Whenever black folks start dominating in a sport where historically only white athletes were considered supreme, there is an attempt to reel them back in.
It never works.
Tiger-proofing the course
Tiger- proofing was the name given when Augusta National decided to revamp its course because Tiger Woods was dominating so easily.
Tiger’s 12-shot victory in 1997 set alarm bells ringing, but it wasn’t until after his second victory in 2001 that the concept of ‘Tiger-proofing’ first raised its head.
Tiger was the longest player of that era, and as a result nearly 300 yards was added for 2002 via extra length to half the holes.
In some ways ‘Tiger-proofing’ was a misnomer because if you make a course longer, it just becomes even more likely that the longest players will succeed… which Tiger proved by winning again in 2002!
When Tiger first won in 1997, Augusta measured 6,925 yards; In 2015 it was over 500 yards longer at 7,435.
As Simone flew, her scores didn’t.
The Yurchenko double pike is considered so perilous and challenging that no other woman has attempted it in competition, and it is unlikely that any woman in the world is even training to give it a try. To execute it, a gymnast first must launch herself into a roundoff back handspring onto the vaulting table, and then propel herself high enough to give herself time to flip twice in a pike position (body folded, legs straight) before landing on her feet.
It’s the kind of maneuver done much more easily by a platform diver who has the help of gravity and the safety of a soft landing. Simone Biles, though, executes it by producing enough speed and strength to power herself high in the air and then flip so quickly on the way down that gravity seems to have been taken by surprise. Others were too. So was Biles.
Not even the vault’s namesake, the former Russian gymnast Natalia Yurchenko, tried it in competition.
There is a fear that Biles is so good that she might run away with any competition she enters simply by doing a handful of moves that her rivals cannot, or dare not, attempt.
However, The International Gymnastics Federation has refused to score this difficulty during her competitions.
“They’re both (The scores on the vault and beam in which she performs the move)too low and they even know it,” Biles said of the rewards for her beam dismount and the double-pike vault. “But they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me.”
“They had an open-ended code of points and now they’re mad that people are too far ahead and excelling.”
Despite not being properly rewarded, Biles has said she would continue doing them.
When asked why, she quickly answered, “Because I can.”
Indian Wells
(reprinted from 2022)
Naomi Osaka brought to tears by a heckler at the same tourney the Williams sisters boycotted for 14 years because of abusive fans
Naomi Osaka crashed out of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells after a fan’s incessant heckling brought her to tears during her Round of 64 match against Veronika Kudermetova.
But the four-time Grand Slam champion is just the latest tennis star to face harassment from the crowd at the Southern California tournament. At the peak of their tennis careers, Venus and Serena Williams boycotted the Indian Wells Masters for 14 years after they were the targets of racist abuse, epithets, and overwhelming boos from the unfriendly audience.
The Williams sisters’ issues at Indian Wells date back to 2001 — when Osaka was just three years old. That year, both Venus and Serena rode hot streaks all the way to the semifinal of the tournament, where they were set to face one another, but the elder sister pulled out of the match 20 minutes ahead of its scheduled start time with a knee injury.
Fans were furious about the last-minute scratch, which fueled speculation that the sisters’ father, Richard Williams, predetermined which of his daughters would win their head-to-head matchups. So when Venus and Richard arrived to watch Serena compete in the finals of the tournament a few days later, all three were bombarded with boos and far more vicious jeers.
“I stepped onto the court a couple minutes before [my opponent], and right away people started booing,” Serena recalled in her 2009 autobiography, On the Line. “They were loud, mean, aggressive… pissed!”
“What got me most of all was that it wasn’t just a scattered bunch of boos,” she continued. “It wasn’t coming from just one section. It was like the whole crowd got together and decided to boo all at once.”
Williams noted in the book that she was surprised by the audience’s response at the time, especially considering “tennis fans are typically a well-mannered bunch.” She couldn’t figure out what she’d done to become the subject of fans’ ire, and didn’t initially make the connection to her sister’s injury from the round prior.
“I looked up and all I could see was a sea of rich people — mostly older, mostly white — standing and booing lustily, like some kind of genteel lynch mob,” Williams wrote. “I don’t mean to use such inflammatory language to describe the scene, but that’s really how it seemed from where I was down on the court. Like these people were gonna come looking for me after the match.”
“I wanted to cry, but I didn’t want to give these people the satisfaction,” she added.
It was quickly apparent to Serena that race played a role in the abuse. She “heard the word n—– a couple times” through the chorus of boos, she wrote.
“I even heard one angry voice telling us to go back to Compton,” she added. “It was unbelievable.”
Though the younger Williams — who was just 19 years old at the time — dropped the first set, she bounced back to beat Clijsters 4-6, 6-4, 6-2 and take home the tournament’s trophy. After securing the win, Williams walked over to her family, then hugged her dad and sister in an outpouring of emotion.
Venus returned to the tournament the following year. And in 2016, Serena made her way back to the Indian Wells final but fell against Belarusian star Victoria Azarenka.
Osaka wasn’t subjected to race-based abuse during Saturday’s match, as the wayward fan who caught her attention was repeatedly caught shouting “You suck!” Still, the heckling brought to mind the Williams family’s experience, and that triggered Osaka’s emotions, she said later while addressing fans after her straight-set loss.
“To be honest, I’ve gotten heckled before. It didn’t really bother me,” Osaka said into the microphone. “But [being] heckled here, I watched a video of Venus and Serena [Williams] getting heckled here, and if you’ve never watched it, you should watch it.”
Neither Venus nor Serena has spoken publicly about Osaka’s experience with the Indian Wells heckler — or her post-match comments — since her exit from the tournament. But when Osaka was in the news for refusing to fulfill her media obligations at last summer’s French Open, both Williams sisters were firmly in the young star’s corner.
Serena said she wished she “could give her a hug” because she knows “what it’s like” and has “been in those positions” before. Venus, meanwhile, offered Osaka some blunt advice about dealing with the press — which could easily double as advice for dealing with hecklers.
“For me, personally, ‘how I deal with it’ was that I know every single person asking me a question can’t play as well as I can and never will,” the elder Williams said. “So no matter what you say or what you write, you’ll never light a candle to me.”