Rounding up some of the most intriguing reads I’ve come across this week, posted on Sports Biblio, my experimental Tumblr companion to this site, or that I have Tweeted and collected elsewhere:

• Pigskin Progessivism — George Will’s war on football, American-style, now seems to blame the political movement popularized by (an unnamed) Teddy Roosevelt for the rise and dominance of college football. Just the way the union-loving, high-tax, government-giveaway liberal majority down South likes it.
• Death Spiral — Online journalism guru and New York Mets blogger Jason Fry thinks his team’s lack of money to improve might be the last straw for his fandom.
• Stage Struck — The art of the sports profile, with an emphasis on top tennis stars, gets the profile treatment in The Paris Review from Scott Korb, who leans John McPhee’s way in identifying the master of the form.
• The Death of the Anna Kournikova Era — Was there one? Jay Caspian Kang says so at Grantland, where he wonders whether we’ve finally overcome our objectification of female athletes this summer. This is such a facile hot mess I don’t know where to start, so I’ll stop.
• Writing the Olympics — Nicolas Lezard agreed to write a thousand or so words a day every day during the London Olympics, which he wasn’t interested in. His words have become a book, “Nolympics,” just published by Penguin.
• Ajax, the Dutch, the War — Simon Kuper explains the difficulties getting information about and talking to Holocaust survivors while reporting his book, just now published in the U.S.: “Since finishing the book, I have found myself almost unable to read or hear anything about the Holocaust.”

Keeping tabs on which country is “winning” the Olympics — and we know which country this is — is one of the most jingoistic activities of an already jingoistic event, at least what is presented to American viewers.

Much has been made about the success of U.S. women athletes at the London Olympics, and there is quite a bit to celebrate. From gymnastics to women’s soccer and now boxing, the triumphs of American females at these Games were noteworthy.

Whether it’s Gabby or Alex, Missy or Candace, Sanya or Abby, they’re “our girls,” the newly-minted heroines of Olympic glory, as important to American medal collection as the men. The “Title IX Olympics,” some have proclaimed. In fact, this Tweet was making its rounds quite frequently:

“If US Women were a country, they would be ranked 3rd in Medal Count. Thank you Title IX.”

In the myopia of American culture, especially when it comes to the Olympics, this means that women have now become an integral part of the jingoistic narrative of how we will officially remember London.

This began early during the Olympics with the Stenographer of the Sisterhood, naturally, who clucked as only she can::

“The last grouchy anti-Title IX holdouts must have succumbed by now. Either that or they are hiding in their closets. Americans love to win more than anything else, and the nation’s greatest winners are now women.”

To not wax euphoric about what she does, of course, is to be “anti-Title IX,” and suggesting otherwise was implied repeatedly to those of us in supposedly resistant precincts by the American sports media herd in London.

None could be bothered to point out that Title IX has had absolutely no impact on quite a number of these sports, most notably gymnastics, tennis and boxing. Teen swimming sensations Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky are where they are — just as Janet Evans was nearly 25 years ago — because of superb club training programs more than scholastic sports, which limits their time in the pool and access to world-class competition.

This is not to diminish what Title IX has produced, but to illustrate that it’s never been the predominant factor in some sports, contrary to the assertions of women’s sports advocates and journalists pandering to an easy storyline.

The second portion of the above quote is more to the point. The maturity of women’s sports in the U.S. is feeding into our “winning” culture, which attracts all-important media and corporate sponsorship attention that improves mainstream standing. Title IX has been an important vehicle to an end that, when you think of it, runs counter to what the law was supposed to be about.

That’s an irony that will always be missed by the celebratory American media. What also isn’t being written is how truly gargantuan the gap between U.S. women athletes and female athletes around the world has become. The London Olympics revealed that the American Olympic industry — for men and women — is as strong as it has ever been. That’s the real difference, as much, if not more, than the long-term effects of Title IX.

Meanwhile, for female athletes in other countries, who in some cases were trotted out as tokens for Western media consumption, or were seen as victims of the “gender police” for other cultural reasons, their prospects don’t appear to be all that brighter with the London Games complete.

Outgoing IOC president Jacques Rogge hasn’t exactly been a paragon for gender equality in his tenure. But he is a realist, as he showed Sunday when asked about the next steps for the progress of women in sports, at least outside the United States:

“We are going to continue to discuss with the local authorities and sports ministries and try to find strategies and solutions to improve the situation.

“It will take time. The ideal situation will not be found tomorrow. This is work for probably a decade at least to see major improvements.”

In the understandable excitement over the female American exceptionalism demonstrated in London, these comments will be utterly forgotten — if they were noted at all — on these shores.

Since I can’t come up with anything terribly profound to say after Monday’s women’s Olympic soccer epic between the U.S. and Canada, I’ll link here this morning to those who were there and had the daunting duty of putting together words to describe it.

After last year’s comeback victory by the Americans over Brazil in the World Cup quarterfinals, I thought it would be hard to top such a feat. And so it happened at Old Trafford.

As I wrote after that match a year ago, and the World Cup, the Americans’ entertainment factor transcended the fact that they’re female athletes playing soccer. This was pure sporting spectacle, and Thursday’s gold medal match against Japan at Wembley Stadium ought to be another magnificent treat.

Grant Wahl, Sports Illustrated:

The U.S. women’s soccer team has a way of doing this to you: Making you think it’s over, that there’s no way these women could possibly find a way to rescue victory from defeat. It happened last year in the World Cup against Brazil, when they galvanized a nation by somehow scoring with a man down on a Hail Mary in extra time. And it happened again here at Old Trafford on Monday. All the U.S. did was come from behind three times in the second half, erasing an epic hat-trick performance by Canada’s Christine Sinclair.

Jeff Blair, Globe and Mail, Toronto:

“It’s a shame that in such an important and even game that the ref had such an impact on it,” said Sinclair. “We feel cheated. It’s a shame that in a game as important as that, the ref decided the result before it started.”

Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports

Wambach brushed off complaints about the ref as a loser’s lament and said it was in line with the relentless talking Canadian coach John Herdman did in the build-up to the game about how the Americans use “illegal tactics” such as setting picks on set plays.

Bruce Arthur, National Post (Canada)

Canada should remember this. The Olympics are stuffed with sports we care nothing about, and with athletes we only know every four years, but they’re packed with something else, too. They matter so much to the people competing that they get to us. And so when Simon Whitfield runs to gold in Sydney, we remember. When Joannie Rochette skates her heart out for bronze, we remember. We should remember this.

Michael Lewis, Newsday

If they gave out awards for Olympic drama queens, the U.S. women’s soccer team would get a gold medal.

Cathal Kelly, Toronto Star

We celebrate victories, but we also celebrate classics. If all those great Canadian triumphs we like to talk about — from ’72 onward — were celebrations, this team’s 4-3 loss at the Olympics was Lear on grass. It was Macbeth. It was a great tragedy. Emphasis on “great.”

The Olympics have just started, and I can’t wait for them to end.

That’s what I have thought over the years watching the Opening Ceremonies and first few days of the Games.

But not for the reason you may imagine.

I’ve always wanted the Olympics to hurry up and get over so Bud Greenspan could complete his amazing documentaries of the games. After covering the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics, I knew I was missing so much more of what was in my midst.

As I watched the festivities from London over the weekend, I remembered that these are the first Olympics since Greenspan died on Christmas Day 2010.

There’s been quite a hullabaloo over NBC’s insistence on “plausibly live” prime time coverage in the age of instant media. But who’s going to stop the clock hands and tell the stories, timelessly and methodically, to preserve them for the ages?

After two days of the Olympics, the events already have come and gone like a blur, crammed onto multimedia platforms and over-the-air snippets, many seen only fleetingly on an iPad application before something newer, fresher, more compelling comes along.

I admit to being addicted to the ease of watching what I want, when I want, and as it happens. But who’s going to sort through what transpires over the next two weeks, long after the Olympics are over, and help us see the Games in a whole new way?

We’re dearly missing the gifted storytelling of Bud Greenspan, who came in behind the Games to help us understand what happened, and to appreciate why these moments should never be forgotten.

International pressure on Saudi Arabia to send women athletes to the London Olympics has paid off. But some working to improve the plight of females in sports and life in that country are skeptical it has more than symbolic value. Says Saudi sports website editor Ahmed al-Marzooqi:

“We are still disappointed here. I should be happy for them, but this will do nothing for women who want to be in sport in Saudi Arabia.”

But presentation is paramount for Saudi observer Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

“This flies against the traditions of having a woman not make a public display of herself or mixing with men. Now, the world could see women marching with men in the opening ceremony and – even more – women running in competition.”

Indeed, the United Nation’s Special Adviser on Sport for Development and Peace, Wilfried Lemke, declares that the Saudi “decision marks a significant progress in realizing the right of all to take part in physical and sporting activities, and hence achieving greater gender equality in sport.”

Gender equality is, of course, a highly Western concept, untroubled by the real difficulties that remain inside Saudi Arabia, where extreme cultural resistance to women in public life could turn into even stronger revulsion with the presence their women competing in London.

For the UN, IOC and others demanding the Saudis break the gender line (it wasn’t really a “decision” at all), this is merely one more box to check on their checklist of symbolic acts regarding “equality.” It’s also meant to quell critics, primarily from the United States and other countries with advanced status for women, and who have been making the most noise about the Saudi absence.

Qatari women in the Olympics. Check.

Brunei women in the Olympics. Check.

Saudi women in the Olympics. Check.

The only three nations sending Olympians to London that have never included women before. Check.

Gender equality in sports and in life is indeed a wonderful thing. It’s not hard to understand why pressure would be exerted on a country that doesn’t allow women to vote, drive or be seen in public unaccompanied by a male, much less one that disapproves of female athletic activity. But the pressure groups clearly didn’t regard the realities for the women they claim to be helping and who fear a post-Olympic backlash.

Says Rawh Abdullah, a captain of a female soccer team in the Saudi capital, Riyadh:

“We have to wait. I am afraid of their reaction, if we push too hard. We risk being shut down completely, and I do not want to reach a dead end because of impatience.”

She’s stressing the importance of developing sports for women inside the kingdom from the ground up, on an organic basis, as slow and grinding as that may be. Failing to listen to the voices of those inside Saudi Arabia with the most to lose from this act of symbolism figures to make the work of changing laws and society from within even more onerous.

As al-Marzooqi says:

“It’s a conflicting situation. It may be good for the future, but it’s definitely not good for the present situation. There will be side effects.”

Hope Solo is once again in the news for some of the wrong reasons – being warned for a positive test for a substance she takes for pre-menstrual purposes and discussing athletes’ debauchery at the 2008 Olympics.

The U.S. women’s national soccer team goalkeeper is either a breath of fresh air or hot air, depending on your point of view (or perhaps some of both). In a profile in The Daily Beast this morning, she’s just as blunt about the life of a professional female team-sport athlete, and what she has to do to pay the bills and raise awareness for her sport.

While some leading women’s sports advocates bemoan this state of affairs — especially when it comes to supposedly suggestive magazine poses — Solo is living in a very different world. As she tells Andrew Romano:

“My soccer salary would only make me an average living. So we can’t just market to little girls constantly. We need to start selling tickets to the masses. To middle-aged men. To all walks of life. At the end of the day, these stupid photo shoots are about bringing more recognition to the game, getting bigger contracts, and putting ourselves on the same level as the men.”

The recent demise of the Women’s Professional Soccer League, where Solo made her living for the last three years, has prompted some sobering discussion of the possibilities, and immediate realities, of her sport.

These are first-world women’s sports issues, of course, and with the London Olympics less than two weeks away, more attention will be paid to the first female Olympians from Saudi Arabia and the debut of women’s boxing.

It’s also the first Olympics in which American women will outnumber their male counterparts, a fact that has received plenty of Title IX clucking on these shores. But the alleged flip side to all this good news, as Jeré Longman of The New York Times surmises, is this:

“Women also continue to be sexualized in the marketing of their sports. Both badminton and boxing considered requiring women to wear skirts but backed off in the face of widespread criticism and ridicule, making skirts optional.”

This is hardly the first time Longman has parroted the agony aunts of women’s sports I profiled in “Beyond Title IX.” Now he just takes it upon himself to speak for them, and by their own presumptuous logic, all female athletes.

It’s this silly and trivial obsession over attire, and posing, that generate far too much attention in major American press outlets, oblivious to the realities of women athletes and their everyday pursuit not only of Olympic glory, but for the means to continue to do what they love.

The Amateur International Boxing Association is now saying skirts are optional for competitors in the first women’s Olympic boxing tournament in London.

Another first-world crisis has been averted.

This optional position is probably the best, given the mixed opinions from the boxers. Some were incensed about what might have become compulsory; others were not.

In free Western societies this shouldn’t regarded as be the greatest indignity, although there has been plenty of serious squawking from the usual suspects about this affront to equality.

For female athletes in Afghanistan, just getting in the ring is a miracle. Especially those few participating in combat sports who are defying the remnants of harsh Taliban proscriptions against their very participation in society.

Sadaf Rahimi, 17, is training for the London Games near a stadium in Kabul where women were once stoned for adultery:

“I hope the Taliban don’t come back and take over. But if they do, I urge them to let women engage in sports and go to school.”

There’s no mention what she was wearing. As if that mattered. But it’s not hard to guess.

The Christmas Day death of Bud Greenspan, the official documentarian of the Olympics since 1984, is generating the typical fond remembrance pieces from the likes of Alan Abrahamson and Richard Sandomir, among others.

What I found most striking about some of Greenspan’s “official” work is how he didn’t make distinctions between male and female athletes in his storytelling. To be sure, the gender of the athletes depicted is obvious. But in his filmmaker’s eye and mind, a great story doesn’t differentiate.

Recall the 1984 Los Angeles Games, when the International Olympic Committee began moving out of the stone age and began offering competition in a number of sports for women, including the first women’s marathon. There also was the controversial 3,000-meter run involving Mary Decker and Zola Budd.

This also was a period of great contention in women’s sports in the United States, two years after the NCAA began sponsoring national championships for women (a move that the now-defunct AIAW fought vigorously, to no avail), and during a time in which Title IX officially wasn’t being enforced. In the Grove City v. Bell decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that only educational programs receiving direct federal aid were subject to the non-gender discrimination statute.

For four years, women’s sports activists were predicting doomsday, when in truth, women’s sports — especially at the college level and under NCAA auspices — made great strides. To cite one example, 1984 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team, coached by Pat Summitt and including a very young future Olympic legend in Teresa Edwards, roared to the gold medal.

To be sure, the absence of most Iron Curtain nations, especially the Soviet Union, was quite notable. But the cries that women’s sports were sliding back because of the Grove City ruling — and which died down only after Congress passed the overriding Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 — were also muted by the simple, eloquent examples of female athletes that Greenspan brought to the screen.

Say what you will about the IOC in recent times — and there’s plenty of hot air coming from the usual places — Greenspan didn’t overlook the stories of women competing in obscure events, some for the first time.

And say what you will that women athletes today remain invisible. But take a glimpse, if you care, at Greenspan’s profile of women cyclists in 1984 that few have heard of before or since. He gave visibility to athletes of both genders in sports that get just one chance every four years to capture a fleeting moment of glory. Luckily for all of us Greenspan’s eye was very sharply attuned.

Not long after I scarfed up a copy of David Maraniss’ “Rome 1960,” sports business and politics writer Henry Fetter recalls just how low certain sports rated in the American athletic imagination, and how these deficiencies dovetailed perfectly into a certain candidate’s Cold War electoral message:

“By the time the Rome games ended, American fortunes in men’s track and field had recouped somewhat, but it was the American setbacks during the first week that resonated the most—defeats and disappointments that meshed perfectly with Kennedy’s successful campaign theme of a once-mighty America that was losing ground in the contest for the global preeminence that many Americans claimed as a birthright. It turned out to be very close election.”