Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
June 4, 2009, Washington Post

Who Says Female Athletes Can't Finish First?

Sports fans are disappointed that Rachel Alexandra, this year's superhorse, will not race Saturday in the Belmont Stakes, the third part of horse racing's Triple Crown.

Rachel Alexandra caused all sorts of excitement when she beat the Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird, in the Preakness three weeks ago. Television ratings for the race were sky-high. Afterward, Rachel Alexandra even posed for Vogue, the fancy fashion magazine.

The reason for all the excitement is simple. Rachel Alexandra is a filly, a girl horse. Most of the top racehorses are colts, boy horses. It's always interesting and fun, even in a horse race, when the girls challenge the guys in sports.

Lots of girls compete against boys at younger ages in sports such as soccer, basketball and baseball. Did you see that recently a 12-year-old girl, Mackenzie Brown, threw a perfect game in the Bayonne, N.J., Little League? Brown struck out 12 of the 18 batters (all boys) she faced.

But it isn't often that women compete against men at the highest levels of professional sports. Top male athletes tend to be too strong and too fast for even the best female athletes.

Still, it does happen. Check out the jockeys riding those powerful racehorses. Some of them are women. Julie Krone, probably the greatest female jockey ever, was the first woman to win a Triple Crown race. Krone rode Colonial Affair to victory in the 1993 Belmont Stakes.

Similarly, three of the 33 drivers in this year's Indianapolis 500 auto race were women. Danica Patrick, who may be the most famous female race driver around, finished third.

Female professional golfers have, on occasion, played in the men's PGA events. A few years ago, Annika Sorenstam, maybe the greatest female golfer ever, competed in the Colonial golf tournament. And teenager Michelle Wie teed it up against the guys in several tournaments.

Men and women professional tennis players compete against each other in mixed doubles matches.

Tennis is also famous for another "Battle of the Sexes."

In the 1970s, a 55-year-old former Wimbledon tennis champion, Bobby Riggs, challenged the best women professional players. Riggs didn't think the female pros were very good. He easily defeated Margaret Court, the No. 1 women's player in the world. But later Billie Jean King trounced Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, before a huge crowd in Texas and a national television audience.

Last week boys and girls competed against each other in another sport: the National Spelling Bee. (Hey, spelling is as much a sport as chess.) Even ESPN covered the spelling bee. Anyway, Kavya Shivashankar, a 13-year-old girl from Kansas, won the championship by spelling "Laodicean" (which means "lukewarm or indifferent in religion or politics"). She beat 150 boys and 142 girls to take the title.

So from Rachel Alexandra to Kavya Shivashankar -- and lots of women athletes in between -- girls rule.

Fred Bowen writes KidsPost's sports opinion column and is an author of sports novels for kids.

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