Dirty Nails, Dirty Wheels

I just read a piece on Al Jazeera about Paraskevi Papachristou, a Greek triple jumper, being barred from the Olympics over a racist post she made on Twitter. Most of the article is perfectly acceptable journalism, but then Papachristou is described as “a blonde-haired athlete who sports a navel piercing,” information totally irrelevant to the story, so far as I can tell. Once again, a woman is described physically in a news article where her physical appearance is immaterial to the content of the piece. Bullshit. And a sort of bullshit I’ve not previously noticed on Al Jazeera, where usually the worst problems are bad copyediting. I hope this doesn’t happen again.