Martina Navratilova has sparked a backlash over a “regressive” campaign that saw British rugby players at the Olympics wear lingerie.
Sharron Davies, the former swimmer, and Mara Yamauchi, the former British long-distance runner, also expressed their dismay at a photoshoot aimed at changing the perception that “strong female forms are not ‘feminine’”.
Ellie Boatman, Jasmine Joyce and Celia Quansah – all part of the British sevens team (although Quansah didn’t make the finals for the Paris Olympics) – were signed by lingerie company Bluebella’s #StrongIsBeautiful campaign. The company said the aim of the photoshoot, which featured the three players on the pitch in lingerie, was to show girls “how they can look muscular and strong, but still feel feminine”.
However, the campaign appears to have backfired, with Navratilova, who has won 18 major tennis titles, and other prominent women’s sport campaigners unimpressed. Navratilova said the campaign “feels really regressive and sexist”.
According to Women In Sport, 64 percent of high school girls drop out of all sports due to body insecurity during puberty.
But Davies and Yamauchi said the campaign will not help address the problem. Davies wrote on X: “What the actual —- this is an utterly disgraceful campaign, whose brainless idea was this? Oh yeah, let’s get professional female athletes in porn underwear! Extremely regressive… stereotypes, again.”
Yamauchi said the campaign is “exploitative, degrading, sexist, regressive nonsense.” “Of course the intended audience is men,” she added. “Portraying women as sex objects is not going to encourage teenage girls to take up sports.”
The #StrongIsBeautiful campaign has been running for eight years and has previously included female athletes for the Olympic Games in Rio and Tokyo.
Boatman, 27, said in an article in the Evening Standard: “Sometimes you would even hear parents telling their sons to target the girl because she would be the weak link in the team. It was also definitely the case that the boys were celebrated much more and all the effort was focused on them. Little or no money was spent on facilities for girls and I was given boys’ clothes, which would completely overwhelm me.”
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