Androgens And Women

So far this year England have won everything possible. In March ?and in Australia ?they took the ICC Women’s World Cup, then last month they swept more or less all before them in the ICC World Twenty20, and only a rainy day stopped a whitewash of Australia in their one-day international series, which finished at Lord’s this week.

On the back of that 4? win, England moved on to Worcester in buoyant mood. Their captain Charlotte Edwards, recently awarded an MBE for her services to cricket, is confident of retaining the Ashes after winning at Bowral in 2008 ?and the city is keen to see them back.

Four years ago, after 42 years of waiting, England reclaimed the Ashes at New Road and yesterday the head of England Women’s Cricket, Clare Connor, said they were thrilled to be back. “The memories of regaining the Ashes at Worcester in 2005 are still very powerful for many of the players who played in that dramatic series,” said Connor before the team paraded their silverware through the city’s shopping center. “I am sure the players will be buoyed by those memories.”

Yesterday’s parade ended with a date with the mayor, and the Worcestershire Cricket Board, keen to stimulate grassroots interest in girls’ cricket across the counties of Hereford and Worcestershire, is planning a series of on site activities throughout the match.

For a start, the players will get a guard of honor before play each day of play. Other activities will occur throughout the match, the neighboring King’s School playing fields being pressed into use, and the ECB’s Cricket Factory used to test and develop skills in children on Sunday and Monday with entry free.

On the field, England will be looking to maintain the upper hand they have had over Australia for most of the summer and the weather forecast looks like being kind this time. On Tuesday persistent rain in London scuppered England’s chances of whitewashing Australia in the one-day series after their bowlers had restricted Australia to 100 for seven in a shortened game at Lord’s. England went into the final match with a 4? lead ?the last two wins being last-ball finishes ?but their chase of a modest total was cut short in the third over.

At New Road they are likely to be confronted by the kind of slow pitch that resulted in the England Lions and Australia wrestling each other to a standstill when they met last week, only Steve Harmison finding the hostility England’s women have had in abundance this year.

“It is absolutely terrific,” Matthew said. “I never thought I could come back, play as well as I have done and win. It feels amazing. My initial thought was just to make the cut here.”

The professional from North Berwick was back on the practice range five weeks after the arrival of her new baby, Sophie, and inexplicably discovered she was in the form of her life.

Only two other mothers, Nancy Lopez and Juli Inkster, have won majors since 1960. Matthew finished third and second in the two events that followed the birth of her first child; the mechanics of baby delivery have surely never before featured in a champion’s press conference and are unlikely to again. No epidural was required, Matthew very kindly volunteered.

“It was a four-hour labor second time around, very speedy,” she explained. “I didn’t really take medical advice after that. I was just told to get back playing as soon as I felt able; after eight or nine weeks I was back to normal.”

Matthew, three shots clear before a ball was struck, was never overhauled at the top of the leader board despite finding parts of the course she had not encountered earlier in the competition. A one-over-par 73 proved sufficient, victory claimed by the same margin that she held at the start of the day.

There was the added intrigue of her playing partner, Christina Kim, whose madcap antics kept spectators laughing and Matthew ?a softly-spoken and essentially low-key sort ?probably wishing she had a set of ear plugs to hand despite her later assertions to the contrary. “Christina was fantastic, she was egging me on the whole way round.”

There was no need for the BBC to provide a description of Kim’s play ?she offers a far more impressive running commentary on her own than Peter Alliss could reasonably muster.

Supermum, as Matthew has been branded on account of this showing on the Lancashire coast, did not succeed without the odd wobble. Two dropped shots in her opening three holes had doubters believing external factors had caught up with her at last. Another bogey at the 10th, combined with the imposing figures of Karrie Webb and Paula Creamer in the background, threatened to derail Matthew’s epic bid altogether.

Three successive birdies from the 13th to the 15th restored the 39-year-old’s position. By her last hole Matthew had the cushion of three shots and could savor every moment before returning a three-under aggregate score. “There was a tear in my eye at that point,” she said. “I knew after my tee shot on 18 that I had won.”

It would be stretching matters to compare Matthew’s success in relative terms to what the 59-year-old Tom Watson would have achieved had he won the Open Championship at Turnberry last month. There is much greater strength in depth in the men’s professional game than exists in the women’s.

Looking as fit as ever, after putting herself through an intensive seven-month training program, the 26-year-old will play Marion Bartoli of France in the first round of the WTA event here, before going on to Toronto next week and then the US Open. She will then evaluate what she needs to do to regain her former glory or, perhaps, better it.

It is difficult to know if Clijsters will have the motivation to challenge for the top ranking, a feat she achieved for the first time in 2003. However, if she can stay fit she has the talent, power and athleticism to add to the one grand slam title she won before her retirement, the US Open in 2005.

“Obviously that’s something that any athlete [wants], especially when you’ve been there,” Clijsters said. “I won’t be happy just hanging around the 100 spot in the world. It’s not that I am aiming for numbers, but you aim for those big matches and give yourself opportunities to play those big players and hopefully you win.”

Getting into shape was her toughest challenge. The tennis skills came back to her more quickly than she expected but fitness and movement took time. Perversely, however, the rigors of pregnancy and having the time to really train have convinced Clijsters that she may return a better player than before.

“Physically, I wanted to work on a few things and I have improved those things a lot, so I assume that they can help me out there on the court,” she said. “I think also mentally having gone through these last two years I think you grow as a person and I hope that’s something that’s going to help me out there. Now I have done a lot of things that I never really worked on when I was playing, and never even had a chance to. That’s something that I find very important.”

Her return is a boost for the women’s tour. Serena Williams holds three grand slam titles and yet Dinara Safina is world No1. Since the retirement of that other Belgian, Justine Henin, no one has dominated. Could Clijsters be the savior? “No, I don’t feel that way,” she said. “I’m happy they think about me and look at me in that way but it’s not something that I am worried about when I am out there playing. I am doing this for myself and my group of people, and the fans.”

Clijsters quit in May 2007, having struggled with wrist, hip and back problems. In her time away she married the American basket baller Brian Lynch and in February 2008 she gave birth to a daughter, Jada. Had it not been for a call from the All England Club in January, she may never have returned. But once she began training for an exhibition event, alongside Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and Tim Henman, to test the new roof over Center Court, she realized she still had something to offer, even if she kept her thoughts to herself for a while. “I was very certain that this is what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know, ‘is this a fling, is this something’?” she said. “In ten days’ is it still going to be there? And it was.”

Evonne Goolagong was the last mother to win a grand slam, at Wimbledon in 1980, but at 26 Clijsters has time on her side. She intends to play for a “few more years”. “I do have a long-term plan. It’s not that now I have a [retirement] date set ?I follow my feelings and that’s I guess what I will do. My feeling that I am going to retire after the US Open is not there, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

The decision, announced by the IOC president, Jacques Rogge, following a meeting of the executive board in Berlin, means that the Olympics in London will be the first to feature women and men competing in all of the sports.

Women will be able to box alongside men for the first time since the activity was included as a demonstration sport in 1904. Savannah Marshall and Nicola Adams are two of the British female boxers who could now become household names.

Despite its history dating back to the 1720s, women’s boxing has never been included in the full Olympic program. Today’s change has been hailed by boxing authorities, who said concerns about competitiveness and health issues had been disproved once and for all.

Rogge, a former doctor for the sport, said: “Boxing was the only sport with no women included. The sport has progressed a tremendous amount in the last five years and it is about time to include it in the games.”

The sport was rejected for inclusion in the Olympics in 2005, largely due to concerns about the standard of competition internationally.

But following a concerted push by the International Boxing Association, there are now more than 500,000 licensed women boxers across 120 countries. The Amateur Boxing Association of England voted to lift a 116-year ban on women’s boxing in 1996 and the number of boxers licensed by it has grown from 50 in 2005 to 642 in 2009. Those figures do not include women who box for fitness and who do not fight competitively.

Proponents of the sport, who say female boxers are more technical in style than their male counterparts, are keen to point out the distinction between amateur boxing, with its fewer rounds and more protection, and the professional sport.

“It’s a bit like fencing with gloves on. It’s technical and it’s tactical,” said Rebecca Gibson, the national women’s boxing development manager at the Amateur Boxing Association of England. “The girls who box are from very diverse backgrounds, from those using it as a way out of crime, to navy officers.”

The decision was also welcomed by campaigners for gender equality who said it was an important staging post towards their ultimate aim of redressing the Olympic gender imbalance that sees men competing for 38 more medals than women.

Sue Tibballs, chief executive of the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, said the inclusion of boxing could help provide the sorts of role models that might boost participation among young women and address the drop-off in activity among teenage girls.

The decision means that the governing body’s campaign for equality in men’s and women’s track cycling events ?there are seven men’s and three women’s events ?is almost certainly doomed to failure.

British Cycling began lobbying for parity after the Beijing Games, where the female sprinter Pendleton had only one opportunity to win a gold medal while her male counterpart, Chris Hoy, had three. “There isn’t a reason why we shouldn’t have the same number of events as the men,” said Pendleton, the gold medalist in the sprint. The campaign won the backing of the Olympics minister Tessa Jowell, who is expected to meet IOC president Jacques Rogge this weekend in Berlin.

But the IOC said requests for new events by cycling, swimming and wrestling “could happen, especially if the new events increase the participation of women at the Games” though only “on condition that they replace events already on the program”.

In other words, additional women’s events can only be included at the expense of existing men’s events to avoid adding to the overall number of athletes competing ?a compromise that British Cycling, and the International Cycling Union (UCI), both seem opposed to.

“We would be very concerned about the possibility of the loss of any men’s events,” said the British Cycling president, Brian Cookson. “The IOC should think very carefully before reducing any men’s events.” The IOC’s solution, added Cookson, represented “a very unsatisfactory conclusion” to the campaign for equality. “Longer term our objective is for equality in men’s and women’s events,” he said. “Now the onus seems to be on the sport to lose events, but that’s not what we were looking for. There can be equality [in the number of events] without increasing the number of athletes.”

Pat McQuaid, the UCI president, suggested that the cycling events would stay as they were. “Firstly we’d have to sit down with the IOC and see how they expect us to achieve [increased female participation],” McQuaid told Cycling Weekly.

The UCI came under fire after the Athens Games for dropping the men’s kilometre and women’s 500m time-trials to include BMX, and McQuaid hinted that it would be reluctant to scrap another discipline. “It would be very difficult to change anything. It wouldn’t take away from the sporting [spectacle] to have more women’s events, but it would be of serious detriment to the sport if we had to take away from the men’s programme; there’d be ramifications all round.”

Campaigners who had welcomed yesterday’s inclusion of women’s boxing in the 2012 games said the decision not to add any more women’s events unless categories for the men were dropped was a setback. “If the IOC were committed to helping the international federations make progress, it would be helpful if they could be more flexible,” said Sue Tibballs, chief executive of the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation. “It signals there is more to be done to persuade the IOC this is critical for their reputation.”