That is one cryptic article. Do I have to watch the video?
Neb gets all hurt if you don't watch the videos he links to.
How does Neb feel about the videos Stanster links to?
Annoyingly, just about every top result for the athlete's name on Google News was reacting to the news items (like the link) rather than anything in the nature of the items themselves, or even naming the papers that ran them. Here's some more specificity.
The video helps if you want to learn a new way to say the word "controversy".
The idea that swimmers in particular need to be super thin and cut is pretty darn silly.
The idea that women ought to be scorned if they are not within a very narrow range of acceptable body sizes is pretty darn silly.
If you want to know if a swimmer is in shape or not, can't you just look at her times? If she's swimming fast then she's clearly in shape.
Here's another Olympics controversy involving a female athlete.
the alcoholics anonymous preamble explains that AA "...does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes." due to the high percentage of brits and australians etc. here in narnia I have gotten to learn it's pronounced conTROversy. very surprising. that ain't how prince taught me.
There was a similar minor scandal in the British press because some senior UK Olympic official/coach [not clearly identified, but I assume van Commenee] had allegedly been attacking Jessica Ennis for being fat. Which probably created more waves than 'perfectionist coach/administrator sets absurdly high standard for athlete' would normally have done because of Ennis' (and Ennis' ab muscles) role in the marketing for the games.
ISTR that when all the articles came out about Michael Phelps's normal training diet, there were a few quieter comments from women swimmers to the effect that they were always pushed to eat the clichéd "healthy" diet (chicken, steamed vegetables) and policed for weight gain; they'd hardly get to eat a slice of pizza without disapproval not to mind an entire one.
If Jessica Ennis is fat, the word has lost all meaning. I see her running on the road round the corner from our house quite often, ans "Who's that porky cow?" is not what comes to mind.
re: 14
Sport is very odd, though. I remember reading a thing with Bradley Wiggins where he was talking about dieting to lose another few kilos, and he's built like a stick. But yeah, it does seem absurd. Especially given that most of her disciplines are strength/explosive power rather than distance, where even absurdly skinny people are 'too fat'.
16: cycling is weird, though. In cycling upper body mass is "that heavy weight you have to carry over giant mountains"; in most other sports those muscles are useful.
Oh, right, that's basically what you just said. Hello!
Seems like there's a good argument for weight loss for sports like long jumping, high jumping, hurdling, or sprinting--in every case acceleration is key. Any mass not generating force is a drawback. Less so for shotput or javelin.
Maybe the returns to weight loss are less than returns to technique, but it's going to be hard to say a priori.
On the principle that the proof of the pudding is in the [swimming], the Aussie seems fine.
If she is not in the shape she is supposed to be in, then criticism or comment might be fair.
If a swimmer is 15 pounds heavier than they were 6 months ago and they look flabby, then one has cause to wonder about their commitment.
But, female athletes shapes do not have to be a fashion model shape. That is one reason I disliked the efforts to market the sexiness of Amanda Beard and others.
Top level sport is odd 'cause it's the one place you can legitimately be very obsessed with the odd kg of weight either way.
Wiggins has a weight that he aims for track, and a different weight for road. That really gets me, the idea of rebuilding your body over the course of the year.
if that chick is fat then I don't even...
Not that I want to stick up for an idiot making uncalled for comments about Ennis, but he said she was "carrying too much weight", not that she was fat. Which I guess refers more to muscle than squidgy bits. But of course that is entirely between her and her coach.
Saw a funny tweet from Cavendish earlier this year about how he was on the beach looking stupid - tanlines, upper body and arms of a 9 year old, legs that wouldn't fit in his shorts.
Swimming! Body issues!
Seems the appropriate place to link to this: Seattle Officials Reconsider Ban on Topless Breast Cancer Survivors in Swimming Pools
As a bunch of people have said, body obsession in sports in both rational and common. Not a gender thing either. Every year there are numerous male athletes who get bad publicity for showing up overweight or out of shape, with some overeating basically destroys their careers. Mel "The Dinner Bell" Turpin comes to mind. In the NFL at least (maybe other leagues) players are explicitly told what they should weigh when they show up for training camp.
||
So I'm in a FB group with other incoming students, and someone asked for advice on where to buy furniture locally. One of the respondents (who has lived in NYC for several years, you see) is fear-mongering about buying used furniture due to the menacing plague of bed bugs.
I'm somewhere between amused and eye-rolly. And I almost wish to reply, "Attention, fellow human: (1) there are places outside NYC and (2) in some of these places it's still okay to buy a couch from Goodwill."
|>
Story reminds me a little bit of some poorly-thought though criticism of Michael Phelps by Tyler Clary (another US swimmer) a few weeks back.
"The fact that he doesn't have to work as hard to get that done, it's a real shame," Clary said. "I think it's too bad. You see that all too often, where you get athletes that are incredibly talented that really take it for granted. I think the things he could have done if he'd worked as hard as I do would have been even more incredible than what he has pulled off."Or you know he might have blown out an early age, or suffered injury, or ...
I'm also a bit reminded of some of the shameful stuff written about Shane Gould, the most dominant women's freestyler ever during her short career in the early '70s. At age 15 she held every WR from 100 to 1500 meters, but "only" won three individual golds, a silver and a bronze at Munich. It was either after that meet or some other one where she did not perform that well that a coach with the team wrote a story detailing a number of physical observations about her including, IIRC, details of her menstrual cycle. She retired at age 17 amid a whole barrage of generally bad press about her character.