret Lindley, the woman who put sex into football.

Margaret's a history lecturer at the University of Tasmania, but she's also the person responsible for reviving the annual Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture, that was started up by Ian Turner in the '70s, but which lapsed with his death. The thing about this lecture, as Ian Turner did it, was that it was meant to be funny about the meaning and purpose of Australian football. The challenge for Margaret, in taking over the post, was to find a way that she, as a woman, could be funny about footy.

Margaret Lindley: I knew I had to be funny. But being funny as a woman, especially on certain subjects like football, is not the same thing as being a bloke and being funny about it. It's very hard to put your finger on it, it's a sense you have. So I had to work out some way of coming at it as a woman. You can't come at something that is as male as Australian Rules Football, as a pretend bloke, it just doesn't work, because everyone looks at you and thinks, 'Not a bloke'.

So you in fact have to make something of the fact that you're not a bloke.

Amanda Smith: OK, well when you did give that first lecture in your revival of the series, you caused a bit of a stir by announcing that Australian Rules Football was 'a game played by men at considerable personal hazard, for the sexual pleasure of women.' So what murky territory had you unleashed by suggesting that, Margaret?

Margaret Lindley: Or in my unconscious, as Freud would say! Well I didn't want to do one of those - 'It's not fair, because you blokes get fame and fortune' - I hate that kind of whingey feminism, it really is boring. And I'm not suggesting that women don't have, in sport, as in other things, things to whinge about. But I find it boring. I'm sure lots of people - men especially - find it boring; I wanted to entertain all sorts of people with it. So I thought, well, let's just say: look, we women really rule it. It's really our business; we have ways of manipulating; we have ways of having power.

So largely, I think about 90% jokingly, I said, look, we know what the game's really about. I mean you guys get up there, you wear these tiny little shorts - anyone who first sees Australian Rules Football is staggered by the shorts. They look at them: "Oh, my God! Look at those shorts!". They wear tiny, tiny little shorts, very skimpy gear, and they do fantastically dangerous things while we women sit there, in enormous quantities, far bigger than any other footballing code in the world, and cheer and have a damn good time.

So I said let's pretend (or I said to myself) let's pretend this is all in fact a devious female plot.

Amanda Smith: Well there's an American writer, Allen Guttman, who's written a book called 'The Erotic in Sports'. And when I interviewed him about this subject last year, he made the point that those who don't like sport criticise it on the grounds that it's a voyeuristic, arousing activity. While those who do like sport, claim that their appreciation is quite chaste and has nothing to do with any erotic appeal. Would you agree that that division exists?

Margaret Lindley: Oh I think he's absolutely right. I get accused - I just have been accused - of trivialising women's enjoyment of football. I thought, what's trivial about noticing the beautiful body, really, what is wrong with it? But I think he's absolutely right, that you do find people sneering - people who hate sport - saying, 'Oh yes, you just want to look at those bodies'. And you do find the earnest sportspeople trying to suggest to you that this is some desperately moral activity, and that they never notice the bodies. Never. And how you do this, how you actually watch the bodies leaping and running, but you don't actually notice the bodies, or you have no sense that that body is bigger, smaller, or - dare one say it? - more attractive to you personally than another, I don't know.

Amanda Smith: But, Margaret, isn't the idea that women in particular find watching footballers in tight shorts appealing, isn't it the same kind of sexist objectification that women have been accusing men of for years?

Margaret Lindley: Except that a footballer is not a stationary object, and not being stationary is actually very important. I have quite a different view of footballers posed in calendars. I'm not sure what I think of them. I laugh and look at them, but I've never bought one of them. And I go to football matches all the time. A moving object that is powerful, that is surging, and that moreover is moving not for the sake of the observers - none of those players are moving for our sake, for our pleasure, they are doing something for their own, their team's purposes. And to some degree they are completely oblivious of us. They may hear us, but they're not performing for us in some sense.

Now if you take the kind of strip show: a woman or a man in a strip show is a posed object, even when they move. Every move is designed not to express themselves, their energy, their goals, their motives, but simply to - 'I think you will be pleased if I move in this way'. Now if I had a bunch of footballers out there on the field doing that, I would regard that as incredibly un-sexy. I think people turning and posing with their hands on their hips is objectifying. You can't objectify a footballer; you can't objectify a swimmer ploughing down a pool. You can watch, you can be privileged to watch their activity, but they're nobody's object.

Amanda Smith: I guess the essence of what you're saying Margaret, is that we should loosen up on this discomfort about linking sensuality and sexiness with sport. But surely part of the awkwardness is that sex, and how you express desire, is such fraught terrain in the last 20th century.

Margaret Lindley: I don't know how we avoid that. I think these are quite moralistic times, in some senses. There is a kind of a desire to turn all bodies into money-making machines. I think that's very, very strong. And I think one of the concerns about people who, frankly, revel in playfulness and pleasure and joys and sexiness of bodies, is that it's not economically rational. It cuts across territories, and we live in a world where people want the territories, they want to police the territories. We are I think, trying to control this rather frightening sexual world we live in, by putting sex into a whole series of boxes. The thing about sex is it doesn't fit into boxes, it spreads across them. It is in sport, it is in play, it is at work, it's in all sorts of places. And we are trying to confine them at the moment. Some of them have to be confined, but I don't know that sex has to be kept out of sport.

Amanda Smith: Margaret Lindley, from the University of Tasmania. And she'll be delivering her fourth Ron Barassi Memorial Lecturer at footy finals time, in September this year.

And staying on the gender, sexualities and sport theme: let's turn our attention now to women who play rather than watch sport.

Annemarie Jutel is a US-born, now New Zealand based middle and long-distance runner. She's just put out a book called 'A Woman's Guide to Running: Beginner to Elite'. Now we tend to forget that until really pretty recently, women were actively discouraged from distance running - the Olympic Marathon, for example, was only introduced for women in 1984.

Annemarie Jutel is interested in the historical reasons for why distance running's been considered bad for women.

Annemarie Jutel: I think one of the most interesting eras for me is 19th century Victorian approaches to women and physical activity. There was an idea, since we had these Newtonian principles of physics, we decided to apply them to the body. And since energy could neither be created nor destroyed, it was thought that you were born with a given quota of energy which would wane with the onset of menstruation.

So women were made to go to bed, to lay recumbent, to totally cease physical activity for fear of their biological functions actually destroying them. And those Victorian ideals and ideas are still very present, or were still certainly present for many generations after that was no longer actively promoted. When in fact there's no scientific basis for that, it was just a vestige of this idea that women were somehow, because of their reproductive function, unfit for exercise.

Amanda Smith: Well I think at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, for the first time there was an 800-metres event for women, over which there was a great deal of controversy, because it was considered dangerous for women to run that distance, and that it would also prematurely age them.

And it's interesting, I think, that several women did collapse after that race in 1928 in Amsterdam. So is it a case of self-fulfilling prophecy?

Annemarie Jutel: Well actually that was quite an interesting example to produce, because it was a very hot day and it's not so unusual for runners to throw themselves on the ground after a hard exertion in hot weather. And similarly in the men's 800-metre, there was a response which wasn't unlike that: many of the men were strewn across the inside of the track after their race. But they didn't decide to interrupt the running of 800-metres for decades to come for men, just for women. They decided it was too dangerous and the 800-metres was removed from the Olympic program for women.

Amanda Smith: And that was in fact for many years - it wasn't until 1960, was it, that there was a race longer than 200-metres for women reintroduced into the Olympic Games?

Annemarie Jutel: And of course you know well that the marathon didn't finally reach the Olympic Games until 1984, so it took a very, very long time.

Amanda Smith: Well let's talk a bit more about women running marathons. When did women actually start running marathons?

Annemarie Jutel: Oh that's a trick question isn't it? Perhaps we could talk about when women were first recognised as having run marathons, and perhaps look forward to Kathrine Switzer in 1967 - that was a very interesting case which drew a lot of media attention all over the world.

Amanda Smith: This is the Boston Marathon?

Annemarie Jutel: This is the Boston Marathon, yes. In 1967, a young American woman - a Virginian like myself who actually lives in New Zealand now, as well - was training with her male team-mates at her university. And there was a lot of talk about this Boston Marathon, which has sort of a mystical appeal to distance runners. And she decided she'd like to run it. There was a bit of apprehension amongst her team-mates - 'Oh that can't be possible; you couldn't do that' but she proved it. Actually she went and covered the distance, and more, in training prior to the race. And so her main training partner said, 'This is great, we'll go do it together. Off we go'. Her boyfriend decided to go along and do it with her - 'If you can do it, I can do it,' he said. She went to the race, entered the race legally, and got a race number, and the race organiser wasn't aware of the fact that she was a woman until she actually started running and took off her warm-up suit.

When he saw that she was a woman, he came and tried to forcefully remove her, tried to throw her off the racecourse. Fortunately for her, her boyfriend was a pretty big tough guy, and he ended up tackling the race organiser. She went on to finish, pretty traumatised and pretty exhausted, but she finished the full distance. And that whole episode was recorded on film in pictures that then went all round the world within 24 hours of the end of the race.

Amanda Smith: The pictures were of the race organiser trying to stop her?

Annemarie Jutel: Trying to tackle her, yes that's right. And of course, everyone was incredulous about the fact that this race organiser would tackle a young woman who was just running, and I think that was a very important catalyst in more ways than one. It drew media attention to the fact that women were indeed capable of covering the distance.

Amanda Smith: Nevertheless, why do men run faster than women? I mean, is it purely biological, or are there cultural factors as well?

Annemarie Jutel: Well there are lots of reasons. When I think of my children, or I think of my parents and grandparents, I can see values and behaviours which I have inherited, and which are passed on as well. Now I think that the same thing is true in the big picture; I think that we're collectively the products of history as well. And if we think of the fact that for centuries and centuries leading up to 1997, there has been as much exclusion of women as there has been then obviously there's a great deficit to make up in terms of information, practice, habit, incorporation of these activities in the lifestyle, that kind of thing.

I think it would be very difficult to sort of peel back the layers of socio-cultural influences and find some pure biological being that we could measure and say, 'This is the real female, and this is the real male, and this is how much faster the real male is than the real female.' Things that would interfere...well, for example, there is more lean muscle mass in men than there is in women. Well, what is the socially desirable feminine shape? What is the socially desirable masculine shape? If you look at a fashion magazine for example with men, you're going to see very muscular torsos; if you look at a fashion magazine of women, you're going to see slender, but not muscular - too muscular? that's butch. So there's a social influence which could affect the desirable female, the desirable male; and say men have more lean muscle mass than women. However, I think we can agree that there is a physiological basis initially which would support the fact that there is more lean muscle mass in men than there is in women.

Amanda Smith: Though those social factors are interesting, because I'm just thinking: I remember when I was a kid, I clearly now remember that I observed the way that older girls and women that I knew ran. And I remember consciously modifying the way I ran to imitate them and to adopt their more, what I saw, as a more girlie style. And I stopped that after a while when I realised it was stupid and inefficient, but for a while I thought that was how women should run.

Annemarie Jutel: That's right. Well I think that's a very important example, because we do learn movement, it's not natural. There is nothing purely biological about anything we do, and it's all mediated by our experiences. And your experience of what it was to be a woman, included this girlie-style of running.

Amanda Smith: Annemarie Jutel, New Zealand runner, and the author of the just-out 'Women's Guide to Running'.

And that's The Sports Factor for this week. Thanks for your company today, and I hope you'll join me again next week on Radio National for The Sports Factor. Until then, cheers.

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The Sports Factor can be heard on Radio National, 8.30am Fridays (Repeated Friday evenings at 8.00pm).