Episode 130: NWSL season takeaways, Houston Astros and domestic violence, and weightlifter Kate Nye
This week Lindsay, Brenda, and Jess chat about the NBA's return before discussing takeaways from the 2019 NWSL season (6:29) and addressing everything that happened in the World Series surrounding the Houston Astros and domestic violence (21:49).
Then, Jessica interviews weightlifting champion Kate Nye. (36:13)
As always, we will throw some stuff on the Burn Pile (50:39) and shout out some Bad Ass Women. (1:00:06)
Links
Sign up for Lindsay’s new newsletter Power Plays! https://www.powerplays.news/
You’d Love to See It: 16 Things We’re Hoping for This NBA Season: https://www.theringer.com/nba/2019/10/23/20927444/sixteen-things-love-to-see-nba-2019-zion-williamson-ben-simmons
Our Predictions for the New N.B.A. Season: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/sports/basketball/nba-predictions-season.html
NWSL to Add Expansion Franchise in Louisville, Kentucky: https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/10/23/sports/soccer/22reuters-soccer-usa.html
NWSL's 'Best XI' Leaves Just About Everyone Flummoxed and Enraged: https://www.si.com/soccer/2019/10/25/nwsl-best-xi-reaction-players
What the Future Holds for NWSL–and U.S. Soccer's Involvement in the League: https://www.si.com/soccer/2019/10/24/nwsl-future-expansion-player-signings-us-soccer
Sam Kerr named MVP of US Women's Soccer League: https://wwos.nine.com.au/football/kerr-named-mvp-of-us-women-s-soccer-league/1a11b0df-bd4f-404b-935a-9f9310704910
Budweiser Launches Campaign To Find New NWSL Sponsors: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristidosh/2019/10/24/budweiser-launches-campaign-to-find-new-nwsl-sponsors/#569fff13650e
How the NWSL’s partnership with Octagon could maximize its current opportunity for growth: https://theathletic.com/1311997/2019/10/21/how-the-nwsls-partnership-with-octagon-could-maximize-its-current-opportunity-for-growth/
Astros Staffer's Outburst at Female Reporters Illustrates MLB's Forgive-and-Forget Attitude Toward Domestic Violence: https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/10/22/houston-astros-roberto-osuna-suspension
Astros Drop Failed Smear Campaign Against Sports Illustrated, MLB Picks It Up: https://deadspin.com/astros-drop-failed-smear-campaign-against-sports-illust-1839269728
Astros Fire Brandon Taubman, Now Need To Fire Whoever Smeared Stephanie Apstein [Update]: https://deadspin.com/astros-fire-brandon-taubman-now-need-to-fire-whoever-s-1839336722
Como Park girls' soccer players targets of racial abuse in Mahtomedi: https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/como-park-girls-soccer-players-targets-of-racial-abuse-in-mahtomedi
MLB Umpire Rob Drake Is Prepared To Shoot People In Defense Of Donald Trump [Update]: https://deadspin.com/mlb-umpire-rob-drake-is-prepared-to-shoot-people-in-def-1839307670
Jess Zaiss Becomes First Woman to Finish Two Ironmans in One Weekend https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a29539008/jess-zaiss-first-woman-finish-back-to-back-ironmans/
Maggie Guterl Is First Woman to Win Big’s Backyard Ultra: https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a29537534/bigs-backyard-ultra-2019/
Spanish women footballers vote to strike over pay: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50152143
Burlington girls soccer team stands for #equalpay — and gets carded: https://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/sports/high-school/2019/10/19/burlington-girls-soccer-team-stands-equalpay-and-gets-carded/4028291002/
Burlington girls soccer team kicks equal pay into worldwide spotlight: https://middleburycampus.com/46950/local/burlington-girls-soccer-team-kicks-equal-pay-into-worldwide-spotlight/
Gone in seven seconds: 'Spiderwoman' breaks women's climbing speed record: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/oct/21/gone-in-seven-seconds-spiderwoman-breaks-womens-climbing-speed-record
Transcript
Lindsay: Hello, hello, hello, flamethrowers. Lindsay Gibbs here. Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I am so excited to be back this week and to be your captain for the episode. Joining me from Austin, Texas, the fabulous Jessica Luther, freelance sports reporter. Hi, Jess.
Jessica: Hi, Lindsay!-
Lindsay: And from New York, probably with some birds chirping around her, because that's what happens to her, is Professor Brenda Elsey, associate professor at Hofstra University. Hi, Bren.
Brenda: Hi.
Lindsay: Any birds chirping today?
Brenda: Chirp, chirp.
Lindsay: Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp.
Brenda: It's actually raining today, but you make me sound like Snow White with the birds following me wherever I go, which is such a happy thought.
Lindsay: That's how I picture you now, ever since that one episode where I was like, "Is that birds chirping?"
Brenda: I do live in the beautiful Hudson Valley, so.
Jessica: So a lot of birds love you.
Lindsay: Okay. Today I'm very excited about this episode. We're going to talk a little NBA return at the top of the show. We're going to talk state of the National Women's Soccer League because they have just, by the time you hear this, wrapped up their season. We're going to talk, as I'm sure a lot of you are expecting, what has been going on with the Houston Astros and domestic violence in baseball this week. Then Jessica is going to interview weightlifter Kate Nye, who recently won three gold medals in the women's 71 kilogram weight class at the 2019 IWF Championships. They're going to talk about her transition from gymnastics to weightlifting, why gymnasts make such great weightlifters, and why she is going up in weight classes for the Olympics.
Whew. I'm excited about this show. First of all, though, basketball didn't return this week because as we have covered all summer, basketball has been here. It never went anywhere. The WNBA was in action, but the NBA did get back in action officially this week. Did anyone see anything they enjoyed? Brenda, anything going on in New York?
Brenda: Well, actually, I'm from Detroit and, yeah, they played the 76ers and it wasn't good. You know it's pretty pathetic when the highlight is Blake’s free throws for losing! It's like you know as soon as you see that in a sports reporter's tweets and headlines…If you didn't see the game, it was high-scoring and exciting and Derrick Rose showed up, but I'm not feeling too optimistic about that.
Lindsay: Yeah. I think that's fair. Jess, anything stand out to you?
Jessica: Yeah, I was wondering when I, I haven't actually seen a game yet, which is a normal thing for me with the NBA. But when I was prepping for this and I was reading around, I was kind of wondering, and Lindsay, I wanted to get your thoughts on this. It feels like this is a really not east coast league these days. I feel like I was reading about the Warriors and are they going to be good enough and the Clippers and the Lakers and the Suns and the Nuggets and then you have the Bucks, and I just was like, I mean, the New York Times, they did a preview thing and they all wanted to say something about the Knicks. But then the Knicks went out and lost their first three games. So it just feels to me like it's out west now, the NBA. That that's where everything is, I don't know.
Lindsay: The western conference has always been the tougher conference, or for the past few decades. I mean, maybe not decades, but, you know. The western conference. But I think in the east coast right now, I mean, I think it's tough because it's like, you know, Lebron James. You have the Clippers and the Lakers who have all the star power this year. The Clippers look so good. And then you still have the Warriors, who are still super intriguing, so those are three of the most intriguing teams, and yeah, they are all on the west coast, which is really just, the timezone is just very rude for me. I would like to go to bed early, thank you very much. I'm not thrilled about it. But, I mean, look, the Celtics are going to be plenty intriguing this year as always. The Nets, Kyrie Irving.
Jessica: Yeah. That's huge.
Lindsay: What, like 50 points in his debut?
Jessica: They still lost, though.
Lindsay: It's the first game! You can't really get up in arms about wins and losses at this point!
Jessica: Oh, okay.
Brenda: Fifty points and you still lose!
Lindsay: It's not ideal, okay! It's not ideal. But you've got the 76ers, of course-
Jessica: Yeah, of course. Absolutely.
Lindsay: ... who are going to be really intriguing and of course we have to mention Zion Williamson, who not really east coast, of the New Orleans, so closer over here, but closer than California, but he's out six to eight weeks with an injury, which is a terrible way to start the season. But luckily for them, the NBA season is very long, so we will still hopefully get plenty of good Zion. But yeah, I'm excited. Honestly, I love the NBA, and as much as I get on my high horse and wag my finger at all the ‘basketball is back’ people, I'm still very excited. The NBA is here.
All right. So while there's been a lot of talk about the World Series, which we will get to later in the show, there's another big championship happening. Big playoffs in the championship that's been happening, and that's in the National Women's Soccer League. We obviously talked a lot about women's soccer for the World Cup earlier this year, but Brenda, can you kind of get us started talking about the state of things in the NWSL?
Brenda: Yeah. We're recording this on Sunday, October 27th, which is the day that the final will be played, later today between the North Carolina Courage and the Chicago Red Stars. Lindsay will for sure be doing a Hot Take, so look out, that's probably already up if you're hearing this by now. The championships, in terms of this show right now that we're talking about, can be a place or a jumping off point to talk about the year. I remember when we started, we have several episodes that were discussing the issues facing NWSL at the beginning of the season. A couple exciting things. I mean, the finals sold out in North Carolina, so yay. Nice to see people getting there, getting their butts in the seats. There are some other things that happened at the beginning of the season. There was a rupture with Lifetime, which we talked about on the show, and some people had, immediately it looked like that was a bad thing and just as quickly, a bunch of people close to NWSL had said, "Maybe not so much. Hold on. Wait." And they did end up snagging a deal with ESPN, which was, I think, most people would consider pretty positive. They also signed on Budweiser as a sponsor, notwithstanding my distaste for that beer, is probably a good thing.
Lindsay: They didn't consult you on that, Bren?
Brenda: No. I mean, Bud's gross! Come on. Everybody knows that. We live in the time of, I don't know, more complicated beer.
Lindsay: I know, but sometimes, something light is just what you need. I actually had Bud Light the other night, and I was like, "You know what? This goes down easily." I was happy.
Brenda: Yeah, I guess so…
Lindsay: Jess! Do you have any beer opinions you want to share?
Jessica: I have so many, but not anything relevant to this?
Brenda: Okay. Well, anyway. Then there was the issue of the Women's World Cup and if the Women's World Cup and the US Women's teams win, would buoy the league and what that would mean for the league. I would just like to say Crystal Dunn had an amazing presser the other day, discussing how hard the women who work on the US women's team have had to work and play and play and play without a break, which was a really interesting insight into the NWSL schedule and those players whose salaries are buffered by playing for the national team. That's great, but that's also a very trying season.
I guess the only thing I want to say about technical things, because we're not breaking anything down or players that are interesting for me, is I'm so excited, no one will be surprised, to see Debinha playing better and better and better. I absolutely love her. I've loved her for years. I was disappointed in her World Cup. She was disappointed in her World Cup. She just didn't finish, she couldn't finish, and she's just looked great. For the Courage, Crystal Dunn is such a workhorse. It is the case that Tierna Davidson, the defender from the Red Stars, is out. Debinha should take advantage. So that'll be really interesting, but then, Sam Kerr, Sam Kerr, Sam Kerr for the Red Stars. I know this is coming after and I don't want to do a bunch of that, but those are players that have been amazing all season and are worth everyone taking a look at. That's my intro.
Lindsay: That's your intro. All right. Jess.
Jessica: Yeah. We're at such an interesting moment with the NWSL. I mean, I feel like we say that a lot, but the World Cup was huge this year in a way that, I mean, it's the hugest so far and it was particularly big here in the US with not just the women's team playing really well and winning, but just all the talk around it. And so they've had, their attendance has gone up. We've seen these all these matches, we keep talking about them, that are getting sold out even in bigger stadiums than we've ever seen. They've just announced that they're going to expand to Louisville in 2021, but then I read that they're possibly going to expand to a new team next year and they just haven't announced it yet, where that will be. Maybe Sacramento or Atlanta, which, I think Atlanta would be a particularly interesting place based on everything that's happened with the MLS team there.
And then I think all the stuff around sponsorship, I know we all just made fun of Budweiser or not, but Budweiser has been really interesting because they came on, I think, right after the World Cup, and they were putting out major ads around that time, but now they've done this entire new campaign just to push for more sponsors. They call it the “Future Official” campaign and they are talking about how they're their official beer and that there's space for the official timepiece, the official restaurant, the official deodorant, and they've made these ads where it's Rapinoe wearing a watch that's just all green and it's like, "You could be here." Right? Trying to get other corporate sponsors to buy in, to say we're in this for real and you should be too, that this is a good investment. And then on top of that, the NWSL's hired Octagon, which is a branding company, that are working to do their media rights and it just feels like there's so much momentum, but I don't know a lot about this, so I was hoping maybe one of you two does. The NWSL's about to change radically its relationship with US Soccer, correct? And I don't understand exactly how that's going to impact. So everything feels very exciting and very momentum-forward, and then I'm just wondering what the US Soccer part of this will mean as their contract is ending and will change.
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot up in the air, as there always with these situations, but the biggest thing is that, yeah, they want to move it to more where NWSL owners are having a little bit more, I guess you could say skin in the game, a little bit more control over things, as opposed to US Soccer. It does seem like US Soccer is still going to be a part of things and is still going to help with the US Women's National team's salaries, which is obviously a big thing, but what we are seeing, though, is there's a big problem right now, which is that, and we see this with the WNBA too, right? The United States, we are tied to this salary cap structure of sports teams, which is really weird, because we're not supposed to like anything against capitalism and yet when it comes to things like that, you know what I mean?
Jessica: Yeah. Labor of athletes.
Brenda: Yeah.
Lindsay: Right. When it comes to labor of athletes, and especially when it comes to paying women's athletes, all of a sudden, the free market disappears and it's just like they should be grateful for whatever they can get. So they're having this situation. Sam Kerr was just named MVP of the league again. We've talked about how fabulous she is on the show, but Sam Kerr is not American, which means she does not get the big subsidized salary from the US Soccer Federation that helps her NWSL salary, which means I think she's only making like $42,000 in the NWSL this year, which is just mind-boggling. So she has European clubs who want to pay her like a million dollars and can't under their models. There does seem to be some optimism that some of the compensation structures are going to be able to be more flexible going forward into next season to find a way to keep stars like Sam Kerr in the league, which I think is pivotal for its future.
I think Crystal Dunn had a great quote in media day. She said, "I'm sick of being the," She didn't say, "I'm sick of," but she said, "Yes, we want to be the most competitive league, but we should also strive to be the most professional league." And it's really time for the NWSL to take steps towards that. But overall, I want to kind of be optimistic for one second before we start laughing at the Best XI list, which we need to, is that we've seen so much more growth in 2019 after the World Cup versus 2015 after the World Cup. And the thing is, the NWSL office wasn't that much more ready for this World Cup than they were for the one four years ago.
Jessica: Yeah. That's a good point.
Lindsay: Their communication staff was gutted after the split with Lifetime. They still don't have a commissioner. There's a lot of, they didn't have a communications director for most of the year. However the league still grew, and I think that just shows you how much time and patience matter. Yeah, it was better in year seven than it was in year three, even though things are still far from perfect. So that, to me, gave me hope despite the dysfunction behind the scenes. Brenda, you want to talk USSF? And then Jess, I'll let you talk the Best XI.
Brenda: No, I just want to put on the table, I read the same thing where the nine owners of NWSL are considering, quote, “breaking with US Soccer Federation” and I don't know what that means. All the European leagues are still under their federations in UEFA.
Lindsay: They're not breaking fully. They're just trying to get, I think, more control over the thing.
Brenda: Right. So I'll just be really interested to see how that unfolds, but just to be really exact about it, it can't break from US Soccer Federation in terms of following its regulations, its rules. Right. So I just wanted to be clear about “breaking” because a lot of the news stories have been like, "They will now be completely private entities." They are, for all intents and purposes, totally private entities. It's just like Barcelona still falls under La Liga and Spanish Federation.
Lindsay: Right.
Brenda: So a lot of people just, when they write about it, I find it funky. Unfortunately, for good or bad, there's no breaking with your overlords.
Jessica: Right. It does seem like control over decisions about pay and stuff like that is what the owners want.
Brenda: Right. And it seems also marketing and that promotion aspect, which will be really interesting, because that's the one thing for me that strikes me as really weird in the relationship between the professional league and the federation. That's very strange. It's very unique to the US that they have a role in that at all. So just throwing that out there for perspective.
Lindsay: All right. Absolutely. Jess, can we now laugh?
Jessica: Yeah. Yes. They released the NWSL Best XI, the first and second teams, and I just want to say right up front, one of the things that, I mean, there's so much baffling about it, but the way that it's voted on, fans only get 20% of the vote. And then the media 20%, players 40, owners, GMs, and coaches another 20. And on some level, it would make sense to me that this would happen if the fans had way more say, but it was basically the US National Women's Team’s popular players who barely played in the NWSL are ending up first team or some on the second team. So for example, my favorite one, and I'm just going to lead with it so I get to say it, is that Rose Lavalle-
Lindsay: Oh, darn.
Jessica: ... she only played in six games and-
Lindsay: Rose Lavelle.
Jessica: Lavelle. And so she barely played in the NWSL and she made it and her own mother tweeted that she didn't even vote for Rose. I mean, Brenda's already talked about Debinha, but she was left off both and she was an MVP candidate. A lot of the players spoke out. There is a serious edge to this, the credibility of the league when they can't recognize the actual players who are sustaining the league during World Cup years where a lot of the US women's team were not there, but it is so ridiculous who actually made these teams based on who was playing.
Lindsay: Yeah. It's absolutely absurd. They should really scrap the whole thing and redo it, because nobody, and we're talking players who made it on the list are like, "This is wrong." You know what I mean?
Jessica: Yes.
Lindsay: Nobody is happy about this. And nobody's saying the players who made it are bad players.
Jessica: No!
Lindsay: It just doesn't make sense for this season and for the way things went. For me, it does exacerbate something that we see in women's, I know we see it in men's sports, too, but I'm talking women's sports here. You know, the fact that it's so easy to latch onto superstars and since women's sports gets so little coverage, all of that gets soaked up into the superstars, and that's it. And there's no other…I talk about this in tennis a lot, I love Serena Williams, obviously. Love, love, love, love Serena Williams. But there's a whole WTA tour, you know what I mean? And Serena doesn't exist if she doesn't have opponents to play and people to beat and they're stars, too. There has to be some attention that can go elsewhere and I think we've seen years in tennis where people voted Serena the best player of the year even though she's only won, like, one tournament. And it's like, yes, that's not how this is supposed to work. Playing counts for a lot. Actually being there. It has to. These aren’t all lifetime achievement awards. So yeah. It's ridiculous, it's sad, but it's also really funny.
Brenda: Also, though, welcome to soccer awards, US. I'm also delighted by all the pushback. I thought it was actually really positive, because I feel like there was a couple times, like remember when Sam Kerr got totally passed over for the ballon d’or and there was all these funky things. Anyway, I just kind of thought the one thing that heartened me was all the pushback and all the discussion and then it prompted all these conversations on Twitter about who people would put. I really enjoyed that. I was really getting a kick out of it. Just to throw that out there. And Crystal Dunn, I think her quote was literally, "No human being is happy about that list." It was sort of positive, I felt like, to hear the community cackle and go at it.
Lindsay: All right. A topic I think nobody is surprised we are diving into on Burn It All Down is what's been going on at the World Series, particularly with the Houston Astros. Jess, I know you have a few things to say.
Jessica: Well, I want everyone to bear with me as I lay out what exactly happened. Two Saturdays ago, October 19th, the Astros beat the Yankees on a José Altuve walk-off homer to clinch the ALCS pennant and book their ticket to the World Series and they're up against the Washington Nationals. But that night, the night that the Astros beat the Yankees, in the clubhouse, according to a whole host of reporters, but first reported by Sports Illustrated's Stephanie Apstein, some slimy shit went down. I'm just going to quote Apstein. She wrote, quote, "In the center of the room, Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman turned to a group of three female reporters, including one wearing a purple domestic violence awareness bracelet, and yelled half a dozen times, 'Thank God we got Osuna. I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna.' The outburst was offensive and frightening enough that another Houston staffer apologized."
Okay. "Why Osuna?" You might ask. It wasn't because of how he had played in the game that night. He had given up the game-tying home run. He's a pitcher. He had given up the game-tying home run and it was Altuve's home run that saved the Astros. It was because in 2018, while a member of the Toronto Bluejays, Osuna reportedly assaulted the mother of his child. While she returned to Mexico and the legal case ended, as often happens in cases of domestic violence, the MLB investigated and found that Osuna had violated the league's domestic violence policy and they suspended him 75 games. Osuna didn't appeal. Most teams wouldn't touch him, but the Astros saw him as a “distressed asset.” I have seen that phrase so many times this week.
Osuna is a very good closing pitcher with a lot of bad PR, but a great price tag at that point. The team made lip service at the time about second chances, zero tolerance policies, and the owner donated a fraction of what they paid Osuna to some organizations working on domestic violence. And now, an assistant GM targeted a female reporter in the locker room because apparently, and this has come out over and over again, he didn't like that she would tweet out the number for a domestic violence hotline whenever Osuna would enter a game that season. He had complained to higher-ups or something like that about this.
Okay. So that happened and that was bad. And then the Astros handled all of this as badly as you could handle this. They immediately put out a statement. I mean, what, within 30 minutes or something. They immediately put out a statement not denying this happened, but saying Apstein had gotten the context wrong, that Taubman was supporting the player during an interview and called her story a “fabrication.” It turns out the only fabrication was SI's version of events. Osuna later said that he wasn't even in the room at the time. Reporters other than the three women corroborated Apstein's reporting. Taubman, a former Wall Street dude who worked for Ernst & Young, put out a statement where he referred to himself as a husband and father, said he was just over-exuberant, and ended it with the greatest non-apology conditional. Quote, "I am sorry if anyone was offended by my actions."
Then the Astros' GM, Jeff Luhnow, said, quote, "What we really don't know is the intent behind the inappropriate comments he made. We may never know that, because the person who said them and the people who heard them, at least up to this point, have different perspectives." Which is like, no, Jeff, we know the intent. We all know it. In the meantime, the Astros lost the first two games of the World Series, both in Houston, the second one 12 to 3. Taubman was fired after that one, supposedly because, quote, "his conduct does not reflect the values of our organization." They apologized to Apstein in the statement where they fired him, but not for calling her a liar. They lumped her in with, quote, "all individuals who witnessed this incident or were offended by the inappropriate conduct." They then added, amazingly, “the Astros in no way intended to minimize the issues related to domestic violence.”
Okay. And then in game three, the Astros sent Osuna out to the mound to close the game. They were in DC and the blessed crowd booed hard and long and loud. Osuna was unfazed. The Astros won the game and went on to win the fourth one, too. As of this recording, the World Series is all tied up at 2 to 2.
Okay. So that's the story. That's the short version. There's other shit in there, too. But where do even want to begin with what has unfolded over this week? I think the most important thing, for me, and the biggest, and the thing that gets me about all of this is that I feel like the most honest person that talked about Osuna over the last two weeks and his place on the Astros was probably Taubman. And that's the rub. Sure, they fired him, but that was as calculated a move for the health of the team as when they brought Osuna on. And in the end, of course, it was all about winning. And in game three of the World Series, all their morally questionable decisions were legitimized by what happened on the field.
I imagine after game three, there was a sad Taubman at his home, on his couch, yelling to no one in particular, "Thank God we got Osuna. I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna." And then crying for a little bit over his lost job, which, spoiler alert, he'll get another one. He's a white dude from Wall Street. And I think that hurts a lot, to imagine that that's actually the most honest thing we might have heard from the Astros in the last couple weeks and what that means for sport and the society and everything around domestic violence. But what has been going through y'all's mind around this this week?
Lindsay: So much. I just can't stop thinking about Apstein and those other female reporters in that locker room and having that yelled at them and knowing that they were targeted. I can't stop thinking about the fact that other male reporters were there and didn't speak up about it until after the Sports Illustrated report came out. I cannot stop thinking about an organization calling you a liar in a statement, as a reporter, after writing something, that had to be so hard. I can't imagine being a reporter in the World Series, which is just a huge career moment for anyone, and then becoming the story in that way, which is, spoiler alert, not what any reporter wants. Not at all! I just can't imagine what those reporters have been going through this week.
Jessica: Well, we don't know which reporter was wearing the purple bracelet because-
Lindsay: No.
Jessica: ... she doesn't want to be the story and has been-
Lindsay: Right. She doesn't want to be the story. I legitimately don't know and I just keep thinking about them in general, even though I don't know-
Jessica: Absolutely.
Lindsay: ... exactly who. It's just, as someone who's been in these locker rooms, who's been around celebrations, who knows how, look, it is being these teams and being a beat reporter for, I don't care if it's men's sports, women's sports. It is a tough dynamic, right? Because you need their access, you need to be around them to do a big part of your job. But at the same time, you are not accountable to them. You're accountable to the reader. So it's a really tough relationship. It's a very strange power struggle that I think every reporter feels, no matter what their beat is, at times, and especially in sports, these power dynamics, and especially when you add gender dynamics to it as well, they're really tough to navigate just on a day-in, day-out basis. And so this just exacerbates that to me.
Another thing I just cannot stop thinking about is a press conference that Jeff Luhnow was given in Washington after the Series had moved there for games three and four, which as of this recording, the Astros have now evened up the series, 2-2. We don't know what's going to happen Sunday night. He was asked at this press conference whether he had personally reached out to Stephanie Apstein to apologize. Luhnow said he had been too busy and hadn't had the time. Apstein was sitting in that press conference! She was just sitting there. It's unbelievable! It's unbelievable. Brenda?
Brenda: I guess in terms of the issue of the state of journalism, for me, I found it really depressing in terms of thinking about the attacks on the profession of journalism that have been amplified from the very top echelons of this country's political figures. And I feel like there's a way in which journalists are really more vulnerable now and expected to have their own personal brand and build that brand through social media and very few have the support of major outlets, and for me it showed that even when you are employed by a major outlet, the big shots of sports journalism like Sports Illustrated, you're still vulnerable to all of this. And given that you are now out there on social media, and I'm not a journalist, but I know how important journalism is to democracy, to the world we live in, and I just found it really troubling on a bigger scale and reflective of the times in which we live, in which presidents and politicians…
And it reminded me of Jemele Hill and Donald Trump calling her out and what's happened since then. And I was talking about it with my sports class, and the case of Jemele Hill in particular, and I was like, once this type of behavior is legitimized…and there is so much gender dynamics here and sexism, just reeks sexism, rank sexism. It just made me really feel like we need to consider what it means, this transition to social media of journalism, of identifying individual branding of journalists and what that does when we want to know about stories and have them reported. I don't know. I don't have anything great to say about it except that I find it dismaying. I'm sorry. I'm such a downer about it.
Lindsay: Can we just, no…
Jessica: It's all a downer.
Lindsay: No, it is!
Jessica: Everything about it is a downer.
Lindsay: It's all a downer. There's nothing happy here. I just keep thinking about the audacity. Excuse me, but the fucking audacity to think that you can sign Osuna and take that whatever, whatever calculation you do in the back room and then think you can do that and then never have to face questions about it again. Because that is part of the risk you're taking. That is part of the reason why so many teams didn't want to do this. Not because they really care about domestic violence, but because they knew that it was going to be completely legitimate to be asked about it over and over and over again. They knew that every single win, every single big moment was going to come with this as part of the conversation. That is why they got the depreciated asset or whatever.
Jessica: Yeah. Distressed. Distressed asset.
Lindsay: And got the distressed asset. That's why they got such a good deal on it. That's why they were able to get him. This is part of that. This is part of that deal you made. Then to lash out at the people who are holding you accountable for that, even in the most, I don't want to use the word professional, but I mean, yeah, the most professional and respectful way. She was wearing a domestic violence bracelet and tweeting out the domestic violence hotline, which is what anyone should do when they're reporting on this stuff. It's just the audacity of it is just... Jess, can you wrap us up here?
Jessica: Yeah. I'll just say two more things. One of the things that was interesting this week was listening to people say, "Well, these are the Astros and they're terrible." They're bad to their media. There was a whole thing with Verlander this year where they wouldn't let, what, the Detroit Free Press person into the Houston locker room to interview them because Verlander didn't like him. And that we should, that on some level this was, what more do we expect? This is the team that signed Osuna. They're terrible. And that's true, but at the same time, I just echo what Lindsay just said. This is so, I don't know. There's something above and beyond, even for the grossest of them, with the way that this organization has handled all of this. And I do think there's something to be said that we should be thinking about the Wall Street-ification of sports and the data-fication of all of this that turns these men into data points. Louisa Thomas has a great piece at the New Yorker about this that I suggest everyone read.
The last thing that I want to say, and again, this is all a downer. Suzyn Waldman, who's a pioneer of women in sports media, she has been really vocal this week about how distressing this has been for her, to see how not far we have come around female reporters in baseball spaces. I mean, she just recently gave an interview saying she can't watch the World Series, which is a big deal for her to say, because of how the Astros have lied through all of this. And I just think how sad that is, when we think about the pioneers in this field who've gotten us to this point that we can even be having this conversation and that this broke her heart this week, too. It's just another layer of how shitty all of this has been.
Lindsay: All right, now for Jess's interview with Kate Nye.
Jessica: Hello, flamethrowers. Jessica here. I'm excited to have gold medal-winning weightlifter Kate Nye on Burn It All Down today. Kate, who is 20 and a relative newcomer to the sport, competed in the women's 71 kg weight class at the recent 2019 IWF Championships where she won three gold medals. She had a 112 kg snatch, that's 246 pounds, a 136 kg clean & jerk, which is just shy of 300 pounds, and that totaled to 248 kg. She was the best in all three categories in her weight class. Kate won the Junior World Championships in July, so she is currently the reigning Junior and Senior World Champion. Which is a hell of a thing, considering this was her Senior Worlds debut, she only made her international debut last year, and she spent 11 years as a gymnast before leaving that sport at the age of 15, taking up CrossFit and only a few years ago, weightlifting. Welcome to Burn It All Down, Kate.
Kate: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Jessica: I wanted to start at the beginning and actually ask you, where are you from?
Kate: I'm from metro Detroit area in Michigan. I was born and raised in Michigan. A few different places.
Jessica: So you were a gymnast for 11 years, which is more than half your life at this point. Can you tell us about why you left gymnastics and how you found weightlifting?
Kate: Yeah. I started gymnastics when I was basically a toddler still, when I was for years old.
Jessica: Wow.
Kate: It was just kind of part of who I was. It was my identity and it happens a lot with gymnasts that you don't really think about if you like it. It's just something you do. And we see that a lot. And when you get to middle school, gymnasts kind of start dropping off like flies when they realize they would like to do something else. So I think that was just kind of the thing for me. I got to high school, I was 15 years old and I was thinking about college gymnastics and it was just something that gave me anxiety, thinking about doing it for four more years in college. I think that's when I kind of decided that, why am I doing something I don't even like? I talked to my parents and they were super supportive and my meniscus, I tore it and I had to have a surgery to remove a good chunk of it.
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Kate: After I had that done, it was kind of the perfect opportunity to be like, "I don't want to go back."
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah.
Kate: Yeah. It was all good. I am very thankful for my gymnastics career and I think it set me up really well for weightlifting, but it was just I fell out of love with it and I was forcing myself to do something I wasn't that into, you know?
Jessica: Yeah.
Kate: So it was really good for me to get out of that environment where I kind of felt trapped, in a way.
Jessica: Sure.
Kate: So after that, like you said, I kind of found CrossFit afterwards and I really liked that, but at the same time, it didn't feel quite right yet.
Jessica: Right.
Kate: There were some things I didn't like about it still. Weightlifting is kind of like my perfect sport and I love it with all my heart. It's my true passion in life. So it all worked out.
Jessica: Did you just happen to go to a gym that had weightlifting? I'm around a lot of weightlifters at my gym. I deadlift, which is different and we'll talk about what weightlifting is in a second, but there are lots of people at my gym who weightlift and if I asked to do it, there'd be someone there who could train me in it. So did you just happen to, was it that there was someone at CrossFit? How did you actually find it?
Kate: Yeah. So I was training in a CrossFit gym and my current coach, the only weightlifting coach I've ever had, we're still together now, he was a weightlifting coach at the CrossFit gym to help whatever CrossFit athletes wanted help in that aspect of CrossFit.
Jessica: Huh. Okay.
Kate: We met and I was like 16, 17 years old and he was very interested in my gymnastics background because gymnasts make pretty good weightlifters, generally. So he was like, "Hey, if you want to do this, I can make you a Youth National medalist." And I was like, "I don't know, guy. I just like CrossFit." So I just kind of went to his classes just to get better at CrossFit, but slowly but surely I just kind of started liking it more and liking it more and he finally talked me into competing. I competed for the first time, qualified for Youth Nationals. Yeah, it was just kind of something, you know, he was kind of in my ear about it. He wasn't too pushy, he was just kind of enough to stay interested in that option.
Jessica: And he was right!
Kate: Yeah, he was very right.
Jessica: He had a good eye. Yeah.
Kate: And he's been awesome. I was just so lucky that I was in a gym where he was at and he is passionate about the sport. Together we've built a career we can both be proud of. It's been awesome to have the same coach this entire process so that we could grow together and whatnot. I just happened to meet him at the CrossFit gym and we learned a lot together. It's been a great experience.
Jessica: That's fascinating. I want to talk specifics of weightlifting with you because I think a lot of people, if they have any relationship to it, it's that every four years during the Olympics, they maybe see someone. They maybe saw Sarah Robles last time or whatever. Can you just explain quickly what a snatch is, how it's different from or explain what a clean & jerk is so that people have an idea of what it is we're actually talking about? Because I wrote you in an email, I find them very scary. I'm super impressed that people can do this. So can you just tell us a bit about what it is?
Kate: We have two lifts in competition, the snatch and the clean & jerk. You get three attempts of each. You start with the snatch and that is when you lift the bar from ground to overhead in one movement. The goal is to do that, obviously, the most weight you can do. The snatch is always less than your clean & jerk, at least if you're doing them right.
Jessica: Right.
Kate: The clean & jerk is next. You need to get it from ground to overhead, but you stop at your shoulders first. So you do the clean and you get to your shoulders and then you do a jerk from your shoulders to overhead. Usually with a split jerk, your good leg goes forward and your bad leg goes back.
Jessica: Okay.
Kate: Yeah. So that's the usual way. There's a couple other ways, but that's what people usually do. So yeah, you basically just do the best you can in all six lifts since you have three of each, and then you add your best snatch and your best clean & jerk to make your total. And your total is what you, you put it together and that's how you rank.
Jessica: That is wild to me, to think of you snatching 246 pounds off the ground and just lifting it above your head. Just the idea that you hold 300 pounds above your head at all is kind of wild to me. So you mentioned that gymnasts make good weightlifters. What did you learn from gymnastics that has helped you be such a successful weightlifter?
Kate: I think most gymnasts, there's a lot of conditioning, whether that be mobility or strength or just air awareness in general. You're very in tune with your body and I feel like you're also a very coachable person if you're a gymnast, because you have to be coachable. And so I think there's just a lot of factors that just transfer over to weightlifting really well. I think something like half of our national team for weightlifting had some kind of background in gymnastics.
Jessica: Wow! That's amazing. Yeah, because my understanding, again, I haven't done it myself, but my understanding is that weightlifting is incredibly technical.
Kate: Yes.
Jessica: That your ability to do that is to hit it exactly the same every single time.
Kate: It's very, like, a nitty-gritty sport and it's very monotonous, so you really have to be able to be coachable and to be able to do the same thing over and over and over again and pay attention to detail because it is so plain and simple, but with that, there are so many little things that you have to work on and be willing to work on, because it is so, it's repetitive. But if you love it, it doesn't feel repetitive, if that makes sense.
Jessica: Sure. Sure.
Kate: Yeah.
Jessica: And like we just said, it's just a ton of weight. As you're getting up to where you're lifting, you've got to get it right or it's not going to happen.
Kate: Yeah.
Jessica: Is there anything you had to unlearn as a gymnast in order to be a weightlifter?
Kate: There are some things mobility-wise.
Jessica: Oh.
Kate: It's different kind of flexibility. So there are some things like I had to learn how to be better at flexing my toes up, because in gymnastics you want to point your toes. So I didn't have a lot of mobility to go the other way. So that is something I definitely had some issues with, but I don't know. It's just a lot different. Gymnastics was so intense and disciplined whereas weightlifting is a little more free. I only see my coach once a week. For me, I just had to really learn how to be disciplined in a different way. I need to be disciplined to get to the gym myself and push myself to lift more weight on my own whereas gymnastics, it was like you had a coach breathing down your neck 90% of the time. So it was more of a different training setting that I had to get used to, but it was really gradual. I went from weightlifting very recreationally and slowly I'm like, "Okay, I'm a national level lifter," and, "Okay, maybe we want to try for this international team," to, "Okay, this is my full-time job." So it wasn't a crazy transition where I had to just dive into it. You learn as you go with everything you do.
Jessica: You say that like it's gradual, but it's been pretty fast. No?
Kate: Well, yeah! Yeah.
Jessica: I mean, I don't want you to downplay, you've come really far pretty quickly. I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is why do think you've been so successful so quickly in this sport?
Kate: I think one thing is you can't downplay natural talent. I feel like this is what I was meant to do in my life, so I think I found the right thing to try and excel at, you know?
Jessica: Yeah.
Kate: Because I think I do have that on my side, just to have the talent. And I think just the love of the sport and how much passion I have for it has really helped me excel at it just because I have to go in the gym and be 100% willing to push myself. Because no one's going to do that work for me. I look back at my gymnastics a lot and I realize how much I didn't have my heart in it. Having my heart in weightlifting has pushed me to heights I never knew I could reach.
Jessica: Yeah, the highest heights!
Kate: Yeah. I just think that I've had a lot of drive to get to where I'm at and I had this dream and I've kept pushing and pushing and pushing.
Jessica: I wanted to ask another specific weightlifting question. You just won the gold in the 71 kg weight class, but I read that you're going to go up to the 76 kg class for your next major competition that's later this year. How do you figure out, as a weightlifter, what class you're going to compete in and why are you switching?
Kate: For most beginners, you just kind of lift where you are. You don't want to add the pressure of cutting weight or gaining weight when you're just learning how to lift. But as you get more advanced and you look at, "I want to qualify for this national meet. How can I get there the easiest?" So people tend to start cutting to do that. So that's kind of what happened with me. I competed at my first national meet and we realized that there were some American records that we could try to break if I were to cut down in weight. So that's what we did, but in retrospect, that was a bad move because it hindered my ability to progress strength-wise, because I kept cutting weight and cutting weight and cutting weight to the point where I was doing well, but I also wasn't really gaining any strength. That was kind of hard for me. When I stopped seeing any progress and I was kind of at a dead stop where I was in that weight class, me and my coach were like, all right. We got to move up.
Kate: So we moved up to what used to be the 69 kilo category, which would've been perfect, in my opinion, but then they switched all the weight classes. So then I became a 71, which would've been fine as well because that's only, what, a five pound increase or whatever.
Jessica: The difference between 69 and 71? Is that what you mean?
Kate: Yeah. Yeah.
Jessica: Okay.
Kate: It wasn't that bad. That's where my body is happiest, in my opinion, and I was really excited to be there, but then they announced that 71 kilo weight category was not an Olympic category. So that means I would have had to go all the way back down to where I was pretty unhealthy in a too-low of body fat type thing.
Jessica: Wow. This is complicated. Okay.
Kate: Yeah. Or gain another 10 pounds.
Jessica: Wow.
Kate: So I was in a really tricky spot last year because basically the only option was to go up again, but everyone struggles within, in some way or another, as how you look at yourself with weight gain or too much weight loss. I was like, "I don't know how I'm going to take looking at myself gaining another 10 pounds after I just had to deal with gaining 10 pounds." That was the real struggle for me, but you do what you got to do. You make sacrifices when you have a big dream and if I get to be an Olympian by gaining 25 pounds in two years, so be it. And it's been worth it, 100%.
Jessica: I want to ask because I just got out of the gym myself. I just worked out right before we recorded. What do you like to eat after you work out?
Kate: After I work out, I typically like to keep protein high on all meals in general, but especially after a workout. A good amount of whole grain carbs. I like rice or sweet potato sometimes, whole grain pasta, that kind of stuff. And then usually some kind of healthy fat. I like avocado, some various oils. I'm definitely always trying to keep lean protein in every single meal and then kind of go with the unhealthier stuff, in quotes, because you can use ‘unhealthy’ for almost anything. I'm not a really big whey person, whey protein. I don't drink protein shakes typically, but I do have creatine after my workout.
Jessica: Okay. All right. Great. So I guess the next big goal, you're trying for the Olympics next year.
Kate: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Jessica: Good luck with that. I hope that we get to see you in Tokyo.
Kate: Yeah, thank you.
Jessica: That would be very exciting. Thank you so much for being on Burn It All Down and sharing all of this with us.
Kate: Of course. Great to talk with you.
Jessica: Yeah, and congratulations again.
Kate: Thank you.
Lindsay: All right. It is time to rage and to throw some things onto the Burn Pile. I'm feeling extra rage-y today. How about you all? Jess, we were just talking some baseball. I know you have something else baseball-related.
Jessica: I know, I have another baseball thing. Mine's going to be quick today because it's so obvious on its face why this deserves to be torched. I'm going to stick with Major League Baseball where this week, a 20-year veteran umpire, Rob Drake, deleted his entire Twitter account after tweeting angrily about the possible impeachment of Donald Trump. Drake was very mad. In the tweet, he said, I didn't see it, so this is taken from Passan's work. In the tweet, he said he was going to buy an AR-15 rifle, which has infamously been used in a bunch of mass shootings over the last however many years, quote, "Because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT," all caps, "This way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!!,” three exclamation points, #MAGA2020.
Rob Drake looks exactly the way you would imagine he would. He's a white dude. He keeps his hair short, tight, and gelled up. He has apologized, saying, quote, "Once I read what I had tweeted, I realized the violence in these words and have since deleted it." These men… "I know that I cannot unsay the words, but please accept my sincerest apologies." Which like, a better apology than the Astros, which is the lowest of the bars. He specifically said he was sorry to, quote, "Everyone that my words made feel unsafe, especially to every person who's been affected by gun violence in our country." And then taking a line from the same playbook that the Astros actually used to craft their final apology statement, he added, quote, "I never intended to diminish the threat of violence from assault weapons or violence of any kind." No, dude, you were literally propping up the threat of violence from assault weapons. Oh, my goodness.
MLB is looking into it. The MLB Umpires Association said that while Drake, quote, "Chose the wrong way to convey his opinion about our great country, he's just a passionate individual and an outstanding umpire." What he tweeted is objectively bad. It's objectively bad and it's threat of violence against people he disagrees with politically and we can burn it for that alone, but beyond that, it made me think about how only one MLB player ever took a knee during the national anthem. Bruce Maxwell. And Maxwell now plays ball in a league in Mexico. That one act torched his MLB career and it was a silent, peaceful protest against violence.
Maybe the MLB will choose to cut ties with Drake and this will end his career, as it should, but I won't count on it. Baseball is a place awash in white supremacy. That they'd push aside violent white supremacy would not surprise me at this point, but we should think about what it means for a man who is subjectively making decisions about individual players when they are at the plate to hold such beliefs. What does this mean for players of color when they're up there, for players who ever take any kind of progressive political stand, that this the man making major subjective decisions about them? Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe he is able to be fair. I don't know. He seems emotional. But this is yet another reminder of the work that baseball has yet to do when it comes to dealing with the intersection of politics and sports and so I just want to burn Drake metaphorically and his tweet and what this exposes. So burn.
Lindsay: Burn.
Brenda: Burn.
Lindsay: All right. I have two. I'm sorry. The first is very quick.
Jessica: Oh, so Shireen of you.
Lindsay: I know, I know. Somebody's got to stick up for the rule-breaking in Shireen's absence. Shireen "Ted Talk" Ahmed!
Jessica: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Lindsay: So first of all, I want to burn anyone who is saying that the nationals are ‘bringing a divided DC together.’ DC is not just the Congress and the White House, people. DC is the most democratic voting block in the country and that is just a ridiculous thing to say. Congress has nothing to do with DC sports. That's just stupid and throw that on the burn pile.
But my real burn is about a tweet - once again, tweet, Twitter bad - from Mizzou Athletics, Missouri. They have this diversity video. It's a video intended to highlight the diversity in their athletics department. They tweeted out four screenshots from it and the screenshots were, there were two white women, two white athletes and then a black woman and a black male athlete. The chyrons over the two white women, Chelsea Christensen and CJ Kovac, Chelsea's said, "I am a future doctor," and CJ's said, "I am a future corporate financier." The chyron over Arielle Mack, the Black student athlete, I said it again! Propaganda. The Black athlete that they used just says, "I am an African-American woman," and the chyron over Caulin Graves, the Black man that they featured in this video, just said, "I am a brother."
Can we see a little difference in the way these people, I mean, it's one of the most stark racist things I've seen on Twitter, which is really saying something. Mizzou, of course, deleted this tweet after a lot of blow-back, speaking of how for the two white women, you gave them promising futures. For the two black students, you merely stated facts about themselves…It’s just absolutely ridiculous and once again, I think a little bit more diversity throughout maybe the communications department would probably help quell things such as this. It's just ridiculous. Let's just throw those racist stereotyping and crap onto the burn pile.
Jessica: Burn.
Brenda: Burn.
Lindsay: Bren?
Brenda: Speaking of racist stereotyping, on October 15th, a girls' soccer match took place outside of Minneapolis between Como Park Senior High and Mahtomedi High School, I apologize of my mispronouncing that high school, which is a suburb of Minneapolis. In the game, apparently what happened is there were a considerable number of Asian girls playing on the Como Park Senior High team and there were a group of boys, 10 or 11, who began to call them Asian food names and then began to jeer and tell them to go back to their countries. Now, I want to say that in this very same week, I, in Duchess County, received as a U7 coach, that means 6 year olds, an announcement that our league had also experienced racist jeering from family members, fans, et cetera. I am so angry when I read this story about the Minneapolis girls.
I honestly am just beside myself that the refs, these games are reffed at this level. How are they not stopping them? I mean, high school play actually doesn't fall under FIFA rules. Which is interesting. So club soccer, in some sense, you have to stop the game. You are supposed to stop the game. Those players and fans that do that are ejected from the grounds. I can't imagine that high schools have worse regulation. If FIFA can do it, why can't a public high school do it and what is wrong with you coaches to allow this to happen? These are not 40,000 people that are anonymous in a crowd. This is something that everyone heard, every parent heard. Everyone is responsible at that game for letting them continue to do this and to hurt those young women. I want to burn the racism, but also burn the complacency of everyone there at that game that allowed that to happen. I mean, it shouldn't be on the parents of the young women. It shouldn't be on the young women, but it should really be on everybody else.
And so I want to burn that that went on for dozens of minutes on end and that every player heard it. One of the people that was interviewed was the father of a Mexican-American girl who was playing and while she wasn't called an Asian food name, the idea of going back to her country, which is this country, is absolutely racializing immigration. It's xenophobic. It's garbage. None of that belongs in youth soccer. So I want to burn it.
Jessica: Burn.
Lindsay: Burn.
All right, well, the Burn Pile just made me more angry, so let's now lift up some Bad Ass Women of the week. Honorable mentions, Jess Zaiss did two Ironman triathlons in one weekend, which is exhausting and ridiculous. An Ironman is a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride and 26.2 mile run. She is an oceanography PhD candidate at the University of Southern California and is preparing to do an Ultraman, a three day event that features a 10k swim, 263 mile bike and a double marathon. So, yeah, sure. Congratulations? That's incredible.
Maggie Guterl became the first woman to win the Big's Backyard Ultra, a race wherein the competitors have an hour to run a loop that is just over 4.1 miles long and they just keep running until only one runner is left on the course. They do this for days if necessary. Guterl won after 60 loops, which is 250 miles. You know, these people are just definitely not the same species as I am. I'm so in awe. Okay, keep going. All right.
Solidarity to the nearly 200 Spanish footballers in Spain's first division who voted to strike because they want better pay and resources and to Italian players who are trying to get an old law changed that caps how much female footballers can earn each year at 30,000 euros. How is that a law!? And to players in Mexico's domestic league who are speaking out against unequal treatment and resources between men's and women's teams. Absolutely.
Speaking of that, shout-out to the Burlington High School Girls Soccer players who, during a regular season game, removed their school jerseys to reveal jerseys underneath that said #EqualPay. Since removing a jersey on the field is against the rules, they received yellow cards, but the referee, a woman who assessed the penalty, later brought out a shirt in support of the message and I know the Boys Soccer players at their school have been very supportive as well. It's a great story.
Indonesia's Aries Susanti Rahayu is a real life Spiderwoman. The 24 year old broke the women's speed climbing record when she clocked scaling a 15 meter course up a wall at the IFSC Climbing World Cup in just under seven seconds. Cannot wait for this event to have its Olympic debut.
Also, this is a long one this week, but we're having fun, congratulations to Aryna Sabalenka, who won the WTA Elite trophy in Zhuhai. This is the WTA's second tier year in championship. Many thought Sabalenka would be a slam contender this season, but she struggled to back up her breakthrough 2018 season. But she finished strong with two titles in China and it's worth noting that last year, the winner of Zhuhai was Ash Barty. So this could be a really great omen for Sabalenka's 2020.
Speaking of Barty, we'd like to congratulate the eight women who qualified for the WTA Finals, which starts on the day we're recording this. It is the WTA's crown jewel tournament, the richest women's sporting event in the world. It will be round robin format. The eight women who qualified are Ash Barty, Karolina Pliskova, Simona Halep, Bianca Andreescu, Naomi Osaka, Petra Kvitova, Belinda Bencic, and defending champion, Elina Svitolina. We'll have more on that next week.
All right. Drum roll, please. All right. Our Bad Ass Woman of the week, I just had to make it Stephanie Apstein for reporting the story. The bravery it took to report that story knowing what the backlash it would be, the way she has handled continuing to do her job, and being to professional. As I said earlier, I know that she did not want to be the story this week, so I just want to send her a, say we're thinking of you, we are grateful for the work you do not just on this story, but just your reporting on baseball in general at Sports Illustrated. It is wonderful to have women like you in this business.
All right. What is good, Jess?
Jessica: Yeah. My what's good this weekend is the Texas Book Festival, which is this really cool huge free event downtown. They actually do it in the Texas capital and they shut down the streets around the capital. They have tents and all these authors, like hundreds of authors come to town. They speak about their books, they do signings. So yesterday I got to meet Saeed Jones, who has a beautiful new memoir. Lyz Lenz, who writes about faith and feminism, I got to hug her. And then they bring romance authors, too, so Christina Lauren is this writing duo pair that I deeply love and I got to meet both of them. I interviewed them a couple years ago for Shondaland which was a total delight. That was all very fun for me.
And then today, my son is a huge fantasy reader and so there's actually a panel, they do a ton of children's events. They have a children's activity thing, they bring in, there's an entertainment thing. I walked by yesterday and there were kids in a chorus singing. But then they bring all these authors in and so we're going to this YA panel that has authors that he's very excited to meet and get his books signed. So that's cool.
I felt really lucky yesterday. I got home just in time to catch most of-
Lindsay: Yay!
Jessica: ... Shireen's TEDx Toronto talk that she did. She was amazing and she got a standing ovation. She is our biggest cheerleader because she not only mentioned our podcast, but named each one of us individually. I just deeply love Shireen and it was fun to see her succeed on such a big stage.
Lindsay: That's so amazing! Brenda?
Brenda: Yeah. Yay, Shireen. Congratulations. If people haven't seen it, we tweeted it out and you should definitely watch it. She's a riveting speaker. Also what's good for me is Chile, I think, in the middle of, I'm scared, I'm scared. Probably the biggest protest movement that Chile has seen since the 1970s in reaction to the neoliberal government and police brutality of the Chilean state. I don't know what will happen. I mean, it putatively started over a price hike in the metro fares, but really this is about much deeper issues going back to the dictatorship. The images of the forms of protest through music and dancing and artistry are so very Chilean and remind me of every reason I wanted to write about that country and why my first book, and why I moved there. I'm also scared. Seeing people tortured and detained is not a wholly positive experience by any means. It's really terrifying and sad. So it's mixed. It's really mixed, but it's really inspirational and just all solidarity with Chilean people as they fight the good fight.
Lindsay: Amazing. All right, so I've had quite a week. First of all, I'm in Cary, North Carolina for the NWSL championship game, which means I will have, this month, watched a WNBA championship and an NWSL championship, which I think makes me the winner.
Jessica: Yes!
Lindsay: I'm so excited. But also, as a lot of you know, as I've been sharing, ThinkProgress, where I'd worked for four years, shut down six weeks ago and I've been trying to figure out what my next step is. I'll be honest, I considered leaving the business multiple, multiple, multiple times. I considered shifting gears. There's been a lot of soul-searching, but I'm not going anywhere. You're not getting rid of me that quickly. This week, I launched Power Plays, which is my new newsletter on Substack. You can subscribe and three days a week, you will get all of my writing on gender and sports and intersectionality and power right into your inbox. If you're a Burn It All Down fan, I can guarantee you you're going to like this. I am going to force my co-host to do a little Hot Take with me this week to really dive into why I'm doing this, so I won't bore you now, but powerplays.news is where you go to subscribe. I'm very nervous about this and very excited, so your support would mean the world to me. All right.
Brenda: Woo-hoo! Signed up.
Lindsay: Thank you all so much for listening to Burn It All Down. If you want to support us, support this podcast, patreon.com/burnitalldown is the place to go. We will have two Patreon videos coming for our subscribers this week in which I am going to take you behind the scenes at the WNBA finals and I'm going to be answering some reader questions and doing some giveaways, so stay tuned for that. One is well overdue, but it will be there. I promise. I'm very excited about it. And follow us on Twitter, Facebook, all of the links are in the show notes, so I trust you can find us. Thank you for your support, thank you for listening, and as our Brenda says, Brenda?
Brenda: Keep burning on and not out