ON Wednesday, Glasgow City women’s football team unveiled their new away strip. Typically, this would be nothing to write home about but Glasgow City’s new strip has grabbed the headlines because of the slogan that is printed on the back of each player’s top.

It says: “You can’t be what you can’t see”. The aim of including this on each player’s strip is to highlight the importance of visible role models within sport for young girls and pointing out that if these young girls do not have women to look up to, they will be far less likely to aspire to become an elite athletes themselves.

There is no dispute that men’s sport receives far greater coverage and support than women’s; recent statistics suggest that only 7% of all sports media coverage is dedicated to women’s sport while less than 0.5% of sports sponsorship is given to women’s sport.

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I am the first person to champion giving women’s sport and female athletes greater coverage and I know I am not alone in believing that some of Scotland’s greatest sporting role models come in the shape of female athletes. Is there anyone you would rather your kids looked up to than Laura Muir, Katherine Grainger or Katie Archibald?

However, Glasgow City’s decision to blatantly call out the media is an intriguing one. They seem to have decided that this approach is going to produce better results than working with the media to increase coverage that way. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with them – there are particular media outlets which have no interest in covering women’s sport and will try to get away with doing as little as possible. But there are other outlets – and I know I’m biased but this one in particular – that are happy to give women’s sport a decent platform.

In a significant number of Scottish media outlets, women’s sport gets covered as extensively as everything other than men’s football and rugby. Few people could argue that Laura Muir’s record-breaking runs this year have not been afforded ample coverage or that Eve Muirhead’s curling team do not get the attention they deserve.

The biggest issue in Scotland is not that there is no interest from the media in covering women’s sport, rather it is that men’s football remains so dominant that everything else is pushed to the side. Women’s football has a huge opportunity to grab the spotlight this year; the Women’s European Championships are not competing with a men’s tournament, nor a multi-sport games this summer and so, if Scotland do well, the team’s exploits will be covered extensively by the majority of media outlets.

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Women’s sport still has a considerable way to go before anything close to parity is achieved. Will Glasgow City’s method speed the process up at all? Only time will tell. I don’t blame them for trying – but it remains to be seen if this is the best approach to take.

AND ANOTHER THING...

Earlier this week, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) were accused of failing to investigate a raft of positive drug tests during its re-analysis of samples from the 2008 Olympic Games. The claim was made by the German broadcaster ARD, which exposed the Russian doping scandal, with the most striking aspect of their investigation the claims that positive tests from Jamaican male sprinters were ignored. This is, clearly, quite an accusation.

The broadcaster claims that that IOC and WADA took no action over the presence of clenbuterol, which is a banned steroid, in the urine samples of a number of unnamed athletes. ARD’s programme alleged that the positive tests were not pursued and WADA has since released a statement confirming that if levels of clenbuterol are low enough, the substance could reasonably have come from contaminated meat and so pursuing the athlete for an anti-doping rule violation would be unfair.

This assessment may well be true but the real issue here is that WADA and the IOC do not have the authority to decide to ignore tests whenever they see fit. The public already have considerable reservations about the levels of transparency shown by these bodies; this new claim will not help.

The IOC and WADA are already fighting what looks to be a losing battle towards restoring trust in sport. They are also fighting to restore credibility in both their organisations and events in recent years has left the public with little faith that either the IOC or WADA have any real desire to do everything required to clean up sport. The levels of clenbuterol in the Jamaican athletes’ tests may well by entirely innocent. But it is quite astonishing that the IOC and WADA have such little self-awareness that they failed to recognise that if they were found to be ignoring positive samples – justifiably or not – they would be absolutely pilloried. It is yet another example of why the old guard in these organisations needs to be cleared out and if there is any hope for recovery, a new wave of individuals who are willing to do everything it takes top clean up sport must be appointed.