Bradshaw pushes back against GB kit injustice
Olympic medallist tells Sue Anstiss why she had to reject initial choice of team clothing in Tokyo
‘Athletics has become a bit of a fashion show. People thinking, I need to look as good as I can, in full make-up’
It was when Holly Bradshaw looked at the limited – and rather tiny – options of Team GB kit in front of her as she put her final preparations in place for Tokyo that trepidation set in.
“In my head, I was panicking,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to go to the most important competition of my life and not feel comfortable because I was worried about what I would be wearing.”
Instead of the pole vaulter’s usual competition kit, an all-in-one with shorts, there were bikini briefs and crop tops, or a high-cut, all-in-one, swimming-costume-style alternative.
She could not help consider the injustice. Her male team-mates would not have to reveal their stomachs, buttocks and thighs to compete. Instead, they would take to the track, or the field, wearing standardissue knee-length Lycra bottoms and tank tops tucked into their shorts. Why should women be treated differently? Why should women be forced to show their bodies, simply for doing their job?
While we have become accustomed to seeing female track and field athletes competing in two-piece outfits in recent years, they are certainly not what most women would feel comfortable in, with millions watching their every move on TV.
Bradshaw feels strongly about the subject following the appalling trolling she has been subjected to on social media during her career – stretching back to the 2010 World
Junior Championships where she took bronze.
“The backlash I got on Twitter as a young athlete really affected me,” she says. “As a female athlete, it seems that if they can see your abs, you’re ‘athletic’. If anyone looks at your belly and you don’t have abs, you’re deemed out of shape, it doesn’t matter what the rest of you looks like.
“I’d just jumped the third all-time highest in the world and strangers were calling me fat and saying I’m out of shape, I’m unathletic, I’m unattractive. It was so overwhelming as a 19-year-old to be shamed in that way in public.” Bradshaw says that, from 2013, she decided she wanted to wear an all-in-one when competing.
“I can talk about it openly now, but I know I will struggle with body-image issues for the rest of my life,” she adds.
After pushing back against the Olympic kit this summer, Team GB agreed to adapt a rowing unitard, a piece of kit she has been vaulting in for a number of years.
Now her concerns are whether young female athletes will have the confidence to state a preference for more modest clothing. The 29-year-old says that some younger women have told her they would rather quit the sport than compete in crop tops and tiny pants. Having worked in sports marketing for more than 30 years, I still find myself confused and frustrated by the decisions about what women are allowed to wear to compete at the highest levels. Tennis, hockey and netball insist that dresses are worn because it is considered more “traditionally feminine” than shorts or leggings. The sports feel this approach attracts female participants, broadcasters and sponsors. Then, at the other end of the scale, there are sports that dictate women must effectively compete in underwear. Arguments around the “increased practicality” of women playing beach volleyball in a tiny bikini do not really stack up, given that the men continue to play in baggy shorts and vest tops. Of course, it could also come down to the choice of the athlete to wear more revealing attire in front of the cameras, as Bradshaw points out.
“Athletics has become a bit of a fashion show,” she says. “Female athletes on the circuit thinking I need to look as good as I can, in full make-up, putting on a performance in their kit, because that’s what makes me money. It’s what gets me noticed. It’s what fame is now.” Bradshaw, however, certainly had the last laugh over the trolling she received as a teenager when she made history this summer. After finishing sixth at London 2012 and fifth four years later in Rio, she became the first British athlete to win a pole vault medal at an Olympic Games with bronze.
Her message was loud and clear. It is not what your body looks like, but what it can achieve, and that should be the only thing that counts.