Eat. Sweat. Play Read online

  At the time She-Ra symbolized something rebellious and cool to me, the idea that a strong woman could be sexy. But fast forward a generation and it now feels very outdated. Unfortunately, we haven’t quite outgrown this trope. You’ve only got to google ‘sportswomen’ to see that one of the first suggested search terms is ‘hottest’. Being sporty and sexy is all good and positive in many ways, but in the twenty-first century it’s not refreshing enough. It’s too often the fundamental criterion for sportswomen to be accepted in the mainstream. Surely we want to get to a point where women can be strong and powerful and not sexy. Or only sexy when they feel like it, not as a requirement to getting media coverage or being valued.

  When I was growing up girls didn’t have posters of sportswomen on their walls. In the 1990s if you wanted a poster on your bedroom wall, the now-defunct chain of shops called Athena pretty much dictated the law. There was a poster for girls: a muscly man stripped to the waist holding a naked baby – just what every young girl yearned for, a child with a hunk. And a poster for boys: the now-iconic image of a woman lifting her tennis skirt to reveal her naked and perfectly pert buttocks. Girls weren’t sold sportswomen as inspirational icons, so if you did have a sports star on your bedroom wall it was likely to be a hunky footballer, reproduced in the poster pages of a teenage girls’ favourite, Just Seventeen magazine (RIP): the likes of Ryan Giggs, Jamie Redknapp or Lee Sharpe. The only exception to this that I ever encountered were gymnasts and horses. Personally I bucked the trend and chose comedienne Maureen Lipman for my bedroom wall, the Jewish grandmother I never had.

  For my generation there were three sportswomen who stood out: Flo-Jo, Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf. Navratilova, in her shorts and glasses, intrigued even my mum, who generally kept her distance from sport. To me, being a bit of a tomboy at the time, any girl or woman who wore shorts when they were widely expected to be wearing skirts was a natural hero. Every afternoon during Wimbledon I would come home and lounge on the sofa for hours. Sometimes my mum would join me, a rare occasion that we watched sport together. There we would sit, hardly saying a word, except to let the dogs in or out if they scratched at the door, spellbound by the movement of bodies across courts, and the gentle sounds of an afternoon of tennis.

  Then Steffi Graf came along, and started winning everything. She was undoubtedly an awesome player, but to my twelve-year-old self she was a traitor. I just couldn’t understand why – when Navratilova had already broken the mould and wore shorts – anyone would take a step backwards and wear a skirt. As far as I was concerned, Steffi was letting us all down.

  Their combined sporting legacy lives on in the inspirational sportswomen of today – Serena Williams, and a stable of amazing track stars such as multi gold-medallist sprinter Allyson Felix, the US 400m specialist Sanya Richards-Ross, double Olympic-champion Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, or Britain’s very own Christine Ohuruogu. My current favourite is US middle-distance runner Alysia Montaño. In 2014 she made headlines for running in the national championships while thirty-four weeks pregnant. She was swiftly dubbed an icon, and even a Daily Mail columnist had to admit she was inspirational. I loved Alysia from even before then, covering her races while working the circuit as an athletics correspondent. The American runner always stood out for wearing a flower in her hair, and I loved her explanation. ‘I think when people look at women in sport, there’s always this sort of, “You run like a girl,” and it’s almost like a negative thing,’ she said. ‘I think what the heck is that supposed to mean? Why not run like a girl? We have grit and I can wear a flower in my hair. I can represent femininity and I can represent strength at the same time.’

  These athletes grew up in the same era as me, and yet they survived the assault of negative messages about women and sport to flourish as elite sportswomen. Thank goodness they did. Many of them still don’t receive the recognition they deserve – Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, for example, may be three times world champion and double Olympic champion over 100m, but how many have heard of her achievements versus her compatriot, Usain Bolt? Nevertheless, they are out there, role models for young girls, many of them outspoken on issues of gender pay equality, or, as in Alysia’s case, challenging our ideas around motherhood and sporting careers.

  It was years later, as a sports journalist, that I actually got to meet Martina Navratilova, interviewing her in the back of a taxi.2 I was nervous, she was grumpy. It turned out to be the most surreal interview of my career, with the conversation ranging from breast cancer and US military policy to Lady Gaga, a mysterious accident with a French cat, and Battersea Dogs’ Home. Halfway through, and clearly bored with my questions, Navratilova suddenly leaned out of the window and started chatting to a French bulldog huffing and puffing its way up a hill in Putney.

  ‘Hey! So cute,’ she yelled out to the dog. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Snoopy,’ said the dog’s – quite frankly – stunned owner.

  ‘Snoopy?’ said Navratilova, adopting a baby voice. ‘You don’t look like a Snoopy to me. I have a French bulldog and his name is Spike. Hey Snoopy. Look up here! Oh, he’s so cute.’ Snoopy’s owner, still struggling to come to terms with the fact that one of the world’s most famous tennis players was talking to her dog, finally plucked up the courage to ask a question herself.

  ‘Enjoying the tennis, Martina?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied airily, and promptly wound up her window as the traffic moved on.

  During my research in preparation for meeting her, I was horrified to read that tennis crowds had rarely warmed to Navratilova as a player. That, like Serena Williams, Navratilova was often described in freakish terms, sneered at for being too muscular, or too dominant in their sport. ‘Serena is so physically dominating, people are feeling sorry for her opponents,’ nodded Navratilova, reflecting on their similarities from the back of the taxi. ‘They were feeling sorry for mine. I was very strong, I was very muscular and I played a very aggressive game. But it’s because she is so strong that she wins and she’s proud of her body. She doesn’t apologize for it and I like that. She’s like, “Hey, I’m a strong woman and get out of my way.” If she was a guy they’d love it, but they get intimidated by women being that strong. I empathize with that because I definitely went through it. It’s tough because you feel like you’re fighting [against the crowd] – it’s hard enough fighting the opponent. And you do feel it, you know, not getting that love. It’s not fair.’

  Even today sportswomen must feel like they are fighting against the crowd, against mainstream society, against expectations. Take women’s tennis – then, as now, still all too often valued in terms of how sexy the players are. Sexy = popular. Sexy = cash. When a major sports channel advertised the women’s tour on UK television in 2014 they ran the slogan, ‘Here come the glamour girls.’ It seems insane that all these years later, long after Navratilova’s heyday, we are still portraying elite sportswomen in this way. ‘It is degrading,’ agreed Navratilova, ‘because they’re not talking about them as a person or as an athlete, they’re talking about them as a sexual object. I don’t like that.’

  Beyond Flo-Jo and Navratilova there weren’t enough inspirational female icons in the 1980s. Thank goodness, then, for the Saturday night hit entertainment show Gladiators. In 1992 the show launched in Britain and it made a huge impression on me. Yes, the women did wear pink crop tops and shorts but the entire cast of female stars were rippling with muscle. This was a revelation. The female Gladiators were fierce, even the smiley ones like Jet and Lightning; they wanted to beat their opponent and I loved how seriously they took each event, hounding contestants up The Wall, virtually pulling their arms out of their sockets on Hang Tough, and whacking them with giant cotton buds in Duel.

  Jet was the Gladiator who garnered the most attention, the one whose name everyone knew, and the one everyone fancied. All these years later I was curious to know what it was like being Jet, ‘the sexy one’, and I resolved to track her down. I di
dn’t expect to find her working at a medical clinic in North Wales, contributing to building pathways in wellness for work with YouTrain, solving the obesity crisis and supporting those with mental health issues. A trained psychotherapist and teacher, Diane mostly lives her life away from the limelight now, and the kids she works with probably have no idea of how famous she once was. For someone so frequently depicted as smiley, sexy, hair-flicky, she surprises me by how serious she is. While the general public saw her grinning and looking glamorous on Gladiators, she was in fact only just turning the corner out of a troubled adolescence during which she had suffered bulimia.

  ‘I had body dysmorphia in my early teens,’ she says now. ‘I hated the fact I was a very muscular female.’ Growing up, the other kids at school made fun of her physique. ‘They’d say, “Urgh, look at your calves, you’re really muscly!” I was very conscious of it. As a child I found it difficult to accept my body shape. At gymnastics I was tall for my age group; I was the shape of a senior by the age of twelve when the other juniors were very underdeveloped. I had that hang-up of being the bigger girl among the junior squad.’ She decided she could never make it as a gymnast – or a dancer – because she wasn’t skinny enough. And so the bulimia began. ‘I remember that feeling of self-hate,’ she says quietly, ‘and now I think how can I not have liked food? How can I have used food as a weapon? It caused a lot of sadness. As an athlete I would have performed even better, I’m sure, had I eaten properly.’

  A chance audition for Gladiators ended up changing her life. ‘I was twenty-two when Glads first hit the TV screens, I remember thinking it was a relief that a bunch of us women were out there in our Lycra sports outfits being strong athletic women, rather than this heroin-chic image of thin women with eating disorders. I was so proud to be one of these very athletic women with backgrounds of bodybuilding, and athletics, or in my case dance and gymnastics. I felt so proud that we were exemplifying women being very tough and strong.’ ITV advised Diane to go public with the history of her eating disorders to avoid any leaks coming out in the newspapers. Her confession followed Andrew Morton’s infamous book detailing Princess Diana’s own struggles with bulimia. Diane says she found the process healing. ‘I’d get letters from girls writing into the show saying, “I hear you were bulimic, look at you now, I’d love to be like you,” and I thought that’s great because I’m very healthy and a normal body weight.

  ‘Gladiators changed things for women, it wasn’t a place where you could just stand around and look pretty – you would have been beaten all the time. But also it hurt; there were a lot of injuries and I left after four and a half years when I suffered a spinal injury and nearly broke my neck.’ But if the female Gladiators were the embodiment of muscle, I say, how did Diane feel about being labelled the sexy one in pretty much every hot list going that decade? ‘I genuinely think it was because I was a bit fatter than the others,’ she laughs. ‘I had boobs and a big bum, whereas my fellow Gladiators were more athletic than me. I used to grin madly when the cameras were on me and it was a nervous grin. I also had a very high win-count and I think the audience liked that. People would say, “Ooh, she’s good at those cartwheels!” Yeah, and there was a reason for it, I couldn’t bear standing still in front of people looking at my arse. If there was an opportunity for me to do a barani flip and escape the cameras, I’d do it.’

  Diane says there was only one occasion on the show when she felt she was forced into being sexy. Nigel Lythgoe, a.k.a. Nasty Nigel, was director of the programme and he decided to line up the female Gladiators for a shot in front of the contestants’ prizes – a blue Jeep for the guys, and a red Jeep for the women. Diane rolls her eyes at the memory. ‘I mean, come on, guys! And what really got me, and I’ve never been a diva, I’ve always been the consummate professional, but they said, “Girls, please go and stand next to the jeeps. Tracksuits off, just stand around the vehicles.” I said, “What? You’re asking us to drape ourselves over cars, like bloody Pirelli girl calendar models? No, no, no, I’m a Gladiator. I run around the arena, I don’t stand and pose next to a car like a glamour model.” I wasn’t going to stand next to a car with my arse on show. When I was standing on the podium or swinging around in Hang Tough, or scaling The Wall, I was moving and doing my job as an athlete. It was the one and only time I felt objectified by the producers of the show.’

  If Gladiators, Flo-Jo, Navratilova and She-Ra were the powerful female icons of my 1980s upbringing, then the Spice Girls were the self-proclaimed ‘girl power’ role models of the 1990s. I was seventeen by the time the Spice Girls burst into our consciousness with the catchy hit ‘Wannabe’, and already too old to be inspired by them. In that teenage angst-ridden way I was searching for complex identities, and found their thematically arranged Spice doctrine – each band member limited to displaying a single trait – irritatingly reductive. I had just fallen in love with football as, that same summer, England hosted the European Championships and the nation went football crazy. The idea of Melanie Chisholm being ‘the sporty one’ because she wore tracksuits was silly to me. It also seemed instantly to confirm that sporty meant the opposite of glamorous, sexy and feminine, because while Chisholm danced around in trackies, her bandmates wore slinky dresses and heels. In response, the mainstream media made it quite clear which of the Spice Girls we should be letching over. As Ali G. cruelly asked in his Comic Relief interview with Posh and Becks, ‘If the best footballer goes out with the fittest Spice Girl, does Sporty Spice go out with someone from Scunthorpe United?’

  Back then there was a lot of talk about the Spice Girls being a manufactured band, a marketer’s dream – it made me wonder if Sporty Spice even liked sport? Wearing tracksuits wasn’t proof enough for me, since that’s just leisurewear circa 1993. I had to find out. A trip to a posh hotel in central London on a mission to interview Sporty Spice about sport was an experience in itself.3 For a sports journalist, sports interviews are nothing like normal celebrity interviews. At sports interviews you do not get massage therapists trying to convince you to sit down for a moment and enjoy a quick fifteen-minute Indian head massage. There are no shot glasses of wheatgrass juice; even at Arsenal’s feng-shui-designed training ground there is just an automatic coffee dispenser and some individually wrapped chocolate bourbon biscuits. So you can imagine my response when a PR lady insisted I might like to have my boobs measured for a correct bra size. Blushing deep crimson (the mere mention of ‘breast’ in my more familiar work environment tends to denote a sway in conversation towards the deeply smutty), I insisted it would have to wait at least until after I had actually sat down with Mel C.

  Flustered by all the offers, I wasn’t sure what I’d make of Melanie (as she is now known). But, despite my cynicism, she quickly won me over. She’s smiley, lovely, funny, self-deprecating, opinionated and swears like a trooper – and she didn’t tell me off for asking about David Beckham. And she was stunningly beautiful. How could anyone ever have described her as the Scunthorpe United of the Spice Girls?

  ‘I was the only one in the Spice Girls who really loved sport,’ she says, instantly allaying all my suspicions. ‘Victoria had to become interested in football when she met David Beckham, but for me growing up in a small industrial town on the outskirts of Liverpool, everyone was into football. That was just how it was. Growing up, everyone I knew wore a trackie. That was Liverpool in the 1980s.’ A Liverpool fan, who remembers the day of the Hillsborough disaster, the ‘ashen faces’ of the people behind the till at her local sweetshop that terrible Saturday, Melanie says she loved sport at school and still loves it now. ‘Sport is empowering for women,’ she says. ‘Look at the Spice Girls, me in a tracksuit, a global pop star, you just can’t imagine it happening now, can you? I’d kill to be in a tracksuit on telly now! But we had that individuality.’

  Melanie says all the Spice Girls have always kept physically fit. ‘Mel B. probably trains the most out of everybody. Victoria runs, Geri does her yoga, Emma does a reluctant workout –
she just hates it,’ but her own obsession is triathlon. ‘I was a bit scared of the idea of a triathlon at first – open-water swims, and I was scared of falling off my bike because that can really hurt. The beginning of the swim is pretty hairy because everyone’s trying to get the shortest route, there’s a few arms and legs and punches and kicks and things. But it’s not actually that bad, the odd foot in the face is all right! I just find myself saying, “Oh sorry! Sorry! I don’t want to hurt anyone.” And I love my bike. It’s white. Very stylish. You know the old adage, “all the gear and no idea”? Well, my triathlon trainer says, “all the kit, still shit”, which very much applies to me. I’m a newbie to the sport, but I’m loving it. There’s so much to it, you never get bored.’

  For Melanie, taking part in sports events is not about sculpting the perfect arse, as so many women’s magazines instruct us is the purpose of sport and exercise, but about the experience and the friendships that women gain from being active together. ‘Being a Spice Girl we harped on about “girl power”, but in the last couple of years it does feel like there’s another wave of feminism going on. It’s good to see, because I think “girl power” has been misunderstood at times. Empowering women is about intellect, not physical appearance. I say that because, working in the music industry, so many of our young artists – brilliant young pop artists – are so sexual. And having a young daughter I’m more aware of it than ever. I’m not criticizing anybody who chooses to express themselves in whatever way is comfortable for them, but I just think why? Why do women feel that this is how they have to express themselves? It’s so sad, our society has become so obsessed with looking perfect. Everyone wants to look good, we want to look our best, but it’s this constant fucking obsession, it drives me insane. I hate it. Of course, being in the public eye, in entertainment, part of my work is to look good, but when I’m in the gym – honestly, I don’t care. The nice thing is that I feel there’s a bit of a revolt going on, a rumble, a movement, where some women are saying they don’t want to do that. They want to be known for their minds and not their bodies.’