'Lolo Jones Outclasses Her Critics':
American hurdler Lolo Jones occupies that usually enviable spot where marketing appeal and athletic achievement intersect. Unfortunately for Jones, when the former outstrips the latter, the backlash from media backbiters indulging their petty cynicism can be ruthless.
Jones’s hardscrabble upbringing and her tragic failure four years ago in Beijing, where she tripped over the penultimate hurdle while in position to win gold in the 100m hurdles, had made her a figure of sympathy and rooting interest for the American public heading into these games. Her Christianity, her high-profile self-identification as a virgin, and her striking good looks made Tim Tebow comparisons inevitable, and just as inevitably, there was a media counterattack.
Prior to Jones’s fourth-place finish in the 100m hurdles in London, the
New York Times unleashed a scathing piece that derided her as a marketing creation who was exploiting her looks and her backstory of poverty in a “sad and cynical” campaign of self-promotion. “Essentially, Jones has decided she will be whatever anyone wants her to be — vixen, virgin, victim — to draw attention to herself and the many products she endorses,” snarked the piece’s author, Jere Longman, who went on to compare Jones to tennis player Anna Kournikova, the media’s whipping girl in the category of style over substance.
No, like Kournikova, Jones is merely a world-class athlete who has failed to check the right boxes to satisfy the
Times’s sensibilities.
As this episode has made clear: They might not be champions, but both Jones and Kournikova are far better at their craft than Longman is at his.
http://www.nationalreview.com/right-field/313403/lolo-jones-outclasses-her-critics-rob-doster
