Today, Explained - Equal-opportunity murderball

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

For the first time, a woman is playing on the US wheelchair rugby team at the Paralympics. It’s a sign of progress in the complicated arena of co-ed sports. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah with original reporting by Audrey Nelson, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Rob Byers and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Photo by Marco Mantovani/Getty Images. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Paralympics kicked off Wednesday in Paris, and the Murderball began Thursday. You might know Murderball by its government name, wheelchair rugby, but the people who first played it called it Murderball because it's fast, it's fierce, and it certainly looks like they're trying to kill each other. It's bumper cars, but everyone's paralyzed and also playing football. Like most of the best sports, Murderball was invented by a Canadian, but the Paralympics are bringing a historic moment to Team USA. For the first time ever,

there's a woman on the Murderball squad. It's Sarah Adam, an historic moment on the board. She scores the first Paralympic goal for a female wheelchair rugby player in Team USA history. We're going to find out why it was so hard to get here and dig into the complexities of co-ed sports on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Audrey Nelson is a freelance journalist who is obsessed with murder ball, so we asked her to tell you about the sport. First of all, you'd see athletes in manual wheelchairs, so rolling their wheelchairs with their hands,

passing and dribbling a volleyball. The objective basically is to inbound the ball. We play on a regulation basketball court. You go from one end to the other end. Stop the ball! Stop the ball! Stop the ball! Stop the ball! Two wheels have to cross over the line with possession of the ball. Points are being scored quickly, almost out of control if you kind of don't know what's going on. And it's legal. But other than that, it's basically kill the man with the ball.

We asked her to tell you about Murderball because the sport and Team USA are having an historic moment at the Paralympics in Paris. Yeah, so Sarah Adam, she's the first woman to compete for Team USA mixed-gender wheelchair rugby. And in addition to being that first woman, she has kind of an interesting story leading up to it. Most wheelchair rugby players get into the sport when they're doing rehab for injuries, often, not always, spinal cord injuries. But Sarah actually discovered the sport before she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. So she ended up just playing softball at the time. She ended up volunteering with other athletes who were playing murder ball. And she pretty much loved it from the get-go. Fell in love with not only the high speed, full contact,

but that behind that kind of high speed, full contact was this chess match, this strategy that was really similar to what I got out of softball. And then Sarah classifies in as a player in 2019. And what that means is basically the Paralympics is very concerned with your level of impairment. And so you're classified or sorted into these categories in many sports based on the level of impairment that you have. And so her MS had progressed enough that she qualified to play the game of wheelchair rugby at, eventually, at the Paralympic level.

And Sarah told me that as a woman player on a team of all men, and she's often playing on a team of all men, even when she's not with Team USA, she feels like she brings something different to the game. You know, I think I, as a female player, I'm not as big as my male component, so I have to play a more cerebral game. Like, we have to play a little bit differently. We have to take care of our bodies a little bit differently. So there's things that we're managing. So in that aspect, I think it keeps it interesting.

Even though wheelchair rugby allows women, wheelchair rugby is really male-dominated. So for context, in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, only four women competed, wheelchair rugby is really male-dominated. So for context, in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, only four women competed in wheelchair rugby out of 96 athletes total. And only three women have ever won Olympic medals in wheelchair rugby. Why is that? So when the sport was being formalized, the people who were actually formalizing the rules made it so that the only athletes eligible to play were those with quadriplegia that was either caused by spinal cord injuries or neuromuscular conditions.

And primarily the people playing the game ended up having spinal cord injuries. And I learned this from Kathy Newman, who's the director of competitions and development for World Wheelchair Rugby. The gender split on spinal cord injuries was 80% men, 20% women. And so Kathy told me that this huge disparity is because men and boys are statistically more likely than girls and women to engage in the kinds of behaviors that cause spinal cord injuries. So they drive more motorcycles, they end up in more car accidents, and they do face higher rates of gun violence, which are all things that can lead to these injuries.

But because of that, there was this perception that you'd never be able to have a separate women's competition, that they would just always be welcome to join the men's program. Beyond that, though, Audrey, is there like a skill issue? I mean, are men better at murder ball than women? I mean, it depends on what you mean by better, which is also something you could say about the Olympics. But I think, as Sarah kind of alluded to when talking to me, she's saying that generally women are going to be, you know, not as big, not as strong as guys playing the sport. And that is just something that is generally true. So that's

certainly something that could intimidate women out of playing. It's certainly something that could prevent women from getting into the elite level because there are these bigger, faster, stronger players. And it's also something that women have adapted to. Sarah says she kind of plays a more strategic game. She plays it with this kind of chess softball mindset behind it, instead of focusing on these high-speed physical collisions that also make up the sport. So, like, yes, men are bigger, but yes, women are smarter. You could definitely put it that way, yeah. So another issue is cultural, which is that

as Kathy Newman, the director of competitions and development at World Wheelchair Rugby, as she told me, there hasn't really been a concerted effort to recruit female players. And a lot of this is in the way Murderball gets pitched or not to young women who are recovering from injuries. So Sarah Adam, she has a friend, Mandy Masciano, who had a spinal cord injury when she was 13. And she's recovering. And here's the story Sarah told me. She's in rehab and there's another young male with a spinal cord injury, similar spinal cord injury to Mandy. And the male was watching Murderball, a popular documentary for wheelchair rugby that gets a lot of athletes involved in the sport. What we do is we take these wheelchairs and make them into a gladiator, a battling machine.

And she said to the therapist, like, hey, what's that documentary? What's he watching? And the therapist said, oh, that's not for you. You don't have to worry about that. Sad. Well, Sarah Adams making history this year. Where does she think this sport should go? Sarah drew this interesting comparison for me between the recreational and the elite levels of wheelchair rugby. And so recreational, she's all in on women's participation. And she's all in on the idea of having some kind of women's only space, which she's actually participated in.

And she's found a lot of value in. It was a unique opportunity to be surrounded by other women with disabilities that are going through similar things to her. Because me, yes, my male teammates, and they're phenomenal, phenomenal teammates. But we have different things that we go through. And to have that support that I didn't even realize I was craving until I was around other elite female athletes. I'm like,

wow, this is so nice to be around somebody who gets it in a different level. So kind of counterintuitively, she's saying to end up with more co-ed murder ball, you should have more women's only teams? Yes and no. So she definitely thinks there should be more women's only wheelchair rugby teams. But she has kind of an interesting take at the elite level. She's supportive of men and women playing together, but she's not necessarily supportive of something like, for example, a quota system that would say you had to have a certain number of women on your team. This is how she put it to me. Whether you're male or female, you can either hack it or you can't.

Wheelchair rugby is an elite sport. There is an elite level, and the eliteness of that level shouldn't be brought down by involving women or men who aren't prepared to play at that level. So Sarah's basically advocating for, you know, having an elite league that, just by virtue of physical differences and abilities, is probably going to end up being mostly male, the way it is now. And then you have a women's only league where women can compete at a high level, but also have this uniquely female supportive space. But I don't know that you're going to have enough females that would qualify for wheelchair rugby to have its own league.

Where do you think that leaves us with Murderball. I guess when I came into my reporting, I looked at the fact that wheelchair rugby was co-ed, and I said to myself, that's great. You know, we're done. It's equal. Men and women play together. Like, bada-bing, bada-boom. Awesome. But we know from the numbers

and from the testimony of people involved with the sport that that's not true. But I think we do this with mixed-gender sports. We write them off as kind of done as we've done all we can. And in doing that, we kind of stop asking ourselves these two questions. What's best for women? And what's best for the sport? And I think that we should keep asking ourselves these questions because the answers to them are really messy. And they're also really interesting and really productive. And so in terms of what's best for women, as I was talking to Sarah, I heard this tension between she loves her male teammates. She loves how she's kind of forced to play a different game than them, that she has her role on the team as sort of the strategist,

because she can't necessarily play the same role with the contact, with the physicality. But she also breathes a sigh of relief when she's in women's only spaces. And then in terms of what's best for the sport, I asked her straight up whether women playing with men improved the sport of wheelchair rugby. And I kind of expected a black and white answer. And maybe that's just because I've played a lot of co-ed basketball. And I kind of feel like a badass when I do it. But it was not a black and white answer. And she wasn't all in on support of just full mixed gender league setup, especially if that involved kind of sacrificing the quality of the sport at the highest level.

Sarah, history maker, after all of the talk, how good did it feel to actually get out there and make your Paralympic debut? Yeah, really excited to be out there. I mean, the atmosphere here is electric. Once that whistle blew, just comfortable playing rugby. Well, what do you think, though, before we go? Do you think this should be a co-ed game at the highest level, or do you think we should separate out the leagues by gender? I think it should be a co-ed league at the highest level. How come? Because even after all of this reporting, I still think it's super badass to watch women in this game playing against men.

I'm going to watch Sarah Adams this week and just absolutely lose my mind. That was Audrey Nelson. She's a rising senior at Wesleyan University, and she was a member of the 2024 Vox Media Writers Workshop. It's a free mentorship program designed to give aspiring journalists an introduction to the industry. And fun fact, I was Audrey's mentor. You can learn more about the program at voxmediaevents.com slash writers workshop. When we're back on Today Explained, we're going to ask if more sports should be coed. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. You're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank.

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ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained. Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, a member of the FDIC and terms and conditions do apply. So we're here in the screening room at Paramount Studios and we're getting ready to watch a new movie called Murderball. It's about these gnarly dudes who play quadriplegic rugby. Hey, time is money. Can you roll the gosh darn film? Today Explained reached out to Andrea Bundon to ask her about the challenges involved in making more sports co-ed. Andrea's not only knee deep in the subject matter as a professor focusing on the sociology of sport at the University of British Columbia, but she's also taken part in the

Paralympics herself as a guide for visually impaired cross-country skiers. Both of the athletes I guide competitively have some vision, so they can see me five to ten feet in front of them. What they can't necessarily see is is the trail going to turn yeah um what the snow conditions are so my job is like ski ahead and both provide sort of a visual marker that they can follow but then also over a radio give them information about what's happening in the race about the tactics about what's happening on the race course you know when you need to go into a tuck when you need to to make a turn. So, yeah, you're racing with the athlete. We're racing as a duo.

And it was from conversations with these two women that, you know, I really became interested in Paralympic sport and the Paralympic movement. So we heard early in the show, Andrea, that this year's Paralympics will bring the first woman ever on Team USA's Murderball squad. I wonder, you know, as someone who's thought about the Paralympics a lot, like, how big a deal is that? I think it's a very big deal in the sense that Team USA has an incredible team. They've been a dominant force in Murderball or wheelchair rugby for many years. So to have a woman on their team is significant. And the games are just starting, so the final numbers are being tallied,

but it looks like there'll be eight women playing or competing, I should say, at the Paralympics in Paris across multiple teams in wheelchair rugby. And that is the highest number of women we've ever seen at the Paralympics in this sport. How does the Paralympics do on gender parity, on co-ed sports, and maybe to give people a broader sense, like, how does that compare to the Olympics? But let's just start with the Paralympics. Yeah. So, I mean, when you're talking about gender parity,

there's definitely some positive developments. In Paris, the expectation is there's going to be 4,400 athletes competing and about 45% of those will be women, which is an increase since Tokyo four years ago, where it was about 42%. It's an increase. It's the highest number percentage-wise that we've ever seen at the Paralympics. So, great news. But I think it also really matters how you're understanding gender parity or what you think that means. So the other number we could look at is how many of the medal events are for women.

So there's going to be, I think it's about 560 medal events at the Games. 235 of those are going to be for women. So less than 50, certainly. It's more medal events than four years ago, but it's still not balanced or gender parity. So, you know, by some measures, this will be, this is really great progress in women's involvement in the Paralympic movement by other measures. I think there is a lot of work still to be done and a lot of other numbers we could be looking at. We heard some arguments earlier in the show, even from Sarah Adam herself, that, you know, we shouldn't just make, like, the Team USA Murder Ball squad, like, 50-50 men and women.

It should be the best possible athletes, even if that means there's more men on the team than women. Do you agree with that sentiment? Absolutely. I mean, I'm not in favor of, like, introducing a quota for women on the team without some reason behind that. We want competitive teams. We want to see the best athletes competing. There's no denying that. I mean, another way we could look at this is what's the end game and why has Murderball taken the approach they have in terms of including women, which is, you know, there's one woman on the USA team this year. Like I said, there's expected to be eight in Paris overall.

Fantastic. But is the goal to use the mixed gender sort of label to get some woman onto these teams, exceptional woman, I would say, and Sarah Adam is exceptional in so many ways, onto these teams to maybe increase the visibility of women in these sports, to build the depth and to really inspire other women to participate in these sports, to get some representation, and then eventually get to a point

where there might be enough enough depth and enough competition that we could see two teams at the paralympics a men's team and a women's team is co-ed sport intended to be a path to developing the women's game or is this the end game itself in which case i would say we're probably only ever going to see, you know, one or two women on each team. In some of our research, we've also spoken to women who have been on teams that are technically co-ed, but in practice, mostly men,

in wheelchair rugby and para ice hockey, or sled hockey is the other sport we looked at. And some of these women had really incredible experiences and really successful careers on these teams and felt they were supported and felt that they had a meaningful role to play on these teams. Other women we spoke to talked about how this was a really, really lonely experience, being the only woman on the team and having to break into these very often masculine spaces, often be the first woman in that space. It was more discouraging than encouraging. And in many cases was the reason

they ended their sport career or went back to playing on, let's say, less elite teams, but where they could play with more women. So is this intended to be a step towards developing the women's sport or is this where we stop? Is there like a day you think we'll see less separation between men and women's sports at the professional level, like the NBA, you know, could a WNBA player play in the NBA one day? I know we're getting there with like refs and coaches, but do you think there's a day where we'll get there with athletes too?

In some sports, it makes a ton of sense. In other sports, maybe less sense. I mean, there are biological differences between men and women, not necessarily ones we sort of focus on. I think women can compete with men in many, many instances, but it also, I think we could be a lot more creative in how we form competitive groups and how we organize our sports. So, you know, thinking about, does it always have to be separate based on gender or sex? Could a weight class be more relevant? There are different

ways we can organize our sports. Sex integrated or co-ed sports like could serve one purpose, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't also be teams for women or other instances where it does make sense to have gender segregated sports. I mean, one of the things I love about co-ed sports is that it does create an incentive for whether it's your national team, your national organization, or your local club or your high school track team to invest in both men and women, right? Say you've got a really, really great track program at your high school, but you have a lot more men and boys competing than women, and suddenly the regional championships introduces a mixed relay. You're suddenly going to be a lot more interested in recruiting a few more female athletes to the program, right?

And making sure that they're getting the support they need so that you can enter a really competitive mixed team and maintain your championship title. The other thing I like is that, you know, it's really important for women or for girls to see women represented in sport. We know a lot about the role of having role models, of being able to see yourself.

But I would say it's almost maybe even more important that men watch women play sport. And we know a lot more women watch women playing sport than men watch women playing sport. So a mixed event might be the only time a young boy actually watches a woman compete. And that has incredible benefit as well for them to see and to recognize the athleticism of women. I think mixed sport, co-ed sports are like really incredible opportunities that way.

Andrea Bundon, School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia. Halima Shah produced. Matthew Collette edited. Laura Bullard fact-checked. Rob Byers and Patrick Boyd mixed. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. Watch some Murderball this weekend. Thank you. you