Back to Paris! 🇫🇷

This week's issue of the best in women's sports is presented by Joni. Get 10% off your Joni order of sustainable period products with the code FEISTY at getjoni.com.

"The game should have been on a national television broadcast. You shouldn't have to pay for any type of subscription to see a game that's historic."

- The Connecticut Sun's DiJonai Carrington on the historic sellout game at Boston's TD Garden — with 19,000 fans!

Three big stories to know this week in women's sports

1. Your guide to the Paralympics

It's time to head back to Paris! The Paralympics start tomorrow — and did you know it's grown into the 3rd largest sporting event in the world. There will be 23 sports and 4,400 athletes, with 2 million tickets already sold ⭐

LISTEN: Our Feisty Croissants & Commentary episode on the history of the Paralympics and how classification works in the Games

Some events you don't want to miss

You can see the full Paralympics schedule here. But there are some big stars and key races you want to circle on the calendar:

Swimming: There are 141 medal events across catagories, spanning almost the entirety of the Paralympic Games — and ending with the 4x100 mixed medley relay on Sept. 7.
- Jessica Long was just 12 years old when she won three golds in Athens; this year she'll be going for the 400m free, 100m backstroke, 100m fly, and 200m IM.
Track & Field: Because of the shorter timeframe for the Paralympics, swimming & track happen at the same time! (Start planning your viewing now.)
- Sept. 8 - The wheelchair marathon is set for the final day with a historic tour of Paris (though a different course than the Olympic marathon) — and six-time Paralympian Tatyana McFadden will be going for her 5th medal in these games (competing in everything from the 100m to the marathon)
Cycling: There are six road race events for women, based on classification, with the courses on a looped route that tours the city so that distances can be adjusted for the different events.
- Oksana Masters has competed in the Paralympics in skiing, rowing, (with 17 medals!) and now cycling. She'll race the road race and time trial on Sept. 4 and 5.
Paratriathlon: Divided into two days of racing based on classification, with athletes swimming in the Seine and biking on the Champs-Élysées.
- Sept. 1 - The U.S.'s Grace Norman lost in Tokyo to GB's Lauren Steadman in the PTS5 division — but Norman hasn't lost a race in two years now. Who will come out on top?
- Sept. 2 - The sprint finish in the wheelchair race became an NBC and ESPN highlight. Both Kendall Gretsch and Lauren Parker are back in Paris.
Sitting volleyball: The women's U.S. team is going for a three-peat — with finals on Sept. 4.
Wheelchair rugby: A mixed gender sport in the Paralympics — called "murderball" for obvious reasons once you see it! — and the U.S. team will have a woman (Sarah Adam) on their team for the first time.
- The U.S. plays Canada on Thursday (Aug. 29) in group play, but it's an uber-condensed tournament with the gold medal match on Sept. 2

How to watch

In the U.S., Peacock will be streaming nearly everything, with highlights also airing on broadcast NBC and USA.

In Canada, it'll be on CBC. And you can check out the rest ofthe global broadcasters here.

And some fun Feisty things just for fun

- Let's get the fit checks! (Notable for the magnetic zippers, btw, and braille) And the gear packing!

- Plus, we want to see the Athlete Village!

- This is a cool data graphical representation of the Paralympics

- Yes, they're Paralympians, not Olympians; but the Paralympics is also dropping the ban on Olympic ring tattoos

- And, the athletes want you to know they're not participating, they're competing

World champ Lauren Parker at last summer's test event. (Photo: Wagner Araujo/World Triathlon)

2. And it's UTMB week for the world's top ultrarunners 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️

Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (known as UTMB) started 21 years ago as a wild 106-mile race through three countries (France, Switzerland, Italy) and nearly as many mountain passes (33,000ft of elevation!) — but now it's turned into a kind of unofficial world championship of trail and ultrarunning. That's also come with a lot (!) of growing pains and controversy this last year!

2,500 runners — though typically just about 9-11% women — will now tackle the namesake event starting on the evening of Aug. 29. Where the average finish time is a whopping 40 hours. But thousands of others (including many top pros) will race events throughout this week — shorter but still wildly tough and championships in their own right! That includes:

CCC - the 100km championship event
OCC - the 57km championship race
MCC - the locals' 40km race
TDS - the 148km just-short of the big cheese
PTL - a multi-day 300km tour completed in teams

Who could win?

Reigning champ (and course record holder) Courtney Dauwalter isn't starting, neither is 2nd place Katharina Hartmuth. But you do have the top four women from Western States, earlier this summer — including American-living-in-France Katie Schide, who put on an absolute tour de force at both Western States and her Canyons 100K UTMB-qualifier.

READ: Women's UTMB race preview

WATCH: UTMB has a full Youtube playlist of highlights & live coverage on UTMB Live

3. The NWSL's new collective bargaining agreement is ground-breaking for U.S. sports ⚽

This week — years ahead of schedule — the National Women's Soccer League announced a new deal with the players' association that not only increases player compensation but also makes some fundamental changes to how the league will treat athletes moving forward.

Key features of the new contract:

Most revolutionary, the agreement abolishes the draft
It also creates free agency for all athletes without restrictions, forbids trades without players' consent, and guarantees contracts
Players get expanded maternity benefits and childcare
And, teams will be held to a minimum spend on compensation for sharable revenue from the previous year's media deals
Minimum player salaries will also increase from $37,856 to $48,500 and to $82,500 by 2030 — with no maximum salary and an increase in the team salary cap to $3.3 million (up to $5.1 million in 2030)

Some of these things — like abolishing a post-college draft and eliminating trades (which can uproot athletes' lives without their say!) — are fundamentally new for major league American sports, but are specifically aimed at keeping the league competitive on the global market and positioning it for the future.

Here at Feisty, we always like to say that: Women's sports don't have to do success the same way men's sports traditionally have; we can can come up with new models and redefine what these structure look like for us. 👏

Tip of the week

Many of you will probably not be shocked to learn that a new analysis has found doctors' and nurses' pain management decisions disfavor female patients. Female patients are less likely than male patients to be prescribed pain relief medication for the same complaints — which, of course, can adversely impact their health.

That discrepancy is even more pronounced when it comes to Black patients, as racial bias in physician's pain assessment and treatment has long been a problem. These implicit biases can also lead to dismissiveness when it comes to health complaints.

Women with chest pains were more likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness than men with chest pains. And women and people of color, who were experiencing chest pains, were more likely to wait longer in the emergency room.

What can be done about this? Well, ideally, medical schools and systems work to undo these decades and centuries of learned biases. But also, more doctors who are women and people of color can help move that needle. One study found that hospitalized women treated by a female doctor were less likely to die!

READ MORE: 'Sex bias in pain management decisions'

Enter to win an Olympian's bike

If looking like a pro will make you faster, then have we got a deal for you 😝 Enter to win Grace Brown's road bike — who won the gold medal in the time trial at the Paris Olympics. Then it's up to you if you ride it or mount it on your wall!

If you don't win, well, don't worry, you can still check out the pre-owned bikes on buycycle.com. They've got over 20,000 road, gravel, tri, and mountain bikes — with easy shipping, excellent customer service, and safe payments. And now you can use the code LIVEFEISTY to get free seller protection when you sell a bike on buycycle.

The highlight reel

🚲 🚲 We tracked down Lael Wilcox as she biked by on day 91 of her around-the-world cycling record attempt. You can also listen 🎧 to her daily podcast to keep up!
🚲 Lauren Stephens won Gravel Worlds (not the official world championships, a big gravel race long called "Worlds") just one week after winning SBT GRVL.
🚴‍♀️ SBT also announced it will utilize separate starts for the elite men's & women's field for all future races.
The One Water Race — an insane race that covers about 200m of running & 50km of swimming — had only three teams finish and was won by the team from Sweden/Australia after 50 hours.
🚵‍♀️ The Mountain Bike World Championships start today in Andorra with the short-track race on Friday, the downhill on Saturday, and the cross-country race on Sunday. It will also be French gold medalist Pauline Ferrand-Prevot's last world champs — because she's going back to the road!
🏊‍♀️ 🚴‍♀️ 🏃‍♀️Feisty's Sarah True won Ironman Canada (after surprise letting us all know she was racing on last week's podcast), Caroline Pohl pulled off a gun-to-tape victory at the Ironman 70.3 European championships, and Charlene Clavel won the World Triathlon Long-Distance world champs.
Elise Cranny broke the oldest track American record this weekend: the outdoor 3,000m. 🏃‍♀️
🥇🥇🥇There were 19 (!) world records (and 31 American records) set at the Track & Field Masters World Championship — including 60-year-old Neringa Jakstiene's world records in the hurdles and long jump (and the pentathlon), 65-year-old Elizabeth Deak's 1:07.66 400m & 51-year-old Kristy Matthews' 1:00.00 flat 400m.
Bahrain's track federation has been sanctioned for systemic doping violations and banned from naturalizing any more athletes.
🥇🥇🥇 Another set of age-group world records (!) were set at the US Masters Swim National Championships 🏊‍♀️ 🏊‍♀️ — including Laura Val's 2:29.56 200m freestyle in the 70-74 age group! The oldest swimmer at the meet was 102-year-old Maurine Kornfeld.
🥎 Amanda Lorenze won the Athletes Unlimited individual pro softball championship.
⛹️‍♀️ Paige Bueckers has signed onto Unrivaled's 3x3 basketball league.
The Minnesota Lynx retired Maya Moore's jersey in an emotional ceremony. (Moore stepped away from her basketball career at its height to devote herself to proving the Jonathan Irons was wrongly convicted, and they later married.) The Seattle Reign also retired Megan Rapinoe's jersey — a first for the NWSL team.
To kick off the U.S. Open 🎾, Billie Jean King & Coco Gauff volley'd a few. Gauff then opened her tournament defense with a strong win — but the odds are favoring a new Grand Slam victor.

Your Feisty recommendations

What to watch: Rising Phoenix — a Netflix documentary on the Paralympics

What to read: "Pack Lunch, Drop Kids Off, Skate, Work"

What to listen to: Brain Storm, our all new special series on concussions with Rebecca Rusch and Selene Yeager, launches on Monday

What's confusing us: Grindr has launched a new grunting tennis-inspired notification sound for the U.S. Open 🤔

What's gone viral: A fight that broke out during UMass-Rutgers women's soccer game has gone weirdly viral — even though we'd like to point out there are plenty of fights in men's games all the time...