U.S. Women’s Soccer has been fighting a very public battle for pay parity for years.
World Cup Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist Hope Solo joined Cheddar for a special #chedHER day of programming to discuss how the wide gap has affected her life.
“Even being among the best soccer players in the world, I wasn’t making a good enough living,” she told Cheddar in an interview. “I had to supplement my income by doing appearances, by doing photo shoots, oftentimes having my former agent try to convince me to do things like Playboy.”
Solo and her teammates filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Soccer Federation back in 2016 to protest the disparities between men’s and women’s salaries in the sport.
The men, who failed to qualify for this year’s World Cup after a stunning loss to Trinidad and Tobago in 2017, have not had much luck at the biggest events.
But they reportedly get paid four times as much as their female counterparts, who incidentally have brought home three World Cups and four Olympic Golds.
Part of the reason, Solo says, is broad pay inequity that plagues so many industries. But it also has to do with how the athletes are portrayed in the media.
“We sexualize female athletes,” she told Cheddar. “Before every Olympic Game, many different media come out with a list of the sexiest female athletes. If you scroll down on any article, maybe about me, you’ll see at the very bottom, women on Sports Illustrated covers.”
The women’s team reached an agreement with the sport’s governing body last year, but it stopped short of mandating equal pay for both teams.
For full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/hope-solo-on-closing-the-gender-pay-gap-in-sports).
Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini joined Cheddar's Kristen Scholer to discuss plans for the future even as COVID-19 upended Barstool's sponsorship of the Arizona Bowl featuring the Boise State Broncos and the Central Michigan Chippewas due to the spreading omicron variant. "In our case as a company, coronavirus has been a big boom for us," she noted. "We've been able to create a lot of new programming, launch a lot of different personalities, and frankly take share from traditional media, and that's what we've done the entire pandemic." While she admitted to taking a hit on the canceled Bowl game, live events aren't completely off the table for Barstool in 2022. Nardini also talked about potential sports betting expansion following its partnership with Penn National Gaming.
Five women have been named to the U.S. short-track speedskating team for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Among those five, there was only one returning Olympian of the group, Maame Biney, who competed in the 2018 Olympics as the first African-American woman to ever qualify for the U.S. short-track speedskating team. JD sat down with Biney to discuss how she's preparing for the games.
Eric Mitchell, Sports Analyst and President & CEO of LifeFlip Media, breaks down the updated rules around testing in the NFL and outlines how vaccinated players are impacted by new return-to-play guidelines.
Carlo and Baker kick off the weirdest week of the year with all the news you missed over the holiday weekend, including calls for the CDC to shorten its isolation window as Omicron sweeps through the country.
The 2022 Winter Olympics will be without some of hockey's biggest players. The NHL and the NHL Player's Association have agreed to not participate in the men's hockey tournament at the Games in Beijing next year. The league has been forced to postpone some games because of a rise in COVID-19 cases among players. Washington Post sports reporter Samantha Pell joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss what this could mean for the Winter Olympics and the sport of hockey.
Former professional tennis player Patrick McEnroe joined Cheddar to discuss the troubling issues surrounding player Peng Shuai who appeared potentially to have been silenced following her social media post accusing former Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Shuai's subsequent disappearance, reappearance, and apparent retraction of the accusation in an interview only added to worries. "When this happened, all of us in the tennis community were very concerned. And, by the way, another thing Peng said in this interview was that she doesn't speak very good English," McEnroe noted. "Well I can assure you, she speaks darn good English, 'cause I spoke to her on many occasions over the last 15 years."
Carlo and Baker cover the heartening news on the Covid front ahead of the holiday, plus President Biden punting student loan repayments again, a new space telescope and Love, Hate, Ate: Christmas Eve Eve Edition!
The boys discuss President Biden's plans to send out free rapid tests as the testing supply chain starts to buckle ahead of the holidays. Also, why aren't Americans having more babies, and The Matrix returns.
