We've got stamina

[dolorosa_12]

Just a short post with two videos to start off the weekend.

Via a recent roundup of fanworks on ladybusiness, I came across this fanvid from a couple of years ago by runawaynun. It's called 'Stamina' and is a compilation of different women competing in different sports across the ages.

Watch it here.

As a former gymnast, all of the gymnasts in the video were familiar to me (although I would really quibble with including Kerri Strug's vault which won the US women's team the gold medal in Atlanta in a compilation of triumphant moments in women's sport; my opinion of that situation is basically, fuck the Károlyis), and the whole thing is just really well put together, and made me quite weepy.

The last concert I was able to attend was a fantastic weird little gig in a former metalworks turned goth club in Islington, in December last year. It was very much to my taste: just me, Matthias, and a handful of aging goths being screamed at by a tiny Swedish woman dressed in sunglasses and pleather. One of the songs she played has now been released as a single, and I have been playing it a lot today.

Watch on YouTube

Courage, courage, courage.

Comments

[kore]

That vid is FANTASTIC, I just watched it like 3 x in a row (and left a comment!).

[dolorosa_12]

Isn't it just staggeringly good? I think my only quibble would be that it's missing Cathy Freeman, but my impression is that the vid creator is an American, so may not have been aware of the symbolic significance of an Indigenous Australian woman winning the 400m race at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 (the last Olympics of her career and her last chance to win an elusive gold medal; I still remember watching the event on TV as a fifteen-year-old and getting genuine chills down my spine when she stepped out onto the track, the green, gold and white of her full-body hooded lycra running suit in contrast to the night sky, and the calm way she moved through the air as the race progressed).

I should leave a comment too. I always feel weird about doing so on old posts.

[lirazel]

As a fellow Tennessee girl, I got a little teary-eyed about Pat Summitt at the end. And I'm not a sports fan (figure skating and rhythmic gymnastics aside), but this made me want to read biographies of every single one of those women.

my opinion of that situation is basically, fuck the Károlyis

SAME. I distinctly remember watching it happen as a kid and being totally confused about why she needed to compete when she was hurt.

[dolorosa_12]

I'd never even heard of her before seeing the video, but she sounds like an amazing person.

I'm not really a sports fan either, partly because of the way Australians are about sport (which is a whole other blog post that I may write at some point), apart from gymnastics. But my husband is a huge, huge sports fan (of women's and men's sports) and I guess some of it has rubbed off on me. Certainly I can appreciate that video, which made me very weepy, and, like you, made me want to read about all the women featured in the video. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of sports and politics (particularly during the Cold War), which it appears featured in a lot of those women's experiences.

Women's gymnasstics is so, so messed up, and the US women's gymnastics team has had some truly awful coaches over the years. I don't think I actually watched that particular Olympics team event live (although weirdly, my gym coach in the last few years that I was a gymnast actually competed for the Australian women's team in Atlanta), but I remember hearing about it later and being completely appalled. The truly messed up thing is that even without Strug's second vault the US team would have won!