they should understand that all sports competition has an element of showmanship and display - after all, the viewers make the sport possible.
Sports competition isnt something with intrinsic value that can exist in a vacuum. If the audience desires certain types of show, they get it, or the competition makes no money and cannot continue.
If the athletes don't turn up, the competition makes no money and cannot continue. This goes both ways. The "element of showmanship" taking precedence over the sport shouldn't be tolerated, and the pushback is well within their rights.
The pushback doesn't have to be effective to be valid.
That's exactly what is wrong with capitalism: somehow money-making is at the forefront of the concerns of every human activity, to the point that athletes may not be able to choose their own clothing.
Would you agree that the net worth of individual athletes is substantially derived from advertising endorsements and sponsorships? https://www.sportsmanagementdegreehub.com/olympic-athletes-s...
Look at this list of wealthiest Olympians: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/list/top-50-olympians/
Notice that almost all of the women are figure skaters, gymnasts, or horseback riders (not a very sexualized sport, probably some interesting effects of family wealth needed to even train for it). Why are there no female power lifters raking in millions after winning a medal? I'm singling out power lifting as a sport where the women are conservatively dressed and the events are not particularly flattering to the female form.
Ideally we would have access to per-event viewership data going back decades as a proxy for Olympic event popularity, ticket revenue, and advertising revenue. I could only find this article with some good graphs of overall income by source: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-g... The bulk of which is TV. What glues eyeballs to the TV screen?
We can compare viewership of 2 simple YouTube searches as a proxy:
"sexiest female pole vaulters": top5 vids alone are >50M views total
"sexiest female powerlifters": top10 vids are <10M views total
Interestingly, the #6 result for "sexiest female Olympic gymnasts" is titled: "28 Olympians on How to get laid in the Olympic village" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UD0w13IdQ Even Cosmopolitan, that bastion of the misogynistic male gaze (sarc), knows what people wanna see about the Olympics.