In the American women's basketball league, sex toys are flying onto the court – a nuisance for the booming sport

Who's immune to not only developing bad ideas, but also implementing them? You attend a Coldplay concert, bad enough, and get filmed blissfully embracing the scumbag . FC Zurich signs Benjamin Mendy .

But in the US – of course – in the last ten days, there have been four people who first bought a frog-green dildo, then smuggled it into a stadium, and finally threw the sex toy onto the court at a WNBA women's basketball game. And at each of these steps, they clearly decided: Yes, I'm going to do that today.

Initially, the players responded to the phenomenon with humor. "Damn, how did my thing end up there?" wrote Kierstan Bell of the Las Vegas Aces after the first incident. It was a curiosity in a country with a long tradition of people throwing strange things onto the field: In Detroit, it's still squid; in Florida, it was dead rats in the 1990s.

In the WNBA, dildo throwing has become a bizarre viral trend, a nationally discussed topic. "Stop it," wrote Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever. And she was promptly hit in the next game. Later, she said: "We work hard to make sure our league is taken seriously. How can that be achieved with incidents like this?"

The WNBA is a booming league, its popularity having exploded in recent years. Attendance now averages more than 11,000 per game. There are expansion projects in several cities, and billionaire investors are buying team shares. The young prodigious shooter Caitlin Clark has achieved national star status; a trading card dedicated to her was recently sold at auction for $660,000. That's more than eight times the 23-year-old's salary.

These are achievements that aren't in danger of collapsing when bright green plastic projectiles are thrown onto the field. But the tastelessness has a certain tediousness for many of its players. Not long ago, the league's salary levels were so lousy that many players had to accept engagements in Europe during off-seasons. The Brittney Griner case would never have happened otherwise – the American spent more than half a year in a Russian prison in 2022 for the trivial offense of possession of cannabis oil before being extradited to the USA in a prisoner exchange for arms dealer Viktor Bout .

In Russia, Griner was a teammate of Diana Taurasi, considered the greatest female basketball player in history. In a recent documentary, Taurasi took a swipe at the WNBA, saying, "I'm the best player in the world and I had to travel to a communist country to be paid like a capitalist." She earned 15 times her WNBA salary in Russia, up to $1.5 million.

Taurasi retired in February at the age of 42, but "equal pay" remains a dominant theme – at the All-Star Game, the players recently demanded unequivocally: "Pay us what we deserve." They will not be distracted by thrown sex toys.

An article from the « NZZ am Sonntag »