For female athletes, the rules have always been clear: Be strong, but not too strong. Be confident but not intimidating. Above all, you have to look the part.
Being a female athlete is an invitation to be objectified, questioned about your “biological clock,” and generally perceived as weaker and less deserving than your male counterparts. Historically, women in elite sports have been paid less, televised less, and rarely given the same respect as male athletes.
But the tide is starting to turn. The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was the first to allocate equal places to female and male athletes, and over half of Team GB’s rowing squad were women. With her trademark hashtag #BeastBeautyBrains, USA Rugby Sevens centre and Olympic bronze medalist Ilona Maher has spent the past two Summer Olympic Games championing body positivity for women of all abilities, shapes, and sizes. People came for her hilarious behind-the-scenes Olympic “villa” content, but stayed for her empowering message that women can be strong and beautifully feminine at the same time.
However, Rebecca Reid argues in Glamour that beauty shouldn’t be part of the conversation. In the context of Bluebella’s #StrongisBeautiful campaign, Reid argues that conflating strength and beauty puts undue emphasis on beauty as necessary for respect on the global stage. She says that “the progress we actually need – rather than continually trying to shoehorn more demographics into the narrow definition of beauty – is to stop caring about beauty at all.”
While I agree that sportswomen should not feel pressured to appear beautiful in order to be successful, there is space for nuance beyond doing away with beauty entirely. Can women’s sport prioritise strength, skill, and personality without tying it to physical attractiveness? I believe it can.
This question evokes the delicate line between empowerment and objectification that Erica Silke discussed earlier this year. She described how language could be reclaimed as symbols of empowerment, and I argue that beauty can be mobilised in a similar way. We don’t need to reject beauty as something to strive for, but we should let it be something people pursue on their own terms. Not only can we reclaim our language of encouragement, we should reclaim this notion of beauty that has historically been weaponised against us.
No one exemplifies this better than Maher. She speaks openly about not just loving her body but appreciating it for everything it can do. In one of her videos, she shows her body from all sides while reminding us “this is the body of an Olympian. It’s not perfect. It’s not completely lean, it’s not completely toned, but this body is amazing, and it does amazing things for me.” In an interview just last month, she emphasises to all women that “you can be so much more than people put you in the box as.” You can be strong and beautiful and smart at the same time (hence the hashtag, #BeastBeautyBrains). Maher is evidence that strength in itself can be something beautiful, and that embracing femininity does not diminish athletic ability or worthiness of respect.
In rowing, this unapologetic celebration of our bodies feels long overdue. Funnily enough, the “perfect” rowing body type coincides with a conventionally attractive female body. They are tall and lean, but also strong. They are toned, but not too bulky. While the sport has taken steps to widen accessibility at the beginner levels, I haven’t seen widespread acknowledgement that any body type can excel in our sport. In fact, women have to be over 174cm to even apply for the BR Student Development Programme – over 12cm taller than the average height of women in the UK.
Part of this has to do with the current 2000m-centric format of our sport, in which the most efficient body type over this distance is the one discussed above. I am reminded of John Wojtkiewicz’s discussion of how different race distances could vastly improve the sport, including providing opportunities for athletes of different body types; an extra few centimeres or kilograms would no longer be the deciding factor of who makes it to the podium. Instead of focusing on the types of athletes that participate in our sport, we should shift the focus to what events are offered and what sorts of body types they favour (and exclude).
Dr. Emma Ross, former head of physiology at the English Institute of Sport, describes how knowledge about female athlete health is still disturbingly lacking. While I believe she does not adequately address our sport’s preference for a lean and light body type, she does argue that “sport has to be a place where women feel like they belong, truly belong…and they can show up as themselves,” which I wholeheartedly agree with. To accomplish this, we have to understand beauty and strength as not mutually dependent, but not mutually exclusive either.
This requires a conscious reorientation to focus on what our bodies can do for us, not just what they look like. Elite athletes might already know this, but people at every level of our sport would benefit from this shift. After all, male athletes are also not immune to the toxic standards of which bodies look worthy of respect. Training for what we want our bodies to accomplish is far better than trying to attain a (trend-dependent) notion of physical beauty.
And speaking from personal experience, I know rowing has the potential to communicate this message too. Before I started rowing at university, I hadn’t taken sports or exercise seriously. After my novice year, I became motivated by my team. I wanted to train to make the boat stronger, not in some pursuit of a body type I would likely never attain (at least not in a healthy way). It has been liberating to be strong, and at times I have felt more beautiful because of it.
Body positivity is not just about increasing the number of body types deemed beautiful. Body positivity must involve remaking our understanding of beauty into something more than conventional attractiveness. Beauty is in power, in the way that our bodies support what we do, and in the confidence from within that drives us to be our best.
About The Author
Discover more from JRN
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
