The dreams, the sacrifices, the glory, the pageantry, Bob Costas—I don’t care if the Winter Olympics are the “less fun cousin” of the Summer Games, for the next two weeks I intend to plant myself in front of the TV and watch as much of the action in Vancouver as possible, starting with tonight’s Opening Ceremonies.
In Olympic tradition, 216 athletes will march behind our flag tonight as members of the U.S. Olympic team—123 men, 93 women. But, according to Olympic Women and the Media, a new book by University of Alberta professor Pirkko Markula, the women will have received only 5 percent of pre-Olympics media coverage, and will receive only 25.2 percent during the Games, despite composing half of the team. When those female Olympians do receive attention, Markula notes, it tends to be for their appearance rather than their skill.
Case in point: American skier Lindsey Vonn. She’s competing in her third Olympics at age 25, is the current world champion in the Downhill Super-G, and a two-time World Cup season overall champion. She’s considered America’s best hope for gold in Vancouver. But when Sports Illustrated featured her on the cover of their Olympic Preview issue last week, Lindsey Vonn, world-class athlete, became Lindsey Vonn, Olympic sex symbol.
On the cover, Vonn wears her Team USA uniform, standard gear, and what at least resembles standard tuck form for her sport. The cover ignited a controversy over the sexualization of female athletes, though perhaps unfairly, since it’s nearly identical to the 1992 Olympic Preview cover, which featured male skier A. J. Kitt. But then Vonn appeared again in this week’s issue: the annual Swimsuit issue. Vonn, along with three other female Olympians, wears a bikini in the snow to promote her Olympic bid.
Sports Illustrated features women on its cover 4 percent of the time. For a weekly magazine, that means about 2 out of every 52 issues. And with the Swimsuit issue accounting for one each year, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for acknowledging female athletes.
It’s a problem, certainly, that we can’t seem to talk about female athletes without talking about sex. Male athletes are certainly not exempt from this kind of objectification—think Tom Brady or Michael Phelps in GQ. It’s a problem that’s indicative of our culture’s tendency to glorify beauty and sex above all else. But it points to an important question: Is it even possible to admire athletes for their strength, grace, and mastery of their sport without inherently objectifying their bodies?
Athletes at peak condition can make their bodies perform feats that the rest of us can only dream of—flying through the air with feet attached to two strips of wood, landing a quadruple loop on top of frozen water, dunking a basketball over the heads of giants. This is why we watch: to marvel at the capability of the human body to push, and at times to defy, its own limits. When it comes to sports—as Shirl Hoffman points out in Christianity Today‘s February cover story—we can all too easily make an idol of sports, and the athletes who excel at them, because they truly can amaze and inspire.
The tendency can be to reject any celebration of the physical as a distraction from what really matters. But God created our bodies as well as our hearts, and in those gold medal moments, athletic achievement can actually point us to God’s grandeur. We can watch a figure skater gracefully accelerate into a controlled spin and marvel at the awe of a God who created the human body with the ability to achieve such beauty here on earth. Its beauty points to something transcendent—to a perfect beauty, to God himself.
That’s what I’ll be watching for this Olympics. How about you?
