The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team is set to be awarded ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Award for their fight to gain equal pay, even as many of these same women are fighting to allow men to replace women in women’s sports.
The USWNT will accept their award during the July 12 broadcast of ESPN’s ESPY Awards, which has seen lower and lower ratings for the last decade.
The United States Women’s National Soccer Team accepts the Best Team award onstage during The 2019 ESPYs at Microsoft Theater on July 10, 2019, in Los Angeles, California. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
ESPN noted that players of the USWNT settled their lawsuit against U.S. soccer to gain equal pay and won a major victory when the USSF committed to paying them the same as the organization pays members of the U.S. Men’s National Team.
“The award, which the team will receive a week before the Women’s World Cup kicks off on July 20 in New Zealand and Australia, honors a ‘member or group in the sporting world who makes a difference far beyond the field of play, impacting the world in indelible ways,’” ESPN explained in a press release.
Meanwhile, some of these same female players recently signed a letter demanding that all sports allow men who claim to be women to play as women. So, while they are working, on one hand, to force sports to pay women the same as men, they are, on the other hand, undermining their own interests by advocating to have men replace women in women’s sports.
Transgender woman Lia Thomas (L) of the University of Pennsylvania stands on the podium after winning the 500-yard freestyle as other medalists (L-R) Emma Weyant, Erica Sullivan, and Brooke Forde pose for a photo at the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming & Diving Championship on March 17, 2022, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Justin Casterline/Getty Images)
USWNT star Megan Rapinoe, for instance, signed onto a letter put out by a radical transgender activist group demanding that the federal government and state legislatures pass laws that protect men who want to play as women in women’s and girl’s sports.
The hypocrisy of being hailed as activists for women’s rights even as they also work to tear down women’s sports is thick.
If the recent past is any indication, though, not many will see this wonderful award doled out. As noted, the ESPYs awards show has been collapsing in the ratings for many years.
Last year’s ESPYs, for instance, lost 34 percent in the ratings over 2019, averaging only 2.5 million viewers, far below the 3.5 million from 2019.
But that dismal number of viewers is even worse compared to 2015, when the ESPYs earned 7.7 million viewers.
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