America's Obsession With the Babe

I wrote the other day about the obsession ABC had with IRL driver Danica Patrick, almost to the exclusion of everybody else running in the Indy 500. Paul Campos of the Rocky Mountain News has some thoughts on that issue as well (h/t RealClearPolitics.com):

The media frenzy surrounding Danica Patrick's participation in this year's Indianapolis 500 was telling. Janet Guthrie broke the gender barrier at Indy a quarter-century ago, and the race has featured a female driver in 12 of the last 14 years, so by this point Patrick's gender in itself hardly qualified as news. Yet Patrick received far more media coverage than Lyn St. James ever did, who took part in the race seven times in the 1990s, when a woman in the Indy 500 was still novel.

The media's fascination with Patrick also flies in the face of declining coverage of the event overall: Indy car racing has suffered a massive loss of popularity over the past 15 years, especially in comparison to its NASCAR rival. Indeed, many of the stories about Patrick speculated that a victory in the 500 might "save" Indy car racing, by once again making it an economically viable sport. (Patrick finished fourth).

The reason Danica Patrick is supposed to save Indy racing is that she is, sociologically speaking, a "babe." A conventionally attractive young woman, Patrick has been the subject of feature stories in publications such as People, which normally pay as much attention to the Indianapolis 500 as they do to Mongolian yak races.

I thought the ABC broadcast was way over the top with their adulation of Patrick. They had a lengthy puff piece in the pre-race show featuring her, and even had her trying to downplay her looks, though she admitted that her looks had opened doors for her that otherwise might not have opened. Let's face it, if she looked like pole sitter Tony Kanaan, would the media have been interested?

It's too bad it works this way, because Patrick is a talented driver and all the noise about her appearance takes away from that. The IRL has some big problems. For one thing, many of the drivers are not Americans, and many have strong accents when they attempt English, and I think this automatically creates a divide between them and the American racing fans. No matter how good the racing might be, people want to be able to relate to the drivers, and it's hard to do if you can't understand what the guy is saying.

I would hate to think that the IRL has to rely on the success of one cute female driver to save the league. If they do, they've got big, big problems.