An interactive map that reveals lesbian, queer and feminist sport and fitness culture of 1970s and 1980s Sydney, and beyond.

On a freezing Massachusetts morning in 1967, nineteen-year-old Kathrine Switzer illegally entered, ran and finished the Boston Marathon, which was at that time a men-only race. Switzer was studying journalism, and running ten miles a night. Like many women athletes in the late 1960s, she trained with the men’s team, because there was nothing on offer for her. Her coach often regaled the entire team with stories of success at Boston, which he had run fifteen times, until Switzer insisted that she was good enough to run the twenty-six miles. ‘No dame has ever run Boston,’ he would reply.

The next huckster in the carnival of sport is the upcoming 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. If we want aspects of it to be in line with Aboriginal protocol, we need action from across the four winds of the world. If it’s not done right we need solidarity and protest just the same. We are each other’s safety net in this theatre of sport. As a senior Aboriginal woman activist once told me, ‘we are all only as good as we negotiate’.

Zreika's self-imposed invisibility gives us a better sense of the meaning of her choice to sit out the Pride round: not homophobia, as some have assumed, but instead a reluctance to engage in what would constitute an act of protest within the Muslim community. She is well within her rights to make that choice.

In this year's America's Cup, the government and Auckland Council made cash and in-kind contributions worth $250m to Team New Zealand. This is an enormous figure for a minority sport where practically no international spectators were present and where the ‘benefits’ are no more than amorphous claims like ‘putting New Zealand technology on the map’.

The spectacle of barely clothed, malnourished, growth-stunted-yet-impossibly-powerful adolescents performing choreographed tricks on broken bones and torn ligaments to rapturous applause is ghastly and we need to wake up to it.

The Test is a PR exercise and its omissions are glaring. Most notably, the issue of what actually led this immensely talented team to cheat in South Africa and the ongoing questions associated with it are never addressed. Instead, the viewer is taken through a tediously familiar narrative, littered with Anzackery and generalised notions of what it is to be ‘Australian’ as the team charts a heroic path from despair to triumph in the space of little more than a year.

Taking proselytising outside of the gym and into the public, marathon-running has become the ultimate way to signal patriarchal and capitalistic virtues that are otherwise difficult to measure. By simply choosing to run a marathon, mainstream feminism has allowed women to assume a morality that does not challenge the problematic structures it purportedly transcends.

It is the symbolism – not the content – of the transgender policy that is truly radical. Cricket Australia has wielded its significant cultural power to normalise transgender inclusion in national life – a commendable act of leadership.

Like most aspects of modern life, sport hasn’t escaped capitalism. Rather, it’s persistently and comprehensively shaped by economic considerations: how much advertising revenue can be generated, how many shirts will be bought if a club signs player X, how many people can be legally admitted into a stadium on matchday. The recent experience of English football club, Arsenal, exemplifies this well.

This scandal differs from the typical cycle of outrage: we’re not angry, we’re dejected. The reporting and comment have been elegiac. Commentators appear to be genuinely upset. ‘I have never seen such emotion and anguish on a national scale,’ wrote journalist Tracey Holmes. ‘Please tell me this is a bad dream,’ former Australian captain Michael Clarke tweeted. Speaking on ABC Grandstand the day after the event, a tearful Jim Maxwell sounded as if he was broadcasting from a funeral. So what exactly is being mourned?

When HBO broke the news that they would not be releasing the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones until 2019, it was left up to an unlikely Channel Seven to fill the void. Bronzed warriors and bitter foes, sweltering battles and unexpected kill-offs, cross-promotional endorsements to rival the most stomach-churning brother-on-sister incest scenes: it pleases me to say that after a fortnight of near round-the-clock drama, Game of Racquets (or, the ‘Australian Open’ to those purists who get their knickers in knot over the whole A Song of Ice and Fire thing) has re-established itself as the best binge-watch on TV.

There’s something quaint and precious about this beginning – the huge grins on the players’ faces as they run out, the excitement of the fans, and the homegrown, back-to-basics, good-old-days feeling of walking into a suburban footy ground to stand on the terraces and watch the match. It’s not only the presence of the women players. In the opening season we have seen female field umpires officiating matches, watched Bec Goddard coaching Adelaide, and been introduced to many women sports reporters and commentators.

How to reconcile the image of the man spruiking Pizza Hut with the story of how the nice Christian boy, sponsored by a syndicate of Louisville millionaires, won his first world championship against Sonny Liston in 1964 and announced his conversion to the Nation of Islam the very next day? It was a wholesale rejection of white America and everything it stood for, and the emergence of a political identity that would reverberate through Black America and around the world.

Consider, then, a team environment encased in the monolithic corporate structure of the AFL. In 2011, Essendon had a cash turnover of $5.2 million, net assets of $22.7 million, as well as 50,271 paid-up members. Only a couple of years later, the average salary for an AFL player was $265,179, with many players receiving in excess of $500,000. There is also the constant glare of the media spotlight, ever angling for the first flash of scandal.