Paris 2024: How Olympics are redefining body types
Growing up, Simone Biles didn’t look like other kids in her class
Bengaluru: Growing up, Simone Biles didn’t look like other kids in her class. “I looked more like a boy. I was stronger than most of the girls, stronger than most of the boys too even. When I was younger, I would try to hide my muscles.” Biles has ten Olympic medals, three gold medals from Paris alone, and is now the most decorated gymnast of all time.
Traditionally, female gymnasts have been freakishly young and conditioned to be compliant, with child-like bodies and little agency over their person. Biles flipped that. The idea of the small, slender female gymnast being the sole prototype for success saw a shift with the arrival of a strong, muscular Biles (“I wish I had that kind of muscles in my calves,” Kevin Durant gushed). At 27, she’s also the oldest female gymnast in team USA since 1952.
As much as it’s a testament to the human spirit, the Olympics is also about an assortment of body types – the long-limbed, the hulking, the spider-armed, the broad shouldered, and the 4-foot 8-inch woman who can rock a Yurchenko double pike. There’s often a proclivity to imagine athlete bodies a certain way.
The Olympics is our quadrennial reminder that sport takes all sorts.
For a couple of weeks every four years, the Games shows us a bevy of athletes – lunging, parrying, striding, stroking through water, doing handstands and pirouettes and lifting twice their body weight up above their heads. If you put gold medal winners across sports at the Games in a line-up, you’ll know there’s no cookie cutter mould, no one type of body shape, size, height that has it beat. If sports like weightlifting demand explosive power and muscle mass, long torsos and short legs can come good in swimming.
“All body types matter,” Paris’ breakout rugby star Ilona Maher said in a social media video post. “From the smallest gymnast to the tallest volleyball player, from a rugby player to a shot-putter, a sprinter. All body types are beautiful, and can do amazing things. Truly see yourself in these athletes and know that you can do it too.”
Women in sport have long struggled with body image issues. Two-time Olympian Ilona has often taken to social media to respond to hecklers calling her ‘overweight’ or’ manly’. “They think women should be fragile and petite and quiet and meek, but that’s not the case,” she said in a video. “Women can be strong, and they can have broad shoulders, and they can take up space, and they can be big. Don’t let anybody try to define or dictate how you feel about yourself. You get to decide that.” She wears red lipstick as “war paint” and believes “I can be a beast and play this very physical, aggressive sport but also not have to sacrifice my feminity” for it.
Through her staggering count of 23 Grand Slam titles, Serena Williams changed how women athletes are viewed. She brought ruthlessness on court with her mould-breaking large biceps and imposing muscular frame. “When I was growing up, what was celebrated was different,” Williams was quoted saying. “Venus looked more like what is really acceptable: She has incredibly long legs, she’s really, really thin. I didn’t see people on TV that looked like me, who were thick. There wasn’t a positive body image. It was a different age.”
The Olympics allows us to see female athletes of all sizes and shapes — those who starkly differ from the body standards women are conditioned to adhere to — climb podiums and rewrite sporting history.
“The Olympics have heavily straightened out my standard of beauty. Like fixing a stiff neck and putting it back in place. You can’t use pale and baby smooth skin, straight shoulders, A4 waists, supermodel legs etc measurements to define them (women),” a Chinese user wrote in a now viral social media post.
In an interview, Biles who spoke the question she has been asked most often said – “I wish people would stop asking me, “How tall are you? Are you gonna grow?” I’m not going anywhere. I’m 4’8”. I’m stuck. I think I’ve learned to love my muscles a lot more than when I was younger. I got made fun of for my arms a lot. Some people would say mean things. At the time, it didn’t make me feel the best, so I wore sweaters or jackets all year long. Now, I show off my arms all the time.”
There’s still some way to go perhaps though when it comes to how we choose to define women. Gender policing – how women should look, and who qualifies or doesn’t qualify as a woman based on what we believe are the standards, shows up often enough.
“We want (female athletes) to take care of themselves, feel their best, eat healthy and understand that it’s OK to have muscles — because in some sports, you need those muscles,” Michelle Carter, the first American woman to win a gold in shot put in Rio 2016 was quoted as saying. “We don’t want to put them in a box. We want to take away the box so they can be all they can be.”