IN DESPERATE need of a positive female role model from these Games, the American people could do no better than Mia Hamm. A veteran of three Olympics and four World Cups, the 32-year-old football star last night added a gold medal to the one she won in Atlanta and a silver from Sydney as she marked her international retirement.
The United States women’s team’s 2-1 victory over Brazil was the last the Olympics will see of the 5ft 5in Texan and a nation will mourn the departure of the second most capped player of all time — of either sex — who transcended a minority pursuit to turn it into the highest youth participation sport in the US.
The US Olympic Committee can only wish that all its athletes were like her. Elsewhere in Athens last night, others were covering themselves in rather less glory. Tammy Crow, the synchronised swimmer, was confined to the bench as her team came third in the technical event. The 27-year-old from St Louis is returning home to serve a 90-day sentence for killing her fiancé and a 12-year-old family friend in a car crash.
Marion Jones, a triple gold medal-winner in Sydney haunted by innuendo over drug-taking, ran the second leg of the 4 x 100 metres relay heats to widespread consternation. Having failed to qualify for the 100 metres and 200 metres, she moved up the pecking order because Torri Edwards, the world 100 metres champion, had been banned after a positive test for nikethamide. Edwards, in turn, was only world champion after Kelli White, her compatriot, admitted to taking drugs.
It is not a pretty picture. Hamm is the bright spot, an antidote to the poison running through the veins of track and field. Her image is squeaky clean. Julie Foundy, a team-mate, said the screams of “Meeyaa” at matches are like a “combination of a rock concert and a slumber party”. Boys dream of going out with her, girls want to invite her over to swap football stickers.
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She is beloved by sponsors — Nike named its biggest corporate building after her — while her marriage to Nomar Garciaparra, the Chicago Cubs shortstop, was a society columnist’s dream. Yet celebrity is not something she cultivated. “She’s had trouble defining why she took off,” Jim Gabarra, her coach at Washington Freedom, said. “For a long time she fought it.”
Her inclusion in People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People was a source of embarrassment. In this regard, too, she stands apart from her fellow female Olympians. Amanda Beard and Hayley Cope, the swimmers, Logan Tom, the volleyball player, and Amy Acuff, the high jumper, were all happy to sell themselves as sex objects on the cover of FHM. Acuff went farther by posing for Playboy.
The choice for female athletes to achieve fame either by winning without ethics or performing virtually naked has left some feeling uneasy. “It is definitive of a greater social malaise in sport. What is the purpose of competition? The women of today in the US are influenced by the same values as men — money, power, position,” Sharon Kay Stoll, co-author of Who Says This Is Cheating? Anybody’s Sport Ethics, said. “Wanting to win and be successful is not the problem, it’s what we are willing to do to get the win: violate the purposes of the activity, violate others, violate ourselves.”
Hamm, and the rest of the women’s team who caught the zeitgeist by winning the 1999 World Cup in front of 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, managed to become famous without losing sight of the sporting principle. With the “fab five” from that team retiring, the search for new role models is being stepped up. A glance around other sports, with the exception of swimming, reveals a dearth of replacements.