Last week, Flame Bearers, a media outlet that tells the stories of women athletes’ lived experiences, presented the webinar “Who Gets to Compete in Winter Sports?” As the Olympic Winter Games take place in Italy, there are not a lot of Black athletes. The seven Black women on the U.S. team are Elana Meyers Taylor, Jasmine Jones, Kaysha Love and Azaria Hill (bobsled), Mystique Ro (skeleton), Laila Edwards (ice hockey) and Erin Jackson (speed skating).
Dr. Ketra L. Armstrong, director of the Center for Race & Ethnicity in Sport at the University of Michigan, moderated a panel focused on the lack of diversity in winter sports that featured two-time Olympic figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité of France, and Summer and Winter Olympian Dr. Seun Adigun of Nigeria.
“We know that there are some laudable promises and possibilities that inspire us when we watch the Olympics,” said Armstrong. “But we also know that there are some perils.”
With Méité (2014, ’18) not currently competing, and the retirement of Vanessa James, who represented France in 2010, ’14 and ’18 and Canada in ’22, there are no Black skaters in this year’s figure skating competition — the first time since 2002.
“The cost of the sports is one of the factors that definitely enters into play. The other factor would be if we’re talking about Caribbean or African countries, they might not have the climate for the sports, so [athletes] would have to travel somewhere else,” said Méité, who encouraged people to think creatively.
After competing in the hurdles at the 2012 Olympics, Adigun decided to make history for Nigeria by qualifying for the 2018 Winter Olympics. “Allow yourself to dream,” she said. Based in Houston, Texas, Adigun, a chiropractor and sports biomechanist, built a bobsled team with fellow track athletes of Nigerian heritage, raising the funds and finding training facilities.
“We are missing infrastructures that support these countries that are underrepresented or these athletes that are underrepresented. The infrastructure not only relies on the national federations, meaning the countries themselves, but it also relies on the international federations, which means international sporting bodies. How do we actually make room for these underrepresented countries to be represented?” added Adigun, who noted the need to examine where the disconnects are, as well as to expand education about winter sports in Black communities.
In her fifth Olympics, Meyers Taylor won the gold medal in the monobob, her first gold and sixth overall medal. The two-woman bobsled begins tomorrow. The medal games in ice hockey are today.
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