German gymnastics team, tired of sexualisation, wears unitards at Tokyo Olympics

I do not disagree with the fact that many women are unfairly sexualized in these sports and am against that but I feel sometimes misandrious women criticize while giving just as creepy females a pass for commenting on football players butts, swimmers bodies, basketball players shoe sizes and so on...

I've always found it weird that some sports have women wearing scant clothing compared to the mens events. Volleyball for example is a big one where it's unclear how bikini bottoms help over shorts.

When I was a teenager I used to play volleyball, I played until my 20s, I was a decent player, but not tall enough to go anywhere, so I moved to beach volley and started coaching.

It was before social networks and the sport was having a boom all over the planet after indoor champions like Karch Kiraly (FIVB Best Player of the 20th Century together with my fellow Italian citizen Lorenzo Bernardi) made it highly popular.

The sport was born in California, by "cool" people for "cool" people. If you watch pictures of the time you'll see men wearing surf boardshorts, the ones with very long legs, and women tight bikinis. That's how the bikini became the "official" uniform for women in beach volleyball, they were "cool" and men and women playing beach volleyball wanted to look at their best. Technique was for indoor sports.

Fast forward almost 30 years, nobody wear the surfing shorts anymore, they impede your movements, unless you are a champion the like of Kiraly is, you are better off wearing regular shorts.

I've trained a few different female teams and all of them said the same thing: the bikini uniform is more comfortable because there are less places were the sand can end up.

My experience matches the words of many women players, as an example this is an article of few days ago, but I'm sure you will find many more researching the topic on Google

https://www.today.com/news/why-do-women-s-beach-volleyball-p...

> Would shorts be worse than a bikini bottom?

> It’s totally a personal choice. It wasn’t comfortable for me. Way too sweaty and too much sand. But, in certain situations leggings could be a good option — just not in the heat. There are also certain times of the month that wearing a bikini isn’t always such a comfortable option, especially when you’re on TV. So it’s important to have the freedom to choose what works best for you. Players should be able to wear what they want and what makes them perform the best — and for me it was a bikini.

I'm sure many men would wear speedos for the same reason, if they weren't considered "uncool" on a beach.

On the other hand: technical gear can give athletes an unfair advantage even if the arguments around wearing this or that kind of uniform appear to be reasonable.

For example: in 2008 Speedo (the brand) created a record breaking full body swimsuit, that were subsequently banned for professional swimmers because some fibers can reduce the drag to the point that it's like floating in the water with an outboard motor.

Same goes for beach volleyball, athletes are competing on the sand, directly under the Sun, if you cover up too much in some isolating fabric, you could be receiving an unfair advantage by not feeling the scorching sun on your skin. And even if there's a net between the teams, the teams should look the same, allowing two members of the same team to wear different uniforms could hypothetically translate to an unfair advantage.

Volleyball is also the sport that introduced tight uniforms because the loose uniforms of the late 90s were causing too many unwanted net invasions.

I'm not advocating for playing naked of course and I've never looked at sports in a sexual way, no matter how much naked skin was visible, but I think it's something to think about before deciding the rules for everybody.

There is another point: we are fully in the 21th century now, the image rights of popular people have an enormous value, especially for sponsors.

Imagine Nadia Comăneci, one of the greatest athletes ever, today, on Instagram.

How much would her image be worth?

We'll never know, but we know for sure that at her times her image was property of her country that used it as a propaganda tool. You won't find pictures of the young Comăneci not competing or training. It's like that's all she did (probably also true). In any picture you will find, she's wearing the colours of Romania.

Now that she's older and enjoys the freedom she deserves, she takes picture of herself on the beach wearing two-piece bathing suits, because that's what she probably wanted to do when she was younger, but she couldn't.

What's my point? My point is that today there's an overexposure of images and, of course, brand images, driven by the idea of "monetizing" content, more often than not, by people who do not own the rights to publish that content.

Sportswomen and men historically had their image on display only when they were competing and, especially if they were at the top, they could draw the attention of the media and brands. But their performances were more important than their looks anyway.

Now many athletes begin a career as brand models way before their sport career is over, I will go as far as to say that for some of them the two paths move at the same pace. Anna Kournikova is an example of being both a top ranking tennis player and a model.

Recently Berrettini have become the first Italian to reach the final at Wimbledon, it boosted his popularity to unimaginable level, he's moved from mostly unknown outside the tennis circuit to sex symbol in a week. I won't repeat what Italian women wrote about him on social networks, bu I guess you can imagine.

That kind of popularity means a lot of money flowing through.

I can obviously understand why athletes want to protect their image in ways that let them decide when to show their abs and when not to.

The body of the athletes has become commercial space, the more you cover it, the more you can put something on display on it. In Formula 1 even shoes and gloves of the pilots are full of sponsors, because there are special cameras that point to their hands and feet. Of course a pilot can't drive without shoes and gloves, but what about marathon runners? They actually wear so light because every gram saved is a gram less to take to the finish line, but their uniform is made of what my girlfriend calls "snail slime". If they were full body there would be much more space to put ads on and people would see them for 2 hours.

So in the end I am all in for freedom of choice, but as a former sportsman I also think that we should be vigilant and monitor any abuse that could come up by hijacking perfectly valid points. Maybe I've become an old cynical, but there's too much money involved to not imagine a dark side emerging sooner or later.

In the 70s this was seen as sexual freedom and it was conservative religious movements which were aghast at women flaunting their sexuality. And today women are adopting similar but not the same position as the conservatives of yore. Covering themselves to avoid the sexualization that those conservatives of yore warned about.

Now, to be sure, they are not coming from the same place, but they are arriving at similar expressions.

In any case I agree with them. Rate them on gymnastics rather than sexiness.