Criticism
On August 4, 2012 Jones came under heavy criticism from Jeré Longman of The New York Times who maintained that "This was based not on achievement but on her exotic beauty and on a sad and cynical marketing campaign". Janice Forsyth, director at the University of Western Ontario, compared her as the Olympic equivalent to tennis' Anna Kournikova, who had never won a WTA Tour singles tournament but became well-known after appearing in numerous photo shoots and product advertising images.
Jones rejected these criticisms, saying that her critics should be supporting the U.S. Olympic athletes, whereas instead they just "ripped me to shreds". Jones also stated The New York Times did not do its research properly, as unlike Kournikova, she had won several major races, including two world indoor titles and holding the indoor American record.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)