Ah, Wimbledon. A place where everything, from the snacks to the sexism, harks back, at all times, to tradition.
Matthew Syed weighed in (£) on the latter in the Times this week, noting the “hypocrisy” of female players’ demands for equal prize money and coverage while they still play only three sets and, at Wimbledon this year, are granted a special break between sets two and three. It is this kind of ingrained inequality, he claims, which “keep[s] the edificice of bigotry in place”.
For more examples, Syed could have looked to his colleagues on the sports desk. An online petition is calling for the paper to rethink its coverage of women’s tennis after Monday’s edition forefronted two pieces about female tennis players. One analysed their fashion, while the other covered two-time Wimbledon winner Petra Kvitova’s musings on periods:
Today’s sport section was less objectionable, but similarly skewed: it ran only one main piece on a women’s match.
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