Equestrian Sports, Media Coverage and Gender

dominobrown

dominobrown

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Bare with me guys!

Reading H+H and in the letters section many people were writing in echoing my thoughts on the compleate lack of media coverage of WEG. Obviously H+H is compleatly excluded from this, as some other horsey magazines, though H+H always does give really good competition reports :) .

Many letters were saying there is extensive covergae of other spoorts like Golf (yawn), Football, F1 etc etc, both online, in newspapers, and TV. Even if GB are not particular dominant in these sports or doing well.
Also what do you notice about the sports section in news??
It is nearly always MALE dominated sports only!
Most of WEG sports have no gender biased at all (I think vaulting is in seperate sections understanably), men and women compete on a level playing field.
It is one of the few sports that truely do.
So in this day and age why is the media (H+H etc are obviously excluded from this :) ) and sport so sexist??
What do you think and why do you think this is??
Is it a gender issue? Or is there lack of interest in equine sports, despite GB being so good at them?
Personally I am a bit disgusted with the media :mad::mad:

(PLEASE post your thoughts etc, as I am thinking about doing this for my dissertation)
 
I've just written a bunch about this in my book, and yes, I think gender has something to do with it. Female tennis stars are paid less than male. You are charged more to see male 100m finalists than female at the Olympics. Any internet commenter will trot out the old "Men are just stronger than women, therefore their sport must be better" chestnut, given half a chance.

When women were a novelty in equestrian sports, their presence was a big draw. Now that they're commonplace, less so. Add to that the fact that the public as a whole knows much less about horses than they did a couple of generations ago – they simply don't see the skill involved.

Another factor: equestrian sport in Britain just meant hunting, racing and polo until the First World War. Then there was the huge showjumping craze (which really took off in the fifties), and then in the 1960s and 1970s the number of equestrian sports that came to prominence fanned out. You could argue that there were too many options to chose from, and attention got diluted. I know horse folk might be interested in dressage AND show jumping AND racing AND three-day eventing, but the rest of the viewing public might be turned off by the array of options. It's harder to casually follow what's going on.
 
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