But the Giro Donne, the one remaining “Grand Tour” race for women cyclists, passed unnoticed in early July by almost all U.S. sports media. It ended a week ago with a win by Marianne Vos of the Netherlands. Last year’s winner Mara Abbott was the top U.S. competitor, coming in 10th.

Here then, is a video of the Giro Donne, featuring some of the best female athletes in the world. I’m such a sucker for sports montages.

(The song, “Ne ho ancora,” means “I Still,” or (as translated for the English version on iTunes), “Still Ridin’,” dedicated to former junior world champion cyclist Marina Romoli, who was injured in a near-fatal crash last year.)

If you want more women on wheels, there are videos of each stage at the Giro Donne site or directly on YouTube.

Rick Welts, president and chief executive of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, has just come out as gay. It was a significant and risky move in an industry that is not known for its tolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. (LA Laker star Kobe Bryant recently paid a $100,000 fine for calling a referee a “faggot.”) And as Megan Hueter has written at BlogHer, women’s collegiate basketball suffers similar problems. Homophobia and transphobia in sports are not confined to the professional and collegiate levels, however.

For examples, we need look no further than an article last week from the Middletown Press, discussing the struggles—and triumphs—of gay and lesbian high school athletes in Middletown, Connecticut. And the 2009 National School Climate Survey, conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), found that 35.7 percent of LGBT middle and high school students avoided locker rooms because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable there, making locker rooms the most feared places for LGBT students in the schools.

Whether they are athletes or not, LGBT students—or those perceived to be—are at a high risk of being bullied and harassed at school, Nearly nine out of ten LGBT middle and high school students said they experienced harassment at school in the past year, according to the 2009 GLSEN study. Nearly a third of LGBT students surveyed said they skipped at least one day of school in the previous month because of concerns for their own safety.

But law and policy experts Stuart Biegel and Sheila James Kuehl, who wrote the paper “Safe at School” for the Williams Institute, a national think tank at UCLA Law School, say that analyses of LGBT issues often overlook “just how substantial the influence of organized sports can be on the lives of students,” and how central sports can be to school culture.

They note that even at the K-12 level, “the culture of sports often marginalizes gay and gender-non-conforming youth by perpetuating homophobia and transphobia.”

Biegel and Kuehl make three key policy recommendations to help reduce homophobia and transphobia in school sports:

• Involve key members of campus athletic programs in LGBT-related initiatives.
• Make it clear that homophobic comments and actions by coaches and student athletes are completely unacceptable.
• Encourage student athletes to participate in targeted programs such as initiatives addressing bullying and hate violence, as well as gay-straight alliances, safe zones, and wellness programs.

They also suggest that schools ask openly LGBT athletes, former athletes, and coaches to help with professional development and orientation programs for athletes. Additionally, schools should engage “the larger sports community, including student families, after-school sports programs such as little leagues and soccer leagues, local college and professional athletic programs, and others.”

Several new initiatives are attempting to address many of these same points. GLSEN in March 2011 launched Changing the Game: The GLSEN Sports Project, “to assist K-12 schools in creating and maintaining an athletic and physical education climate that is based on the core principles of respect, safety and equal access for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.” Their Web site has numerous resources for athletes, parents, coaches, and school officials, as well as inspirational videos and more.

And Hudson Taylor, a straight, three-time NCAA Division I All-American wrester, now a Division I wrestling coach at Columbia University, has launched Athlete Ally, an initiative encouraging people to sign an online pledge to reduce homophobia in sports. He is seeking high school and college students to be “Athlete Ally Ambassadors” to promote the pledge and participate in future Athlete Ally initiatives.

Hudson also offers a weekly “Ally’s Playbook” video with suggestions for how non-LGBT athletes can help reduce homophobia.

The Sports Project at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) has been around for longer than either of the above initiatives—10 years now—and is a powerhouse of advocacy and education. It also offers legal assistance for LGBT athletes and coaches.

NCLR had worked in close partnership with the It Takes a Team initiative of the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) to address LGBT issues, and while WSF unfortunately shut down the initiative last year, its great resources—including curriculum guides, case studies, action plans, assessments, and policy guidelines—live on at the WSF Web site. And It Takes a Team director Pat Griffin now heads the GLSEN Sports Project.

All great resources—but ultimately, creating change on the playing field will be a matter of personal connections, of coaches, referees, parents, and athletes speaking out when they hear anti-LGBT slurs, see anti-LGBT bullying, or encounter any athlete being marginalized for sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Like sports itself, success here is only partly about the equipment and resources, and mostly about the dedication of the players.

Yes, taking action against homophobia and transphobia can sometimes be challenging—but if there’s one thing sports can teach us, it is how to face a challenge.

You got game?

Photo credit: Clemens v. Vogelsang

Notable, too, is that ESPN writer Dana O’Neil says Faried never encountered any teasing about his family while he was growing up in New Jersey, and that his moms never had to sit down and discuss issues of acceptance with him. He just accepted, without needing an explanation. O’Neil writes of his moms: “They loved one another, they love their kids and now they love their nine grandkids. Life is only complicated if you make it that way.”

Homophobia is rampant in professional and collegiate sports, as folks like Pat Griffin have extensively documented. The fear extends to secondary schools as well, as Stuart Biegel and Sheila James Kuehl have shown. People like Faried, however (who now lives in Kentucky, not the most gay-friendly of states), may help break down the barriers. Major kudos to ESPN as well, for publishing such a positive article.

(If the embedded video above doesn’t work for you, try it at Dailymotion.)

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As I wrote yesterday, the ads were running at NCAA.com, a site managed in partnership with CBSsports.com. CBS came under fire for running FOF ads during the Super Bowl in January.

There’s still no word about future ads, or about the rumor that CBS will run FOF ads during the upcoming NCAA basketball championships, so stay tuned. Reproductive health blog RH Reality Check also covered the story. (FOF is as anti-choice as they are anti-LGBT.) The story made the virtual pages of Inside Higher Ed, though (h/t, Andy), so let’s hope that not only the LGBT community, but also the community of all fair-minded people in higher education can keep the pressure on.

This is an affront to all LGBT, feminist, and allied NCAA athletes and former athletes. I was an NCAA athlete myself, and I’m personally pissed.

I first learned of the incident from Pat Griffin’s LGBT Sport Blog. Griffin is the former director of It Takes A Team, an education and advocacy project addressing LGBT issues in sport. She observes:

The NCAA constitutional principles include an explicit prohibition on discrimination based on sexual orientation. Lesbian and gay student-athletes, coaches, and administrators are a significant part of the NCAA’s membership. Women are a significant part of the NCAA on all levels. Many of the individual institutions [i.e.,  colleges and universities] that belong to the NCAA have policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. Yet the NCAA apparently thinks it is just fine to support an anti-gay agenda.

Griffin also says (which I cannot confirm, but have no reason to doubt) that CBS plans to air FOF ads throughout the men’s NCAA basketball tournament in March “with the complete complicity, consent and support of the NCAA.” CBS, as you may know, came under fire for running an FOF ad during the Super Bowl.

NCAA.com is in fact run in partnership with CBSsports.com. It is focused on competition news and is a more commercial site than the organization’s corporate site, NCAA.org. I imagine that it is CBS that manages advertising on NCAA.com, as it does for television broadcasts. Regardless, the site uses the NCAA name and is clearly run with NCAA approval.

It’s true we shouldn’t stop an organization from advertising simply because we disagree with it. FOF, however, has beliefs and goals that are in direct contradiction to the principles of the NCAA and many of its member organizations. “Homosexual behavior violates God’s intentional design for gender and sexuality,” states the FOF Web site (focusonthefamily.org). “We support counseling and the availability of professional therapy options for unwanted homosexual attractions and behavior.”

The NCAA bylaws state, however, “The Association shall promote an atmosphere of respect for and sensitivity to the dignity of every person.”

Running ads from a virulently anti-LGBT organization in no way promotes that atmosphere of respect. Foul.

Update, 9:30 a.m.: Change.org has started a campaign to get the NCAA to take down the FOF ads. You can sign their petition here.

Griffin provides these contacts:

• NCAA Public Relations: (317) 917-6762
• NCAA Public Relations: pmr@ncaa.org
• NCAA Main Number: (317) 917-6222

If you are an alumna or student of an NCAA-member college or university (or have children who are), you might also want to drop a note to the school’s athletic director, asking her or him to request that the NCAA not run these ads.

(If the embedded video above doesn’t work for you, try it at Dailymotion.)

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She’s captured the images of Olympic skaters like Weir, Rachael Flatt, Sasha Cohen, and many others. Check them out in the Figure Skating section of her Web site. (Please keep in mind that they are subject to copyright.)

Brannen is a regular contributor to Skating Magazine, and along with 2006 Junior World Champion pair skater Drew Meekins, writes and contributes photographs to a regular column on Ice Network. One of Brannen’s drawings is in the collection of the World Figure Skating Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

If any of you have children who skate, you might want to read Sarah and Drew’s column from a couple of years back, in which they ask Johnny Weir’s mom Patti for her thoughts on being Johnny’s mom and her advice for other skating parents.

I took my own son skating for the first time yesterday, and he had a blast. I have no idea if his interest will last, but I think Patti Weir’s tips could be applied to many other sports and endeavors. It sounds like she has a healthy perspective on what really matters: “Be the positive reinforcement to your child.”

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That didn’t stop Olympic organizers from having k.d. lang perform at the opening ceremonies, or prevent NBC from using Melissa Etheridge’s “This Moment” for the closing montage of their Sunday night coverage.

This got me thinking (though perhaps my brain was addled from watching the speedskaters earlier—mmm, speedskaters): Many of Melissa’s songs seem to match up well with Winter Olympic sports, to wit:

• “Bring Me Some Water”: Cross-country skiing.
• “Like the Way I Do”: Pairs skating.
• “You Can Sleep While I Drive”: Bobsled (drivers only).
• “Brave and Crazy”: This could fit a lot. Ski jumping and halfpipe snowboarding come to mind.
• “An Unexpected Rain”: Downhill skiing (at least so far this week).
• “Nowhere to Go”: Short-track speedskating.
• “Touch and Go”: Short-track speedskating relay.
• “Precious Pain”: Pretty much any of them.
• And for the athletes who don’t medal, we have “Stronger than Me,” “I Could Have Been You,” and “No Souvenirs.”

Too much lesbian sporty geekiness? Naw. No such thing.

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My deepest condolences to Brendan’s family, who loved him unconditionally.