Perspective

Vaulting into unwanted Internet fame

By ELI SASLOW Washington Post
Published June 3, 2007

NORWALK, Calif. - In her high school track and field career, 18-year-old Allison Stokke has broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California. Yet only track devotees had noticed.

Then, early last month, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1, 000 new messages on her MySpace page.

Stokke has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of her. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it with suggestive comments on his site. Dozens of other bloggers spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke's picture and leered.

The wave of attention has steamrolled Stokke and her family in Newport Beach, Calif.

Blogger Matt Ufford received Stokke's picture in an e-mail, and he posted it on instinct. Readers of his WithLeather.com - a sports blog heavy on comedy, opinion and sometimes sex - would love her. The blog got a record number of hits.

The picture, hardly explicit, was taken by a track and field journalist for a prep track Web site. Her vaulting pole rests on her shoulder. Her spandex uniform - black shorts and a white tank top standard for a track athlete - reveals her midriff.

At track meets, twice as many photographers showed up to take her picture. Her school received requests for Stokke photo shoots, including one from a risque magazine in Brazil.

Dozens of strangers had her picture as the background image on their computers. She felt violated. Her body had been stolen and turned into a public commodity, critiqued in fan forums devoted to everything from hip-hop to Hollywood.

A week ago, Stokke made a beautiful vault and qualified for the state meet. Stokke smiled and took in the scene. She was surrounded by cameras. And for a second she wondered: What, exactly, had they captured? And where, exactly, would it go?

Postscript: After the Washingon Post published this story last week, WithLeather.com replaced Stokke's photo with a cartoon of "some nondescript full-grown individual doing a pole vault, and should in no way be confused with any real person, " but later posted new photos similar to the original. On the Internet, a bell cannot be unrung. A Google search of her name returned 591, 000 hits.

[Last modified June 2, 2007, 21:06:33]