Does Katie Taylor get the credit she deserves??

Here is an interesting extract from the Sunday Independent.
Is the author right? Does Katie get the credit she deserves?
What do YOU think? ......

Extract from The Sunday Independent:-
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Sunday December 07 2008

Katie Taylor couldn't be much better really. In 2006 in New Delhi, she didn't just win the world lightweight title, she completely dominated the opposition. On the way to gold she had a 15-point rule stoppage in the first round and then 19-4, 20-5, 23-6 and 31-14 victories.
Last year at the European Championships in Denmark, there was a first-round knockout and two 15-point rule stoppages. Taylor received the boxer of the tournament award as she did again last week at the World Championships in China. For a change, one of her fights was close with Czech fighter Danusa Dilhafova getting within one point of Taylor after some controversial decisions against the champ. Otherwise, it was business as usual, Anna Carruthers of Australia losing 20-3, Celeste Peralta of Argentina being stopped in round one, Azzynat Gadzhieva of Russia being outclassed 20-2 in the semi-final, fancied home town contender Cheng Dong being despatched 13-2 in the final.
The Bray star stands in the same relation to women's boxing as Tiger Woods does to golf. And if her sport finally makes it into the Olympics in 2012 chances are that it is Taylor's excellence which will tip the scales in its favour.
What's not to like about Katie Taylor? She overwhelms boxers from the biggest, most powerful sporting nations in the world. She's tough enough to give a good account of herself in sparring with some of our elite amateur male boxers. She was an articulate and engaging presence on RTE's panel during the Olympics. She seems extraordinarily modest and grounded. She is an all-rounder who's given outstanding performances for the Irish soccer team.
In short, Katie Taylor has everything going for her. And when I look at her achievements, I wonder if she isn't a worthy challenger to Pádraig Harrington for Sportsperson of the Year (though maybe RTE will give it to Henry Shefflin again, who knows?) She should, by rights, be the biggest sports star in the country.
Except, of course, she isn't. It's not that her achievements don't get reported. They do. But they don't tend to attract banner headlines in the newspapers or, for that matter, any television time whatsoever. Most of us have heard of Katie Taylor but never actually seen her in action. The coverage of her feats has a dutiful rather than an ecstatic flavour to it. At a rough guess, Kenneth Egan's Olympic silver medal received around a hundred times more airtime than Katie Taylor's world titles.
Maybe this is because we're not sure about the magnitude of Taylor's achievement. Women's boxing is new and perhaps there's a suspicion that titles are easily enough achieved. Yet Taylor is beating fighters from countries that don't tend to produce poor competitors in any sport. The chances are that the Chinese and Russians she beat in her last two bouts in Ningbo had to come through pretty extensive domestic competition. And a media which lionises Gaelic footballers and hurlers whose competition comes from a very shallow population pool indeed is in no position to be dissing someone's world title.
Perhaps it's because we focus so much on the Olympics, which are viewed as a kind of once-off opportunity for minority sports to catch the national attention before being forgotten for another four years. It could be that a gold medal in 2012 is what Taylor needs to take a more prominent place in the public affections. (And also that if women's boxing doesn't make it into the London Games, she is doomed to be forever underappreciated.)
It could also be that there's something more pernicious at work. Perhaps Katie Taylor would get more notice if she was a man. Perhaps her lukewarm reception indicates that the sporting media is a citadel of old-fashioned sexism where women's sport simply doesn't get cothrom na feinne.
For years there have been arguments that women's sport should get equal coverage in the sports pages and that the reason it doesn't is that sports journalism is an overwhelmingly male preserve. Perhaps this is true. But it does bring to mind a comment Bertie Ahern made when asked if women voters were properly represented in the Dail, "women don't vote for women, they vote for me." Similarly, it appears that, by and large, women don't watch women's sport as much as they watch men's sport. I can remember going to the women's football final between Waterford and Monaghan in 1999 as a sceptic and emerging as a convert. It was a terrific match and players such as Geraldine O'Ryan and Aine Wall of Waterford and Edel Byrne of Monaghan were good enough to make you think they'd soon be household names.
It was a good time for women's football: there had been a succession of great finals and the crowds were getting bigger every year. I honestly thought that down the line if the women didn't attract capacity crowds, they'd at least be getting over 50,000. The game looked good enough to deserve those kinds of numbers.
Yet ten years on Croke Park is less than half full for women's football finals and the game remains relatively marginalised. The Cork team, which has dominated in recent years, is a magnificent unit but the names of even its best players are unknown to the casual sports fan. And the rub is that you can't really blame the media. There has been plenty of TV coverage for ladies football and camogie yet they've remained stalled in terms of mass appeal. There are more women at the male football and hurling finals than at their female equivalents.
There are obviously factors other than media chauvinism at work. Maybe the old attitude epitomised in 1934 when that great charmer Archbishop John Charles McQuaid condemned female participation at mixed sports meetings as, "a social abuse outraging our rightful Irish tradition," is still there below the surface. Or maybe it's not an Irish thing at all. In the current New York Review of Books, the American novelist Alison Lurie mentions how, "a girls school often looked most unlike a boys school. Its playing fields tended to be fewer and more discreetly placed. The implication was that girls were different from boys, less physically active."
I don't know what the problem is. But I'd like to. Because I still feel that Katie Taylor isn't getting full credit and that this has more to do with our attitudes rather than her achievements.
thephotograph@hotmail.com


So what do YOU think? Do you agree with the Indo journalist?