The leotards in females’s sports are playing a hazardous video game. As female professional athletes continue to break down barriers and generate record-high scores, their attires appear to grow smaller sized and smaller sized. It’s a pattern that appears to impact a number of branches of ladies’s sports– from swimming to track-and-field– however it’s triggering one of the most discussion in ladies’s college gymnastics.
“Why do the college gymnastics ladies not need to use leotards that fit, and why do not they need to use GK briefs under their leo?” asked content developer and previous gymnastics coach BayouBrandi on TikTok, describing the high-cut briefs frequently used under leotards. Commenters stated they ‘d likewise discovered this progressive sexualization in females’s sports, keeping in mind that there’s a distinction in between an attire you select yourself (like a swimwear at the beach), and an attire developed for you. “I’ve actually pulled out of specific sports [because] of how exposing the uniform is,” one commenter composed. A research study released in the journal Sport, Education and Society discovered that 75 percent of the females surveyed had actually seen women drop out of school sports due to issues about uniforms or body image.
While we support ladies in whatever they feel most comfy using, individual autonomy belongs that appears to be missing out on here. In the NCAA, leotards are mostly created by the specific coaches and their leotard associates, according to College Gym News. Assistant coaches watch on patterns and collect motivation on social networks, perhaps talking with the professional athletes about their choices. Otherwise, NCAA leotard policies are fairly unclear, stating that “a student-athlete needs to use a one-piece leotard and is permitted to use any underwears that are the very same color of the leotard or are skin tone in color.”
When you think about that these girls professional athletes do not have any substantial company over what they use (beyond a table talk with their assistant coach), the discourse around their leotards feels specifically one-sided. And as previous college gymnast Natalie Wojcik mentioned in a current TikTok, the leotards aren’t the only problem. Her video highlighted a variety of remarks she had actually gotten on social networks, all of which went over the skimpiness of her leotard instead of her athletic expertise. “Being a lady in sports is difficult in some cases,” she captioned the post. “I am a 23 years of age lady. My body is various than when I was a kid,” she responded to another remark, saying that not all leotards have actually altered, however the bodies using them have.
On an Olympic level, females’s leotards have actually likewise been utilized as a political declaration. In 2021, German gymnasts used full-length unitards to the Tokyo Games in order to press versus the widespread sexualization in ladies’s gymnastics. “We wish to make certain everybody feels comfy and we [want to] program everybody that they can use whatever they desire and look remarkable, feel incredible,” stated German gymnast Sarah Voss. This push for empowerment was specifically effective provided gymnastics’s history of sexual assault,