The 99ers: Celebrating the Mythological

In this paper, The 99ers from the espn Nine for IX series is analyzed as a sport documentary. The 99ers focuses on the highly mythologized US women’s team victory at the 1999 fifa Women’s World Cup. Celebrating the “cultural touchstone” that “irrevocably changed the face of women’s athletics,” the documentary also claims to question the “legacy” of the team and to examine “how women’s soccer, and women’s sport as a whole, has changed” (“Nine for IX,” 2013). The celebratory motif is explicit in the documentary, (re)producing the mythology of this event as a great American achievement that changed the face of women’s sport. Yet the film (re)presents the players within familiar narratives and framings of heteronormative femininity, (re)producing their success within an overarching narrative of feminized team heroic accounted for through exceptionality. Ultimately The 99ers fails to examine the mythology or the ways in which women’s sport has progressed, but it also fails to change the way women in sport media are examined.