Being fined for “improper clothing” after choosing to wear shorts rather than skimpy bikini bottoms, might seem perverse.
Norway’s female beach volley team, who lost the bronze medal match against Spain at the recent European Beach Handball Championships in Bulgaria, are tired of having to don revealing bikini bottoms at tournaments.
They tried to have the regulations changed ahead of the event, but to no avail.
When the team offered to pay the fines in order to play in thigh-length tights before the games kicked off, they were reportedly told they could incur unspecified measures, which they feared might entail being disqualified according to Norwegian state TV NRK.
So they dropped their protest. But in their final game, they went ahead and entered the pitch with the shorts they use for warming up, which they consider their uniform of choice.
They will now have to pay the disciplinary commission 1,500 euros for disobeying their ruling. And the ruling is quite specific.
The International Handball Federation regulations even specify that bikini bottoms must have “a close fit and (be) cut on an upward angle toward the top of the leg. The sidewidth must be of a maximum of 10 cm”.
It is hard to claim that such an attire boosts performance when the players themselves say they feel almost naked and uncomfortable, conscious of the fact that while they do pirouettes, photographers “take pictures between your legs”.
“The panties are quite small, so it is not pleasant when they go a little astray,” Norwegian player Katinka Haltvik told Norwegian daily Dagbladet earlier this year.
Just to make matters worse, men wear loose-fitting tops and shorts – which clearly does not hamper their performance.
Yet what Norwegian papers dubbed “the panty crisis” finds an odd counterpart in a beach volleyball attire row, where athletes were fighting for, not against, wearing a bikini.
Two female players from Germany, namely Karla Borger and Julia Sude, threatened to boycott a tournament in Qatar earlier this year after the Gulf country made it clear that they expected participants to wear T-shirts and knee-long shorts, “out of respect for the culture and traditions of the host country”.
“We are there to do our job, but we are being prevented from wearing our work clothes,” Borger reportedly told a German radio station, adding this was the only time a government had told them "how to do our job".
Their boycott was partly motivated by the heat, which would definitely be an issue, the players explained.
But the organizers in Qatar proved to be much more reasonable than international beach volley authorities in the more recent row: they eventually allowed athletes to play in their bikinis if they chose to do so.
So, who should decide what is proper and improper? And by what criteria, because women athletes are becoming increasingly tired of being told what to wear by male heads of sports federations whose agendas do not always seem to have the athletes' best interest in mind.
The two cases
All the protagonists are fit female athletes, roughly the same age, wearing a similar attire, coming from two European countries with compatible traditions and mentalities: Norway and Germany.
In both episodes, the girls felt they did not have a choice but abide by the rules, or stir up a controversy.
Both sets of rules were, unsurprisingly, drawn up by men. In one case presumably in order to make the games more enticing for male viewers; in the other to comply with tradition and religion, imposing modesty.
Male-dominated organizations have been denying women their right to choose over their own bodies for centuries – but by doing so nowadays, they seem to be discrediting themselves and facing a growing number of protests by disgruntled players.
Meanwhile, the love/hate relationship with the bikini should perhaps remind us that if a revealing outfit can be a western woman’s symbol of emancipation and her sister’s source of embarrassment and discomfort, we should drop the Eurocentric belief that wearing a headscarf is always and unequivocally a sign of submission. You do not help a woman become emancipated by removing her headscarf – you do so by granting her freedom of choice.
This piece was originally published in the August, 2021 edition of Splinters.
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