Olympic rower to speak April 12

Saratoga Reads will cap its 12th year with a conversation with author and Olympic rower Ginny Gilder on Tuesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Gilder, author of Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX, was on the American women's quadruple sculls team that won the silver medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics. Eight years earlier, as a member of the Yale University women's crew, she took part in a headline-grabbing protest that helped define the movement for equality in college sports.

Gilder visit culminates this year's Saratoga Reads programming around The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. Set during the Great Depression, the book tells how nine working-class men from the University of Washington in Seattle competed for the gold medal in rowing at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, challenging the German boat that was rowing for Adolf Hitler.

Forty years later, in 1976, a different rowing drama played out, as Gilder and other Yale rowers staged a "naked protest" to demonstrate against substandard conditions and equipment for women athletes. In addition to improving their own lot, they were hoping to further the implementation of Title IX, the 1972 legislation requiring gender equity in educational programs that receive federal funding.

"The law of the land may have stated that female athletes were due equal rights on the playing field," said a 2012 article on the protest in the Boston Globe. But "Too often, cloaked in sweat-drenched clothes after workouts, the women waited outside in the wintry cold while the men's crew showered . . . 'Sweathogs,' some of Yale's inconsiderate male rowers called them."

Impatient with promises, Gilder and crew made their way to the office of Joni Barnett, director of women's athletics at Yale. In unison they shed their workout clothes and stood naked, covered only by the inscription "Title IX'' that they had inked across one another's backs and chests. Their prepared statement read in part, "These are the bodies Yale is exploiting. We have come here today to make clear how unprotected we are, to show graphically what we are being exposed to…"

The protesters had arranged for the presence of photographer Nina Haight and of Yale Daily News editor David Zweig, a stringer for the New York Times, who sat in a chair with his back to the nude women. Not surprisingly, the protest drew wide media attention. Wrote Steven Wulf of ESPN Magazine, "By the next year, a women's locker room was added to the boathouse .... Even more wonderfully, the cause of Title IX suddenly had a rallying cry that resonated with other women on other campuses."
 
The conversation with Gilder will be moderated by Jeffrey Segrave, a Skidmore professor of health and exercise sciences who is a noted expert on sports and society, especially the Olympic Games. He has lectured and written widely and is the editor of the books The Olympic Games in Transition and Olympism.

At the post-event reception, Gilder's book will be offered for sale by Northshire Bookstore, and Gilder will be available to sign copies.