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Her name is Jasmine Camacho-Quinn. Stop reducing her and other female athletes to relatives of men

TOKYO — Her name is Jasmine Camacho-Quinn.

More specifically, she is Jasmine Camacho-Quinn, 2020 Tokyo Olympics gold medalist in the 100-meter hurdles and owner of the Olympic record in her event.

She is a fighter, a woman who turned a devastating fall in the 2016 Rio Games semifinals into the fuel that drove her to this moment, a three-time NCAA champion who has been one of the best women anywhere at her specialty for several years, and came to Tokyo with the three fastest times in the world this year.

She will leave here with the five fastest times this year, including the fourth-fastest ever.

And yet on Twitter on Monday, in the immediate aftermath of her convincing win, when she pulled away from world record-holder and silver medalist Keni Harrison at the seventh hurdle, crossed the finish line and shouted, "I just won a gold medal! I did it," she was instantly reduced to someone's brother by an NFL reporter.

"Robert Quinn's sister wins gold," he wrote. "Pretty cool."

Even on Twitter, the land of character limits, there were more than enough left to add "Jasmine." To say her name.

A woman of incredible accomplishment, reduced to who her brother is.

Jasmine Camacho-Quinn should be defined, in part, by her Olympic gold medal, not by who here brother is. (Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)
Jasmine Camacho-Quinn should be defined, in part, by her Olympic gold medal, not by who her brother is. (Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images)

No, it doesn't matter that the reporter's audience is NFL fans and Robert Quinn is an NFL player. There is no excuse not to have included Camacho-Quinn's name.

She won the gold medal.

She trained, alone, just her coaches and without the support and camaraderie of even a small cohort, for months for this moment.

This isn't the first time this has happened, of course.

During the last Summer Olympics, someone at the Chicago Tribune thought it was OK to tweet, "Wife of a Bears' lineman wins a bronze medal." As if trap shooter Corey Cogdell, who earned her medal in a shootout with Spain's Fatima Galvez, wouldn't have done it if she hadn't married an NFL lineman. Or as if she got some kind of head start against her opponents, in the Olympics, because one of the men in her life had gained some level of notoriety.

Last year, a Houston television station announced that "J.J. Watt's fiancée" had been traded to Chicago. Kealia Ohai is a professional soccer player who began playing on U.S. national teams when she was in high school.

Plenty of people dragged the television station. None more bluntly that Watt himself, who responded: "This headline is trash. Kealia Ohai (which is her name by the way, since you didn’t even bother to mention it) is incredible entirely on her own merit and deserves to be treated as such.

"Be better than this."

What these women have in common is their achievement. It's why they found themselves in headlines and the tweets of news outlets and reporters.

But no woman, no matter if she's an Olympic record-smashing gold medalist or a work-from-home mother who is scared her groceries will run out before her next paycheck comes, deserves to be erased because of a man in her life.

They have names. We have names.

Say our names.

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