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Canadian athletes can identify with Mexican gymnast who was body-shamed
Mexican gymnast Alexa Moreno received plenty of negative comments about her appearance on Twitter during her performance in the Rio Olympics, and that's a pain many Canadian athletes know.
The CBC explored the subject of body image and body-shaming for athletes in an excellent longform feature by Jacqueline Doorey earlier this month, which saw plenty of Canadian athletes speak candidly about their own struggles with body image. Amongst them was the now two-time Olympic gold medalist and Rio flag-bearer Rosie MacLennan:
The key comment in there from MacLennan is about how it's the performance that really matters, and how your body allowing you to perform at a high level should make you feel good about it regardless of how you look compared to other competitors.
"It was really important to bring it back to focusing on my own progression, my own skills," she said. "Was I jumping higher? Was I feeling better? Was I more agile in the air? When you bring it back to those actual capabilities and skills, it doesn't matter if I have a bubble butt and she doesn't, or if I have thicker legs than the girls standing next to me, because my bubble butt and my thicker legs are going to get me higher.
"it is a conversation that needs to be had, and I think it's important to highlight that not everyone fits into one type of body or will be able to achieve a certain type of body. But if you can accentuate things you're confident in, then you can realize the benefit your body can give you, what it does for you, the function it has, then I think a lot of people would be a lot happier."
MacLennan has been walking the talk, too. After her gold in the London Olympics, she took part in Dove's "Girls Unstoppable" campaign to raise awareness about body-image issues for female athletes. She told Global in 2013 the key for her was her mom's encouragement:
She said ‘Ok, maybe you have thicker legs, or a bigger bubble butt’ or whatever,” MacLennan said. “But she’d say: ‘How do you think you jump so high?’
“It’s reframing it in a positive way and making me look at it like, OK, yes they might be smaller than you, but what’s healthy for you? What’s functional for you? What’s going to help you achieve your real goals?”
There were some further interesting comments on body image and body shaming from Adam van Koeverden, the kayaker who's competing in his fourth Olympics in Rio (and has a gold, two silvers and a bronze to his credit from past Games).
Van Koeverden wrote a well-thought-out piece on his blog about problematic comments about Canadian female athletes Friday, which was then picked up as a National Post column Saturday. He took particular aim at fellow Olympian Adam Creek's comments about Eugenie Bouchard being too interested in her looks and fashion:
After Adam made a few sweeping generalizations about a woman who has gone farther and done more in the sport of tennis than any Canadian woman in generations, he questioned whether or not she actually wants to win. He referenced her enthusiastic desire to talk to the media, her prolificacy on Instagram and her interest in fashion and beauty as evidence that she may have a stronger desire to be a media darling than an Olympic champion. He even did a girlish impression of her “trying out different hairstyles,” seemingly as evidence that she isn’t focused on winning, or that having an interest in fashion, beauty or anything else might detract from one’s performance. Since when is having a pastime a bad distraction?
He may as well have asked her, as one Australian reporter did a few years ago, to “give him a twirl.”
This is the kind of tired, regressive, paternalistic, arrogant and sexist commentary that female athletes put up with all the time, and it needs to stop.
Van Koeverden went on to call out the media's image-focused treatment of athletes like Bouchard and Penny Oleksiak:
It’s never been more abundantly clear that Canadian female athletes are incredible. Penny Oleksiak has already won four Olympic medals and she isn’t even old enough to drive a car by herself. She’s strong, performs under an immense amount of pressure, is an amazing team player and demonstrates the sportsmanship, media savvy and poise of someone twice her age. Yet sadly, the headline on the cover of the Toronto Sun this week was “Pretty Penny.” Perhaps I’m holding the Sun to an unrealistic standard of journalistic integrity, and I get that alliteration sells newspapers, but COME ON. She’s the best swimmer of her generation — maybe ever — and the first Olympic champion ever born in the 2000s, and the paper leads with something referencing her appearance? We can do better.
You see, no journalist has ever asked me if I’ve been doing something different with my hair lately (despite the fact that I AM, thanks for noticing). Nobody has ever asked me to twirl in the mixed zone. I’ve never read that I “put on a little too much weight” in the off-season, even when I have, and I haven’t heard of one male athlete that didn’t perform well because they spend too much time on social media. But I can confirm that a lot of us waste plenty of time staring at our phones.
Another Canadian athlete who had valuable things to say on body image and body types is Sultana Frizell, who represented Canada in hammer throw in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics and won gold in the 2010 and 2014 Commonwealth Games. (She narrowly missed qualifying for Rio.)
Here's what she told the CBC on the stigma of some hammer throwers being perceived as looking masculine:
"I'm an athlete and I'm an Olympian, but my body is not a typical athlete build," said Frizell.
"Like, if you wanted to go on e-Harmony, I would have to check the box [for] 'Full-figured, curvy, athlete.' It's kind of like, 'You need that box.'"
...But outside of U.S. college athletics and her professional circle, Frizell doesn’t often see her body type reflected back at her.
“I think we’re just … bombarded with that type of body and you don’t get to see the other athletes,” she said. “As a hammer thrower, I’m not really in the media too much, along with my colleagues.
“I feel like we just need to get the different body images out there.”
The running world has often been known for being especially harsh in its criticisms of how athletes look, and Lanni Marchant can relate. Marchant, who won bronze in the 10,000 metres in last summer's Pan Am Games in Toronto and placed 25th in that event in Rio, told the CBC she battled issues with food while training to be a professional marathoner. Those even led to her being underweight and suffering injuries as a result:
“I call it eating like an asshole,” Marchant told CBC Sports. “You’re really obsessive about your food and cutting things out and doing everything you can in your power to control your weight and your size.”
Marchant set the Canadian women's record in the marathon in October 2013, and told Kristen Odland of The Calgary Herald the following May that the key to her success was figuring out she didn't need to look like other runners:
"If you look at what the top runners look like and you see these really, really skinny women out there, running really, really fast. A lot of female runners, I think, think they need to look that way to run fast. Which is unfortunate."
And, these days, it’s not making any sense.
The perspective, she said, is shifting.
“I think you see a lot more strong runners out there running really fast,” said Marchant who ran steeple chase at Michigan State University where she also studied law. “We realize that we can’t do it and be waifs. Our bodies break down . . . there’s a different look to the muscle (with a strength component) and you can see that it’s healthy versus racing in the NCAA. I was always one of the biggest girls lining up and I was chronically injured. But that was always because I was always chasing to look like the girls I was lining up against.”
For Marchant, a light bulb switched on when she stopped comparing.
“And then I started running faster than them,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK. Why didn’t think about this when I was 22. It’s unfortunate because there aren’t a lot of female coaches out there, watching over and looking after the female athletes."
There are countless other Canadian athletes who have struggled either with internal battles or external criticism about their body image, and many of their stories are told in CBC's full feature and its accompanying videos. While much of the harshest criticism is focused on female athletes, some male athletes have also had to deal with it, including Canadian kayaker Mark de Jonge (who won bronze in the 200m sprint in London and is set to compete in the same event in Rio). Here's what he told CBC about the criticism he sometimes gets over appearance:
This is a worldwide conversation, too, and ESPN The Magazine's annual Body Issue has highlighted it with both nude photos and stories of athletes with a wide range of body types, from Vince Wilfork to Adeline Gray. Sports feature a wide range of bodies, and not all athletes are going to look the same. Stories and features like that can be an important part of changing the conversation around body types, so it's good that outlets like ESPN, the CBC and others are covering this.
Body image is a tough battle for many inside and outside sport, and it can be particularly difficult at the Olympics, where viewers from across the world can hurl online invective at athletes like Moreno over their appearance. For those who criticized her, though, there were also many who eloquently defended her. Hopefully there will be more of that, and more of the smart commentary from these athletes, and less body-shaming as the Olympics roll on.
