Eat. Sweat. Play

by Anna Kessel

  Ask a sportswoman. In a recent poll of Britain’s elite female athletes by BT Sport, 67 per cent said they feared that the public and the media valued their appearance over their sporting achievements. They thought how they looked was more important to the public than the medals they won? Society has a lot of apologizing to do. Meanwhile, over 89 per cent said they could relate to British Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington’s I’m A Celebrity reality TV meltdown over her body image insecurities, and 76 per cent said the same concerns had influenced their diet and training regimes. Now these are the women who do an eye-watering number of abdominal crunches every day. Who do hill runs in the icy, wet winds of December. Who bench-press. If they feel pressured, what hope is there for the rest of us?

  Among these amazing athletes, double Olympic gold-medallist Rebecca Adlington stands out for her particular body image anxieties. Just months after she shot to fame at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 I interviewed her for a cover feature in Observer Sport Monthly, which involved photographing her in a vintage swimsuit. She looked beautiful, but she was nervous about showing her body in front of the camera. ‘It feels a bit “Oh my God,”’ she said at the time. ‘You feel like they [the photographer] must have shot so many gorgeous skinny people and then they’ve got to work with someone that’s not; it must be difficult for them to get the right angle, they try and shoot their ideas and then they realize you’re not skinny and it doesn’t quite work.’6

  Many have characterized Adlington as horribly insecure, but her experiences are instructive. While there has been a huge upward trend in women’s magazines and lifestyle sections telling women it is OK to exercise, the vast amount of it remains rooted in beauty mythology. By that I mean the reverent tones (and tomes) devoted to female celebs who beast their bodies in the gym these days. Don’t get me wrong, there is some gratifying progress going on here; the days when Madonna headed out for a run in Hyde Park without make-up and made the ten o’clock news are over. In the twenty-first century women are openly celebrated when they work on their bodies: sweat patches triumphantly circled on paparazzi photos of our most ‘stunning’ female celebrities. And the harder they work, the more we admire them. Whether it’s the pre-holiday bikini workout, or the post-baby Bikram yoga sessions. Because exercise = perfection. Doesn’t it?

  Putting aside the fact that this equation is just another version of the worn-out idea that women’s bodies have to strive for acceptance, the message that exercise and sport creates a particular body shape is propaganda – i.e. it’s actually just not true! Small waist, toned arms, pert bottom, wobble-free thighs and perky breasts: it is a myth that if only we did more exercise we would look this way. If we worked harder and did more tricep curls, we would lose our bingo wings. If only we followed Victoria Beckham’s reported regime of doing 500 sit-ups a night alongside husband David, we too would have the perfect waist. For some women that might happen. For most of us, however, it is utter bollocks. Think about it: my arms are big, ergo my arm-to-body ratio is always going to be big vs (relatively) small. I can diet until I keel over, and my arms will still be bigger than I want them to be. There’s literally nothing I can do short of liposuction and stapling to achieve the kind of body that we are told to aspire to.

  So thank you, Rebecca, with your honesty, your girl-next-door down-to-earth personality. Because while when Rebecca talks about her body it makes for upsetting reading, spelling out all those Glamour readers’ daily insecurities in one fluid breath, it is also a true reflection of the limitations of our bodies. That even when we train them to an Olympic gold-medal-winning standard, they still might not look like the lady in the Special K advert. All bodies are different, all bodies have their own individual way of reacting to the work we make them do. As Rebecca so refreshingly explains: ‘I’ve got man shoulders. Honestly . . . I look odd, I look like a Kellogg’s’ character, one of those mini things where their heads and shoulders are so big and then go into a “V”. I can’t fit into a dress or clothes, I’ve got this armpit hanging which is my pec muscle [she says grabbing her pectoral] that just hangs over because it’s so big. I’ve got massive bingo wings. When we go away as a team and we go sunbathing I’m one of the bigger girls on the team. I don’t have a flat stomach or anything. Mine’s quite podgy, I’ve got the bits, the hang, the tyre,’ she says, grabbing a roll of flesh from her stomach. ‘And all the other girls are, like, so skinny. Literally nothing rolls over. It is quite difficult.’

  Rebecca’s honesty is liberating, but also sad – particularly because much of her angst has been provoked by a constant stream of media criticism and commentary relating to her appearance. The controversial Scottish comedian, Frankie Boyle, went on about how weird her face looked, and how she must be ‘dirty in bed’ because she’s got an attractive boyfriend (now husband). Rebecca’s treatment mirrors that traditionally meted out to any sportswoman not conforming to mainstream ideas about femininity: from the ‘Amazonian’ comments that have dogged Venus and Serena Williams’s careers and ‘mannish’ former world number one Lindsay Davenport, to ‘you’re never going to be a looker’ former Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli. So it was perhaps not a surprise when Beth Tweddle, Britain’s best-ever gymnast – a woman so talented that a move on the asymmetrical bars was named after her – was horrifically trolled during a live Twitter Q&A on Sky Sports recently. ‘Pig ugly’, ‘slut’, ‘bitch’, were just a few of the comments aimed at her. Sadly, it seems, women and sport are still only considered acceptable in the abstract. Like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, packed with underwear models who don’t play sport. Or the boxer Tyson Fury commenting that heptathlete hero Jessica Ennis-Hill ‘slaps up well’ when she steps off the track. If we insist on attractiveness to the male gaze being the standard mould for sportswomen, we will continue to alienate girls in their droves. And we lose the very essence of sport that is so liberating and empowering to women. Because the more women play sport, and normalize the image of a sporting female, the quicker we will get away from these reductive comments.

  The subject of body image and sport reached tipping point in the UK with the bomb-drop that Jessica Ennis-Hill, the face of the London 2012 Olympic Games, was allegedly called ‘fat’ by a senior figure at UK Athletics. Pictures of Jess’s mind-bogglingly flawless abdominals graced the front and back pages of almost every newspaper, alongside the headlines. While the general public struggled to get their heads around how such a perfectly toned athlete could be branded overweight, other sportswomen claimed that they too had been put under pressure to lose pounds. Promising British triathlete Hollie Avil retired from the sport just months out from the Olympic Games in 2012, citing an eating disorder, a problem which she said was ‘rife’ in her sport, while heptathlete Louise Hazel said she had suffered similar criticism to Jess from the sport’s governing body.

  As a journalist, I tried to persuade others to speak out about the issue. Several British sportswomen I talked to admitted privately that they had experienced problems, but were reluctant to go public for fear of reprisals. Those defending their sport maintained that weight was not a cosmetic issue but a practical consideration for all sportswomen in order to excel at their events. The sportswomen I spoke to countered that women were more likely to experience criticism than their male teammates. Most damningly of all, they felt that many male coaches had little or no understanding of the diversity of female body types. They were being told that to compete in their event, they had to look a certain way, meet a certain weight. One sportswoman described to me how she had repeatedly broken down both mentally – suffering with depression – and physically – through under-performing and injury – as a result of attempting to meet an unrealistic weight target set by a senior coach.

  In sport, where extraordinary athletes come in extraordinary shapes and sizes, the mind boggles that a coach could be so conservative about the human body. Athletics, for example, has shown us that unlikely candidates can achieve the most amazing things. Until triple world-
record-holder Usain Bolt came along, sports scientists didn’t believe that tall people could sprint competitively over 100m. The diminutive Jessica Ennis-Hill, at five foot four inches, defies logic in her ability to high-jump the British record – a foot above her own head. So why would we resolutely stick to old-fashioned ideas about what a female athlete looks like?

  Much more importantly, it sets us up for a dangerous cultural precedent. We are teaching our children that fat is incompatible with fitness. Fat is shameful. Fat is controversial. Fat is the antithesis of what we are aiming to be. Yes, obesity, severe health-threatening weight gain, is problematic. But obesity is very different from fat. The novelist and game designer Naomi Alderman provides a cheering antidote to all this nonsense. Naomi wrote a blog on the issue after designing a fitness app. On its release she steeled herself for abuse on social media. ‘I mean, a fat person talking about fitness is like a nun giving sex advice, right?’ she wrote. She describes her own journey into discovering exercise, which felt pretty similar to my own and that of millions of other women around the world, except that she’s very clear on one point: exercise has never lost her any weight. ‘What happened was better: I started to enjoy being in my body. I felt better. I felt good. It is a very different feeling to be in a fat body that is moving a lot to one that hardly moves at all. It feels like love. As simple and as joyful as that.’

  What follows is a touching love letter to her body, in its original shape and form, free from judgement. ‘What I’ve learned is: the story I got told about what it meant to have a fat body, that it must mean that I sat around all day eating deep-fried stuffed-crust pizza and watching TV – that story just wasn’t true. The story about how people who look like me hate to exercise just isn’t true. It’s so easy to let the media you see or the discourse you hear define who you are before you’ve even learned about yourself. And I bought into it for too long.

  ‘I really love my body. It’s taken me ages, but I’m there now. I love it in the way you love an old friend, someone who’s always there to support you, who tries their hardest to help you do all the things you want to do and asks so little in return. My body is like a waggy-tailed dog in its excitement to accompany me on adventures. It’s so thrilled to go for a walk or work out at the gym or take a nice bath or have some good sex or dance to some music or lift some heavy things or curl up in bed at the end of a long day. That’s my fat body, which I have learned to love through exercise.’7

  If fat challenges our perception of female, it was South Africa’s 800m runner Caster Semenya who most stretched our understanding of gender, and ultimately what it means to be a woman in sport. After she won the world title in 2009, scandal broke as Caster was labelled ‘intersex’. Fellow athletes cruelly branded her ‘a man’ after she won the gold medal in Berlin in a stunning time, while global media were sent into a frenzy over Caster’s low vocal register and broad shoulders. The then teenager was subjected to a series of intrusive medical examinations over a period of eleven months in an attempt to define her sex organs.

  The following year I was sent to cover her return to competitive racing at a low-key track meet in a remote part of Finland. On a steaming hot day in July, with bugs spawned by the surrounding lakes flitting through the air, the world’s media descended on this tiny town. The resulting scene was disturbing. A small unmanned tent was the only area provided for athletes to change, and several journalists attempted to peep through the gaps in the canvas to catch a glimpse of Caster as she changed into her running gear. There were no restrictions. Everyone felt entitled – and equipped – to assess Caster’s gender for themselves. Was she, or wasn’t she, a man?

  Caster’s story taught us that gender is merely a spectrum of hormones, not a definitive model. Scientists continue to argue over the issue, but many maintain that there is no clear line between male and female, rather an expansive grey area in which a range of body types exist. A study using medical data from US births between 1955 and 1998 estimated that around one in a hundred people had body variations that differ from the standard male or female types. This includes people who appear from the outside to have so-called normal genitalia, but who may have ‘abnormal’ sex chromosomes internally.

  Of course, sport, in its commitment to upholding a level playing field in its most traditional sense, prefers to segregate – and regulate – gender. Whispers suggested that Caster’s case was not an isolated instance. Other athletes, past and present, had also been prodded and poked. Most recently, having been banned from competing at the Commonwealth Games in 2014, India’s Dutee Chand was subjected to a naked examination and issued with an ultimatum: either undergo surgery or take hormone-suppressing drugs. ‘I cried for three straight days after reading what people were saying about me [on the Internet],’ the sprinter told the New York Times. ‘They were saying, “Dutee: Boy or girl?” and I thought, how can you say those things? I have always been a girl . . . I was made to understand that something wasn’t right in my body, and that it might keep me from playing sports,’ she said.8 Dutee stood her ground. For others, it was already too late. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) in 2011 revealed that four female athletes at London 2012 had been taken to France and operated on to remove their testes and allow them to continue competing. Despite there being no sporting necessity to the procedures they were also given a clitoris reduction, feminizing plastic surgery and oestrogen replacement therapy.

  I interviewed Caster in 2011, an experience that I found emotional. As a journalist, I was expected to ask about her gender; as a human being I felt compelled to respect her privacy. Several weeks later I received an email from a reader. It said: ‘I am the mum of a pre-teen girl with a DSD (Difference/Disorder of Sex Development), which the popular media still often refer to as intersex. Although I am not familiar with Caster Semenya’s diagnosis, the sensationalist coverage that followed her world record was observed in silent horror by the many families who have a DSD child.’ The email stopped me in my tracks. I’d felt like a failure for not pursuing a line of questioning about Caster’s genitalia. But after reading that email, I was glad I had held back.

  Dutee bravely took her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. And in 2015 CAS suspended the use of ‘hyperandrogenism’ rules, the very edict that had prevented Dutee and Caster from competing in their natural state. CAS gave sports governing bodies two years to come up with new evidence, or face scrapping the rule altogether.

  Sport is an obvious front line for these issues, and it needs to make sure it is acting responsibly for women and girls battling for the right to define their own gender, the right to define their own sense of femininity, and – fundamentally – the right just to compete. While sport can be liberating for women, too often sport has been our oppressor. From the death penalty imposed in Ancient Greece on any woman caught watching the Olympic Games, to the outright ban that existed until 1984 on women running the Olympic marathon, or the ban on women’s Olympic ski jumping because of unfounded fears over the damage it could cause to a woman’s reproductive organs, revoked in 2014. Even today, for women in Iran, just watching volleyball can have you thrown into prison.

  Wonderfully, despite the barriers, women past and present have fought the system. Just as we tell women today to vote, in honour of the suffragettes who campaigned for the right to do so, so we owe it to those female sports pioneers to draw inspiration from their stories, to continue their fight. One of my favourite stories is of a rebel runner by the name of Roberta Gibb. The US marathoner became the first woman to compete in the iconic Boston Marathon, in 1966, when women were not allowed. Roberta, a confident amateur runner who casually clocked forty miles in a day, hid in the bushes at the start line and then jumped out at the gun to join the men-only race. Tentative at first, she ran in disguise with a hoodie concealing her face, but, supported by the male runners around her, she slowly peeled off her layers and ran openly as a woman, defiant. Up and down the course word spre
ad like wildfire: a woman was running in the pack! The media latched on to the story, and along the roadside spectators began to pick her face out in the crowd, and cheer.

  In a moving passage from her memoir A Run Of One’s Own, Roberta describes the reaction from the crowd as she passed Boston’s famous women’s arts institution, Wellesley College, midway along the route. ‘They were screaming and crying. One woman standing near, with several children, yelled, “Ave Maria.” She was crying. I felt as though I was setting them free. Tears pressed behind my own eyes.’ Roberta was instantly struck by the weight of responsibility on her back. ‘I knew that if I failed to finish I would reinforce the prejudices and set women’s running back another twenty years.’ Despite running conservatively she finished in a time of 3 hours 21 minutes – beating two-thirds of the all-male field. News of her achievement went global. ‘It was a pivotal point in the evolution of social consciousness,’ she subsequently wrote. ‘It changed the way men thought about women, and it changed the way women thought about themselves. It replaced an old false belief with a new reality.’9

  It would take another six years, though, and a stream of female impostors infiltrating the race, before women were officially allowed to compete at Boston, in 1972. And, befuddled by codswallop science about women’s bodies – namely that endurance running could render women infertile – it was only in 1984 that the Olympic Games finally allowed women to compete in the marathon. One of the key figures in the effort to push the Olympic agenda was American marathoner Kathrine Switzer, who also illicitly competed in the Boston marathon, entering under her initials only so that the organizers did not know she was a woman. Ten years later, in 1977, when Kathrine was director of the US Women’s Sports Foundation, Avon cosmetics approached her with an interest in sponsoring a women’s marathon. It is hard to convey just what a big deal this was. Can you imagine? A cosmetics company wanting to sponsor women’s endurance running at a time when female perspiration was akin to bra-burning? Despite the taboo, the partnership went ahead and the first Avon International Marathon was held the following year in Atlanta, Georgia, involving competitors from nine different countries.