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NEW IMAGE EXPOSED
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260 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES Thompson doesn’t need to take anything off for us to marvel at her athletic body. Neither do the track and field calendar girls or the Matildas . Nudity is not only inappropriate in women’s sports, nude is rude. y A NEW IMAGE EXPOSED Tom Maloney Are female athletes being exploited by showing off their muscular bodies in photos? No way says Canadian swimmer Marianne Limpert, and she’s willing to show off hers. OK, so I’m not really naked either. But it would certainly be a delight to be so, alongside Jenny Thompson, Brandi Chastain, or any of the four synchro swimmers photographed wearing a single towel. Or all four, maybe. Hmmm. There’s a thought. Or Marianne Limpert. She’s beautiful too, and blessed with a toned, athletic body. Only difference is, her nationality being Canadian, the likes of Sports Illustrated, Gear Magazine, and Women’s Sports and Fitness haven’t asked her to do pre-Olympic, semi-nude pictorials. Could she, would she? “I have to say, if someone approached me, and it was going to be tastefully done, I wouldn’t have a problem,” says Limpert, scheduled to swim the 100 freestyle, 200 individual medley, and two relays in Sydney. “You spend four or five hours a day working out, and now, you’ve got a great body. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. If you’re athletic and proud of your body, and you believe, in agreeing to do this, that it is not being exploiting , then why not? If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it.” Limpert, confident and proud and independent, is comfortable discussing this subject seriously and lightly at the same time. “Hey, you’ve got my wheels churning,” the Fredericton native says with a laugh, from her current home in Vancouver, “I’ve got a Maclean’s shoot in a couple of days. Maybe I can go topless and become the first Canadian athlete to do it!” Thompson has already done it, sort of, by standing on a beach wearing only a stars-and-stripes bathing suit bottom for SI. The two-time From National Post 2:263 (26 August 2000): A17. Material reprinted with the express permission of: “National Post Company”, a CanWest Partnership. Olympian is facing the camera with her fists placed strategically over her breasts. Meantime, Chastain was covered by only a soccer ball in Gear. She then became famous for ripping her shirt off following the U.S. World Cup soccer victory in 1999. Then, there are the perfectly toned, and yet nubile women from the Australian soccer team, topless in a fundraising calendar that sold in the thousands worldwide via the Web. Last year, Nike ads showed nudes, in silhouette. This summer, Esquire’s Olympic spread focuses on athletic beauty, or is that, beautiful athletes? The trend is putting some knickers in a serious twist. These elite female athletes have it, know how to use it, and aren’t afraid of showing it. Gasp. See, the feminists at the Women’s Sports Foundation in New York have built careers—no, lawsuits and industries—by snooping for evidence of disrespect. They’re kind of like the archaic affirmative-action specialists still employed full-time by Canadian governments, except their activities are restricted to the wide world of sports. Their creed is: women equal to men, without qualification. Ergo, in their minds, Thompson becomes a glorified Playboy model, totally counter to their raison d’etre. Like Limpert, Thompson is 27. She is tied with Bonnie Blair for most Olympic medals by an American female athlete. Like Limpert, she was cheated out of glory in Atlanta by Chinese swimmers apparently propelled by performance-enhancing substances. Heading for a medical degree at an Ivy League school, Thompson doesn’t give a doodle about fuddy-duddy feminist reaction to her decisions. In fact, she wonders, why doesn’t SI use female athletes for its infamous bathing-suit issue, rather than supermodels? Whoa. “Exactly,” Limpert agrees. “I think we present a healthier body image than some of those rake-thin models.” Women should forgive us men folk once in a while. They must agree, it is certainly adding up to a perplexing chapter in women’s history. Consider the contradiction: Women from the bra-burning era now get enraged because Chastain peels her shirt to expose a sports bra...