Laura Robinson Biography

Journalist Laura Robinson knows first-hand the challenges of being a woman in sport.  A three-time Ontario cycling champion, 1979 Ontario and Canadian rowing champion, active Nordic skier and runner, Robinson recalls an active childhood in which she was encouraged by her family to pursue her love for athletics.  She was surprised and angered to find, even at a young age, that the sports in which she participated, and sports in general, were not welcoming to girls and women. 

 

Growing up in what is now Mississauga, Ontario, Robinson discovered her interest in cycling when a group of local boys biked to her house. “I saw this long line of bicycles outside of our house and I knew that I had to be a cyclist,” she recalls.  “They just glinted in the sun and they looked so fast.  I saved my baby- sitting money for about three or four months and I bought a ten-speed.” 

 

It was after she started to pursue competitive cycling that Robinson noticed the attitude taken toward women in her sport.  “While my own cycling club was  wonderful − and they really supported me − once I went beyond and started  racing at a provincial level, it was clear that a lot  of people didn’t want the women there at all,” she says. 

 

This experience, coupled with her exposure to the women’s movement in the 1970s, inspired Robinson to tell the story of misogyny in sport.  She has made this feminist perspective the basis of her sports analysis over the course of her career.

 

In the eighth grade, thanks to the encouragement of her English teacher, Robinson discovered she had the same passion for writing as she did for cycling, and decided to pursue journalism.  “I thought I could be a writer, and I could be a cyclist, and I would always be swept away,” she remembers.  Today, the author of  six books on sport, winner of several prestigious awards for journalism and the silver medal for the 2011 Book of the Year Award from the American Library Association for her children’s book,Cyclist BikeList: The Book For Every Rider, as well as a successful athlete, Robinson has balanced her love of writing with athletics.

 

In 1992, Robinson became the first Canadian to write about sports and sexual abuse when the Toronto Star published her article, “Sexual Abuse: Sport’s Dirty Little Secret.”  Despite her expertise, Robinson often finds her comments overlooked.  “No one is talking about it. I’m talking about it. It is easier to be published in Europe,” she observes.  Even though things are starting to change, “There is still unbelievable resistance in Canada,” she says, recalling an instance in which a story linking sexual violence to sport was dropped the day before publication. 

 

It is not surprising that Robinson recognizes media representation as a major problem facing female athletes.  “First of all,” she says, “women are invisible,” noting the complete imbalance of coverage afforded men’s and women’s sporting events, regardless of the athletes’ success.  Also linked to representation is the issue of

objectification, which Robinson sees in the proliferation of female athletes featured in bikini spreads in publications like Sports Illustrated.

 

Her book, Black Tights: Women, Sport, and Sexuality, deals with the  hyper-sexualization of female athletes and suggests we re-consider sexuality, sport, and the body on a more general level.  Part of this includes a return to the pleasure of sport for the sake of sport, rather than the commoditized culture of sport we now accept.  Robinson explains, “The pleasure of sport gets lost in all that. It becomes something that people watch vicariously and try to understand their sporting experience through the bodies of others.  Generally speaking that is the bodies of male athletes.”

 

For Robinson, sport can be a location for a radical shift in thinking about bodies.  While she acknowledges the pressure to be thin that still hounds women and drives the fitness industry, she separates this from the pleasure of athleticism. “I do think that when you really get into something you forget all that stuff you’ve been taught by the media and you just really become one with the body.  That’s one of the really wonderful things about sport.  It takes you to a place where you don’t think about things like that.”

 

In her consideration of bodies and sport, Robinson puts particular emphasis on the many groups − not just women − that mainstream sports coverage renders  invisible.  “Anything that’s not a white male, and in some circumstances a non-white male, is the wrong body,” she explains.  “Of course, a disabled body, even more so.” 

Robinson’s first children’s book, Great Girls: Profiles of Awesome Canadian Athletes, highlights a number of female athletes with disabilities who generally  do not receive equal media attention.  She notes that even when the Paralympics were held in Vancouver, hardly any Canadian papers sent reporters to cover the games, compared with the intense Olympic coverage.

 

Racialization in sport also comes under criticism in Robinson’s work, such as the stereotype surrounding athletes of colour and their supposed “natural” talent for sport.

 

Robinson puts great stock in the power of youth. “Children are everything. Period,” she says.  “We really need to take much better care of children.”  In order to do this, Robinson explains we must change to a less institutionalized sports model for youth athletics.  She works for a radical re-imagining of sports and athletics as a more positive and equitable field. “We really have to care   about everyone’s bodies, the health of bodies and not bodies as spectacle,” she says.  “It is a big thing, a huge undertaking.”