The recent piece by Caroline Murphy for ESPNW and the response by David De Remer have opened an important discussion about women’s sports in the Olympics and the media coverage thereof. From my perspective, we risk getting stuck in a paradigm where we allow the IOC and its male, Eurocentric views of sport to dominate the discourse on either side. Although De Remer takes Murphy to task for aping the IOC line, which was surely rooted in sexism and the attempt to find an excuse to exclude women’s sports, my sense is that Murphy was actually saying something different. She was expressing the sense of embarrassment many in the women’s hockey community feel that more teams can’t mount a spirited challenge to the U.S.-Canadian hegemony. She is worried that the sport won’t be taken seriously if it keeps being a two-team affair. She happened to couch this worry in unfortunate terms, by seeming to buy into the media rhetoric that lack of parity is what got softball cut and could get women’s hockey cut by the Olympics. What actually happened with softball, though, was that it was a package deal with baseball. Baseball was probably a victim of both anti-U.S. sentiment and a focus on Europe that works to the detriment of sports popular elsewhere. There is, after all, an entire separate Olympics dedicated to sports that can only be played in extremely cold weather and most of which were developed in Europe. Baseball, with its world popularity stemming mostly from Latin America, doesn’t have much pull.
De Remer is right that we expect more from a women’s sports site than a repetition of the tropes we find elsewhere in the media. He is also right that this discourse helps discourage federations in other nations from investing in their teams, even to the small extent they already do. However, there must be a way to talk about our frustrations with the parity issue. It must also be possible to discuss the worry that non-competitive tournaments will give the IOC cover for cutting women’s hockey. Neither of these need necessarily feed into sexist narratives. If we proceed from a position of respect for the sport, we can have more frank and open dialogue.
The First Line 
Hi Jessica, I fully agree that Caroline’s heart was in the right place, and that she was hoping for a closer World Women’s Championship for all the reasons you describe. I agree there needs to be honest discussion about the parity issue.
But I will always criticize any parity discussion that suggests (1) any sport lacking parity deserves to be dropped from the Olympics (2) we should root for the successful national programs to fail, or make these athletes feel guilty for their success.
My assessment of the softball experience is that the “victim of their own success” narrative became dominant, while the injustice of dropping softball in the first place was mostly forgotten. Instead I would like to see the discussion of women’s hockey parity proceed as follows:
(1) end any discussion of dropping the sport from the Olympics. The only way I would sympathize with this sentiment is if the US or Canada were guilty of holding back the development of the rest of the world, but that’s hardly the case.
(2) other countries’ hockey federations should be shamed for any relative lack of support of women, not the US and Canada for their dominance.
(3) we should be rooting for all nations to continue to improve and for the European nations to close the gap by hitting a moving target.
I don’t buy the much-repeated claim that their was a silver lining for the U.S. loss to Sweden in 2006 because it was good for women’s hockey. I’ll never attach such value to any particular game outcome. I would cheer for signs that Sweden or any other country can compete with a fully functional US or Canada program on a sustained basis, and that one result clearly did not pass that test. Others have argued that result was necessary for IOC politics and keeping the game alive, but that result didn’t stop Rogge from threatening to drop the sport 4 years later. Similarly, Japan beating USA softball for the 2008 Beijing Gold ultimately didn’t do much to help softball’s reinstatement ambitions in 2016. So I see no reason to ever cheer for the dominant programs to lose purely for political reasons, and this contrasts with the message I expect most readers took from Caroline’s post.