#crissyperham

(Courtesy: Crissy Perham) As part of NBS’s project commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Barcelona Games, Crissy shares special memories, the atmosphere of the games, and how she feels history should contextualize its overall impact. Can you believe it has been 30 years? Sometimes it feels like it was a really long time ago and other times I’m like “that was a decade ago.” That’s the measure we all think the 2000s was a decade ago. What was it like to be there? What was the environment like? I was so young. I had grown up this Olympic junkie. I can recall watching the ‘76 Olympics, I was six. I remember watching in ‘80 “Do you Believe in Miracles?” ‘84 in LA was like prime sports time for me. I was a huge Evelyn Ashford fan. I really wanted to be a track star. By the time ‘88 rolled around and I had qualified for trials, which wasn’t a big deal and I wasn’t able to make the team. So to make it was the culmination of a lifelong love affair with sports. But I was so young, I don’t know if the further I get away and my family says this to the more special we remember it to be, the more amazing an accomplishment it was. So to be there at the games is something I wanted to do. To see all the famous athletes walk in where we were eating and in the village, it was terrific. I absolutely felt like I belonged there. Totally understanding the history of Americans being in the Olympics so it was amazing. You mentioned walking into the village and seeing all these world class athletes and being able to interact with them, were there any in particular that you were really excited to meet? I saw Steffi Graff sitting with some friends and a couple of us asked if we could join at her table. You watch her on TV and she was so successful for long so and here she is sitting three feet away from you. She was just a regular person. That was an exciting time for me. I did get to meet a lot of people from the Dream Team. I am a huge basketball fan so that was pretty exciting. I crossed paths with some Irish boxers in the village. They were little guys. I am pretty sure that I outweighed them, I was definitely taller than them. Not necessarily famous athletes but crossing paths with those who loved their sport and excelled at their sport. It sounds like the cafeteria was the hangout spot? It definitely was. The village was pretty exciting. Another cool thing about the village is you had random athletes, media, people coming through the village. I got to meet Katie Couric and that was very exciting. I went bowling with Rick Barry. I took some pictures with him and that was pretty exciting. My husband is in the Air Force and decades later he was touring the United States visiting Air Force bases and I got to take a picture with him again. So the village was literally like wandering through a little town but your little town was famous athletes and fabulously fit beautiful people everywhere. Obviously you cannot talk about Barcelona without talking about the Dream Team. Who were the players that you got to meet and also did you get to go see them play? I did get to watch them play early rounds. A big Olympic donor and family friend named Jim Click, he is a huge fan from Tucson and he was going to the games. He was staying at the same hotel as the Dream Team. So when I was done with swimming, my family and I got invited to have dinner with them and hang out with them. We went into the lobby and Mr. Click introduced us to some people. I had already met Michael Jordan accidentally in the basement of a hotel. I got lost and he was sneaking around trying to get out. They were playing the Pacers and they were staying at a hotel and me and my dad got lost. So I had already met him. Karl Malone, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, but it was fun to meet Christian Leattner. I am not a Duke fan! I went to Arizona! He was so nice. I got to meet his sister and his mom and dad. We were just athletes hanging out at the Olympics. What was it like to win the gold medal? It was very emotional. I literally had dreamed of being on that. To stay in the moment and soak it in and yet not almost faint was kind of funny. Then all of sudden it was done. It’s surreal and it's everything you ever wanted it to be. I wish I had a better way to describe it and how emotional it was. You wish it could have lasted longer. It sounded like based on conversations we have had before that you had such a tight kit group in Barcelona. Yeah the thing about having only fifteen girls, there were so many of us that were doing multiple events. That was nice to keep the group small. To have only fifteen of us rooming together, eating together, you get to know everybody pretty quickly. We also have kind of a weird age span. We had someone like Anita who was 16. We had some freshmen in college, freshmen and sophomores. I definitely describe myself as the surprise person that made the team at the end of my college career. Then you had someone who was a world record holder like Jenny or Janet (Evans). Dara (Torres) that was her third Olympics by then. There were alot of boxes that were checked in who we brought together. We love each other. During COVID we were on a zoom call, all fifty of us. I was laying on my bed and I was just like “are you kidding me? Look at all these people that just want to stare at a computer screen just to catch up all because we had swam back and forth that one time together.” There is alot of great people a part of USA Swimming but I do feel like we had a special squad. What would you want Olympic enthusiasts to know about Barcelona? If you talk specifically about swimming, we went through a lot of challenges. We wanted to represent the United States in the most honorable way. We are just human like everyone else but we wanted it just as bad as everyone else. I think people when they get caught up in the gold medal count or how that person didn’t get that world record, there is a lot of pressure we as athletes put on ourselves. We are fallible and we want it to be as successful as you do. Read the full article

By: Zachary Draves Just 24 hours after we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, America took a profound step backward in the pursuit of equality. The Supreme Court took the extraordinary step in overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling from 1973 that granted a woman’s right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. This decision will send the issue of reproductive rights back to the states and already twenty-two are on track to implement strong restrictions if not outright bans. This was years in the making but once it went down it rocked many to the core and that included the world of sports. Athletes, coaches, teams, and leagues such as the NBA, WNBA, and NWSL took to social media, press conferences, and issued official statements categorically condemning this ruling. Tennis legend and activist Billie Jean King said “it is a sad day in America”. USWNT star and fellow activist Megan Rapinoe spoke of her frustrations in a ten-minute zoom press conference in which she said of the decision that “I think the cruelty is the point”. At Wimbledon, Tennis superstar CoCo Gauff said "we're almost going backwards”. Male athletes such as LeBron James retweeted a post from former President Barack Obama which spoke at great length about the ramifications of this decision plus putting out a call to action. Cincinnati Bengals Quarterback Joe Burrow issued a very detailed Instagram post explaining his support for this fundamental human right. The Women’s Sports Foundation, the nation’s leading women’s sports advocacy group founded by King in 1974, issued the following statement. https://twitter.com/WomensSportsFdn/status/1540420754520436736?s=20&t=rQaEqMlFX2_gCQonL8vJ4Q The outrage is palpable and for good reason. The stripping away of a woman’s right to make her own choices when it comes to her body will make life particularly more difficult especially in those twenty-two states that now have the green light to criminalize abortion. For women who want to play sports, they are now in a precarious predicament because a lack of access to reproductive health care has the potential to compromise their futures in sports and society. Nobody understands that more than former Olympic swimmer Crissy Perham. As a 19-year-old college student at the University of Arizona, she found herself unexpectedly pregnant and she made the gut-wrenching decision to have an abortion. Eventually, she would make it to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics winning two gold medals in the Women’s 400 freestyle relay and 400 medley relay as well as a silver in the Women’s 100m butterfly. Today she is a mother of two and a staunch advocate for women’s reproductive rights. She joined alongside King and Rapinoe as part of a group of 500 women athletes in issuing a historic amicus brief in the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization case in outlining their support for reproductive rights within the context of athletics. “Mandating people to have a baby that is not wanted will mean fewer opportunities to continue education, continue athletics, or continue being a member of the workforce,” she said. “It will strain families, particularly people of color without means to pay for childcare, food, housing, healthcare, etc.” Keep in mind that in those anti-choice states such as Mississippi have some of the worst rankings in the nation when it comes to health care. According to the Commonwealth Fund, Mississippi comes in last out of all 50 states including the District of Columbia in overall state health performance. Furthermore, they have the highest infant mortality rate plus rank forty-ninth when in affordable child care. So at this point, it is safe to say that if a woman wants to pursue sports, states like Mississippi have the potential to hamper her endeavors if she happens to find herself unexpectedly pregnant or the victim of rape and incest. Therefore, she will be forced to carry that pregnancy to term with inadequate social support and won’t be able to make it to classes or practice. As a result, her scholarship could be taken away and opportunities are gone. With access to birth control and contraception on the table as noted by Justice Clarence Thomas concurring opinion, we may be seeing the ongoing assault on reproductive rights for years to come. “Anyone with a uterus should have the opportunity to decide how that organ gets used, if at all” said Perham. “Reproductive healthcare includes contraception which is already being tossed around as the next way to regulate half the population. This is about a minority controlling other peoples’ bodies. It’s not right. It’s not freedom.” For millions of women and girls, sports is the epitome of women’s liberation. The ability to display their strength, vitality, and unapologetic spirit and doing so on one’s own terms. Free from the rigid constraints of traditional gender roles. Sports bring out the best in who we are when we give everyone the opportunity to play. Now that basic premise is under siege and we cannot let that happen. It’s time for us to step up to the plate with the game on the line now more than ever. Read the full article