Nike has revealed the uniforms they designed for Team USA’s track and field athletes at the 2024 Paris Games and they’re raising some eyebrows. At a Nike Air event in Paris Thursday, the company unveiled the men’s and women’s designs, but it’s only the women’s that are being called out for being skimpy.
Both uniforms are made from spandex, with the men’s featuring conservative mid-thigh length shorts and a full-coverage tank top. The women’s style one-piece outfit has a skimpy, high-cut bottom that has some athletes wondering if they’ll be showing too much when competing. “Wait, my hoo haa is gonna be out,” Tara Davis-Woodhall, long jump hopeful, who competed in the 2020 Olympics, commented on Citius Mag’s post reporting the uniform design.
And she wasn’t the only one worried about this. “Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or these mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display,” retired U.S. world champion runner Lauren Fleshman writes in an Instagram post. “If this outfit was truly beneficial to physical performance, men would wear it.”
- Nike has defended their design, with Janet Nichol, Vice President of Apparel Innovation telling CBS Sports the uniforms “perform at the highest level” and assuring that athletes were brought in to try the uniforms out.
- “This is clearly a joke … I’m someone’s mom, I can’t be exposing myself in such ways,” Paralympian Femita Ayanbeku comments on Instagram. “Where are the shorts?!”
- “There’s no way a female runner had any say in that design,” another commenter writes. “I hope USALF is paying for the bikini waxes.”
- “If the labia are hanging out on a still mannequin, what do we expect to happen to a moving person?” another wonders.
Source: NY Post