1. 10 Aug 2012 07:44 PM

   From Title IX To The XXX Games

   
   by Chas Danner
   Alyssa Rosenberg Travis Waldron catches us up on the incredible medal run by America's women during this 30th Olympiad:
   

   [They] are now on pace to win more medals than they ever have at a single Games. American women are carrying the U.S. Olympic team: [as of Friday evening], they are responsible for [27] of the team’s [41] gold medals with more likely to come, and they have outpaced every other country’s women on the medal leaderboard.
   

   Alyssa Travis notes that one of the primary reasons for this level of success is Title IX, which banned the exclusion of women from any educational program (i.e. college sports) that benefits from federal assistance:
   

   Without Title IX, many of the women on America’s Olympic team may not have made it to London, and others would have taken paths with many more hurdles along the way. In the U.S., female participation in sports has increased 545 percent at the college level and nearly 1,000 percent at the high school level since Title IX passed in 1972, and it has led to opportunities for female athletes that did not exist years ago. ... Before Title IX passed, few women received college athletic scholarships. There are now more than 200,000 women playing sports at American colleges and universities. Those women largely play low-revenue sports like basketball, track and field, soccer, and volleyball — all sports where American women either have or will win medals, most of them gold.
   

   (Photo: US athletes Carmelita Jeters, Bianca Knight, Allyson Felix and Tianna Madison celebrate next to the clock after winning gold and setting a new world record of 40.82 in the Women's 4 x 100m Relay Final in the London 2012 Olympic Games on August 10, 2012. By Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)
   
   via: Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish