MADRID (AP) — When Patricia Otero watched the president of Spain’s soccer federation tarnish the greatest victory in the history of women’s sports in Spain by…
When Patricia Otero watched the president of Spain’s soccer federation tarnish the greatest victory in the history of women’s sports in Spain by forcibly kissing a player on the lips during the Women’s World Cup medal ceremony, she was saddened — but not surprised.
For this amateur soccer player, the kiss that Luis Rubiales pressed on Spain forward Jenni Hermoso was simply the most public and notorious example of the treatment she and her teammates received as girls and young women.
“We have seen that all our lives,” the 30-year-old told The Associated Press from the southern city of Malaga, where she still plays soccer when not teaching high school. And when Rubiales tried to justify the kiss by saying it was like one he would have “given my daughters,” it sounded eerily familiar.
“I had a coach who would pat our butts, and always while acting friendly, saying, ‘You are like a daughter to me.’ And that was when you are still not adult enough to know what he is doing,” she said. “You think it is normal.”
While women still struggle for equality in Spanish soccer — Otero recalled how her team had to sell raffle tickets to play and clean their own locker rooms while boys did neither — the reaction, in Spain and beyond, to the globally televised kiss has been widespread condemnation.
Hermoso says it was not consensual, and despite claims to the contrary by Rubiales, public opinion is behind the 33-year-old player. The only continuing public support for Rubiales, 46, is from his mother, who started a hunger strike in a church in protest of her son’s downfall.
Even as the conduct of the most powerful man in Spanish soccer robbed global attention from the new world champions, Spain is taking steps to turn the crisis into a reckoning into the sexism that exists in the sport in a country where strides in other areas have placed it in the European vanguard of female gender equality.
Despite Rubiales’ insistence he did nothing wrong, Spain’s government, its players’ unions, soccer clubs, fans and most importantly, Hermoso and her teammates, saw his act as a sexist abuse of power that was no longer tolerable. FIFA, the world soccer governing body, suspended Rubiales for 90 days, and Spain’s government is moving to have him declared unfit to hold the post.
The condemnation of Rubiales, who also grabbed his crotch in a lewd victory gesture within sight of Spain’s Queen Letizia and teenage daughter, Princess Sofía, following Spain’s victory i n the Aug. 20 final, has spread beyond the government and the powers-that-be in soccer.
Fans at men’s games last weekend in the hugely popular La Liga chanted for Rubiales to go, while hundreds rallied in downtown Madrid in support of Hermoso.
