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.
Read more about this topic: Lolo Jones
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)