Sports

Being Fair To Imane Khelif

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.

What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:

On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes. 

Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…

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Olympics Ethics Quiz: The Sexist Commentator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Horror.

Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.

After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.

Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.

Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?

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Baseball’s Unethical Trade Deadline

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Let’s take a break from the election to focus on the things that really matter.

Like baseball.

Baseball’s Unethical Season is upon us. The trade deadline is tomorrow at 6 pm. It means that several teams…fewer this year than usual, but still…will announce to their fans that they won’t be trying to win any more, that hope is lost, and that they will put on the field from now on even worse squads than the ones that got them to this point.

This is because they have decided to trade or sell off many of their best players, especially veterans with big contracts or who will be free agents after the season, for unproven prospects. Those teams will “tank” for the foreseeable future, meaning accumulate losses so they can get high draft picks.

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Meet Sara Morris, the Running Fick [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I referred to someone as a fick last week, and realized Ethics Alarms hadn’t exposed any of that particularly loathsome breed recently. Upon checking, I discovered that the last official Ethics Alarms fick was designated way back in 2021. It was Bennett Madison, a columnist at the now (thankfully) defunct Gawker site. He had openly boasted about deceiving advice columnists and their trusting readers in his article titled, “Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published.”

Sara Morris says, “Hold my beer!”

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Ethics Hero/Dunce: Charlotte Dujardin

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I haven’t had many of these, as you might imagine. In fact, I’m not even sure that this is one.

British Olympic dressage medalist Charlotte Dujardin holds six Olympic medals, three of them gold, in equestrian events. She just dropped out of the Paris Olympics, however, after a video was uncovered that reportedly shows her repeatedly whipping a horse on its legs.

“A video has emerged from four years ago which shows me making an error of judgement during a coaching session,” she said in her statement withdrawing from the Games. “Understandably, the International Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI) is investigating, and I have made the decision to withdraw from all competition — including the Paris Olympics — while this process takes place,” she said. The statement continues, “I am sincerely sorry for my actions and devastated that I have let everyone down, including Team GB, fans and sponsors.”

Some have described this as Ethics Hero-level contrition. She did wrong, she has admitted it without qualifications, and has administered her own sanctions. OK, I’m buying that, sort of. Maybe. With major misgivings.

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Baseball’s All-Star Game : Another Tradition Rotted

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I watched it last night because there was really nothing else worth seeing on TV, but I hate what the All-Star game has become, and have hated it for a long time. Before inter-league play and huge contracts, the “Mid-Season Classic” was a real game, played as intensely as the World Series, for the honor of the two separate leagues. (Ask Ray Fosse how intensely.) Managers would try to get and keep the strongest possible line-up in the game: it wasn’t unusual for several stars to play all 9 innings. Starting pitchers went three innings, not just one. Players slid into bases and dived for balls. It was a real contest. In ethics terms, the All-Star Game had integrity.

For decades now, it has just been a bunch of rich guys going through the motions, joking with each other, making sure no one got hurt. The obvious objective of the managers is to get all 30 players on the roster on the field if possible, not to win. It’s a parade: viewers barely get to see a player display the skills that made him an All-Star. The event has the seriousness of a celebrity softball game…there’s no tension, no drama.

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Ethics Dunces: Yankees Manager Aaron Boone and Centerfielder Trent Grisham

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

You don’t expect me to pass up a chance to chide the New York Yankees, do you? Especially when they really deserve it…and this episode has larger significance, I think, although I always think baseball has larger significance.

When I saw the video of the play above, I didn’t believe it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major league player loaf like that on a play. The culprit was Yankee center fielder Trent Grisham, who is no callow rookie; in fact, he has won a couple Gold Gloves for his fielding. It occurred during the ninth inning of Friday’s eventual 8-4 Yankee loss to Cincinnati; the Pinstripes have been losing a lot lately, indeed they appear to be in free-fall after a spectacular start. (Good.)

Yankee fans noticed, and booed Grisham lustily. Yankee social media commenters, already upset because of the team’s recent losing ways, piled on after the game. Best-selling author and podcaster Eric Sherman probably summed it up best, tweeting, “What in the world was [Manager] Aaron Boone waiting for there in the dugout? Trent Grisham should have been yanked from the game immediately. A missed opportunity for Boone to set an example for a team that has underachieved the last month. Wow.”

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Ethics Quiz: Fake Celebrity Voices [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I decided to write about this insidious (but ethical?) phenomenon when I realized that the Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages TV ads are now using an AI-faked Jimmy Dean voice. For decades they only had one brief catch-line from the old ads when Jimmy was still alive (he died in 2010); we would hear the real Jimmy say, “Wake up to the goodness of Jimmy Dean sausages!” in various combinations. Now, AI Jimmy won’t shut up. (The new Jimmy doesn’t even sound quite right, in my opinion.)

NBC announced last week that veteran sportscaster Al Michaels will be doing recaps during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Well, not really Al; a fake Michaels generated by artificial intelligence will re-create the familiar sportscaster’s voice to provide customized Olympic recaps for Peacock subscribers. “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” will give users a customized highlight playlist, narrated by AI Al.

Al, who is well past his pull-date at 79 (though still younger than Joe Biden), apparently was happy to have AI Al take over for him, and especially happy to receive the check.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for July Fourth is…

Is this unethical or just “Ick”?

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: the Woke Shackles Tighten…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Jennifer Sey, once a competitive gymnast on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, has launched a new clothing line focused on the threat to women’s sports by the woke-driven incursion of “transitioned” or “transitioning” biological males.

TikTok responded to her ad on that platform by banning he company from advertising with this:

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Umpire Ethics: Robo-Ump Update and “Oh-oh!”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Regular readers here know about both my passion for baseball and my disgust with how many games are determined by obviously wrong home plate calls on balls and strikes. Statistics purportedly show that umpires as a group are correct with their ball/strike edicts about 93% of the time, representing a significant improvement since electronic pitch-tracking was instituted in 2008. What explains the improvement? That’s simple: umpires started bearing down once they knew that their mistakes could be recorded and compiled. In 2008, strikes were called correctly about 84% of the time, which, as someone who has watched too many games to count, surprises me not at all.

Even 93% is unacceptable. It means that there is a wrong call once every 3.6 plate appearances, and any one of those mistakes could change the game’s outcome. Usually it’s impossible to tell when it has, because the missed call was part of a chaos-driven sequence diverging from the chain of events that may have flowed from the right call in ways that can’t possibly be determined after the fact. Sometimes it is obvious, as in several games I’ve seen this season. An umpire calls what was clearly strike three a ball, and the lucky batter hits a home run on the next pitch.

Before every game was televised with slo-mo technology and replays, this didn’t hurt the game or the perception of its integrity because there was no record of the mistakes. (Sometimes it wasn’t even a mistake: umpires would punish batters for complaining about their pitch-calling by deliberately declaring them out on strikes on pitches outside the strike zone.) Now, however, a missed strike call that determines a game is both infuriating and inexcusable. As with bad out calls on the bases and missed home run calls, the technology exists to fix the problem.

Baseball only installed a replay challenge system after the worst scenario for a missed call: a perfect game—no hits, runs or base-runners—was wiped out by a terrible safe call at first on what should have been the last out of the game. The game was on national TV; the missed call was indisputable. That clinched it, and a replay challenge system was quickly instituted. I long assumed that robo-umps would only be instituted after an obviously terrible strike call changed the course of a World Series or play-off game, embarrassing Major League Baseball. For once, the sport isn’t waiting for that horse to leave before fixing the barn door. It has been testing an automated balls and strikes system (ABS) in the minor leagues for several years now. Good. That means that some kind of automated ball and strike system is inevitable.

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