'It's voom-VURE-ay'

A week or so ago, on May Day, the sport section of The New York Times featured a short profile of a sports development program from Zimbabwe that has successfully placed "about 150 athletes in American universities in sports like track, tennis, soccer and field hockey" in US colleges. The program was founded by a former college sprinter and football player, also from Zimbabwe. The main focus of the article was a group of these athletes, mainly male, including one in prison for tax fraud. The star of the piece, however, is Gabriel Mvumvure, a sprinter from Louisiana State University, who won the open 100-meter race in 9.97 seconds at the recent Penn Relays in Philadelphia, "the third-fastest time in the world this year." You can read the story here. The story is unremarkable, except I think it was probably the first time in a long time that I had seen a story about a Zimbabwean in The New York Times or another Western media outlet that was not about a musician or politician, especially the country's autocratic leader, Robert Mugabe. When it comes to sports, only the national cricket team gets some attention, but even that's from a while ago. And the swimmer Kirsty Coventry received some attention for winning a total of seven medals at the 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing Olympics. So I asked Wendy Willems, who teaches media studies at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, and writes about how Zimbabwe gets portrayed in British media, whether I'm missing something. Here's a quick email from her:

"The New York Times story might break with images of black Zimbabweans but I suppose it still goes along with the stereotype that all black men are good athletes? I recall another sensational, 'Caster Semenya' story about a Zimbabwean athlet from the BBC. [This time a story about a male athlete who competed as a woman.] Then if we're talking about sports, Flemish television had a reality TV how called 'Allez Allez Zimbabwe' which followed a team of Zimbabwean cyclists who were trained by a Belgian coach. I recall a terrible article from the right-wing Dutch tabloid, De Telegraaf, which seemed to accuse the cyclists of all sorts of things, ranging from impregnating girls and stealing money."