track and field

At least two Swedish athletes competed at the track and field world championships in Moscow this week while wearing rainbow nail polish.

Two female Russian athletes kissed on the winners podium after taking gold in the World Track and Field Championships being held in Moscow. Now Russian officials will have to decide, was it "gay propaganda," or mere sportsmanship?

After months of gender testing and international scrutiny, South African athlete Caster Semenya won her first 800-meter event in her return to track and field competition.  Semenya, 19, took the event with 2 minutes, 4.22 seconds at the Lappeenranta Games in Finland on Thursday, 11 months after winning the world championships in Berlin for the same event. 

Nearly a thousand athletes and volunteers are slated to descend upon Vancouver, Canada, this week to compete in the second Outgames, a global LGBT sporting competition. Eight hundred athletes will compete in badminton, dance sport, golf, poker, soccer, softball, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and long-distance running events. The "eco-challenge" is a multisport event that includes hiking, swimming, rappelling, Tyrolean rope traverse, biking, and map and compass navigation.

I’ve often dreamed about having more womens’ sports highlighted on television and now that it looks like something appearing to be that animal has appeared in my sights, I seem to have very mixed emotions. V.P. Gentile is overseeing a retreat this week at a Southern California resort — which includes athletes such as Shannon Miller (gymnast), Jennie Finch (softball), Laila Ali (boxer), Julie Foudy (soccer) and Marion Jones (track and field), as well as lots of sports marketers — to toss around ideas for espnW.

The Global LGBT Summit is underway in Philadelphia. On Thursday April 29^th a National Sports Panel discussed the toxic effect of homophobia in college and professional sports. One of the panelists was Dr. Pat Griffin.

Rainbow-colored nail polish is against the rules, a Swedish athlete was told while competing in Moscow this month at the World Athletics Championships.

Remember when women’s tennis fans (or foes) started saying Martina Navratilova looked like man? I do. And, it still chills me to the bone that as a baby dyke the only out lesbian I knew of— Navratilova—was being castigated for being a strong woman. Now, South African runner Caster Semenya is under scrutiny regarding her gender.

I joined my high school track team because I was too short to play basketball and I liked the idea of being an athlete. I was and still am naturally pretty athletic, but I was a city kid who played street ball. We moved to the suburbs, where my peers had been on traveling teams and went to hoity-toity tennis camps before the umbillical cord had been cut. So no, I couldn't make the basketball squad, no matter how many times I'd try. But I could run in a straight line and sometimes in a circle, so I became a sprinter.

Chicago's About Face Theatre has received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to develop a musical about late Olympian Babe Didrikson.