Penalised for wearing too much, criticised for wearing too little, sportswomen face scrutiny when it comes to kit

“I think some people still feel uncomfortable with women’s bodies,” French tennis player Alize Cornet says matter-of-factly. It is a year and a half since she was given a code violation for removing her T-shirt on court at the US Open, after realising she had it on inside-out.

Anyone who has sat through a Rafael Nadal match will be familiar with him whipping his sweat-drenched T-shirts off on court, but he has never received a warning for it. An outraged public response to Cornet’s penalty – which many interpreted as her being punished for exposing her sports bra on court – led to organisers promptly changing the rules. The United States Tennis Association also apologised, but Cornet believes the incident was indicative of a “deeper” issue.

“Apparently the chair umpire was just shocked,” she told Telegraph Women’s Sport, sarcasm seeping through the phone. “It was the most unfair decision, there’s no doubt about it. I didn’t see it as sexist, but I think it’s a deeper problem about the woman’s body, and women in general in sport.”

Most women can remember a time they were made to feel uncomfortable in sports kit, whether that is wedgie-pulling in your netball dress, dreaded school swim sessions, or getting tangled in your sports bra. In competitive sport these experiences all too often take a more disturbing turn.

In September last year, an Alaskan 17-year-old swimmer was disqualified from a school meet for allegedly wearing her swimsuit in a revealing way.

Even though the decision was overturned, it caused a media storm. Tennis legend Billie Jean King tweeted that “the constant policing of women’s bodies is offensive, sexist and wrong”, while other commentators alleged racial bias in the decision which went against a black athlete, punished for how a regulation high school swimsuit fitted her teenage body.

Serena Williams, no doubt, can relate. Sporting a tutu, shorts or beaded braids, Williams has spent her entire career being scrutinised over her appearance.

After donning a catsuit at Roland Garros in 2018, designed to function as a deterrent to the blood clots that almost cost her life when giving birth to her daughter the previous year, Bernard Giudicelli, the French Tennis Federation president, waded in to announce a ban on catsuits for the following year. “You have to respect the game and the place,” he said.

But respect the greatest champion of your sport’s right to wear what she is most comfortable and healthy in? Forget that.

The choice of attire can affect results, too. The first woman to wear a hijab in figure skating, Zahra Lari, had a point deduction in her debut competition as a 17-year-old. “They immediately gave the deduction for the hijab, they covered it as a prop,” the UAE native says of the decision, which was later overturned. “My coach was more upset than I was, but once I came home it hit me how big of a deal it was.”

The rules have since been altered, but the case underlines how endemic these experiences are when it comes to elite sports kit and women’s needs.

Ahead of last year’s football World Cup, Nike unveiled national kits designed exclusively for the women’s squads. A watershed moment, at last women footballers at the pinnacle of the game would not be wearing kits designed for men. It was about time. Lucy Bronze and her England team-mates used to have to cut netting out of their shorts, designed with male genitalia in mind.

Phoebe Schecter, a defensive linebacker in Great Britain’s American football squad, finds that her sport’s equipment – created for a default male body – is putting women at risk of injury. “They’ve started doing girl pads that have a little bit of protection on the chest area. But how do we practise against each other with regular [male] pads which are cut off above the chest? Everything is meant to fit a man.”

Even typically female participation sports can overlook the basic concerns of their athletes. In an interview with Telegraph Women’s Sport last year, 19-time gymnastics world champion Simone Biles described the emotional impact of wearing a leotard as a teenager. “People are already uncomfortable with their body changing [during puberty] and then we have to do it in a leotard in front of the world,” she said. There is no other option.

Gymnastics is a sport with a rule book that includes hair and make-up regulations. Following Dutch gymnast Celine van Gerner’s Cats-inspired floor routine at the European Championships, sporting feline-style eyeshadow, Fig, the sport’s global federation, introduced a new rule banning anything other than “modest make-up”. As US gymnast Margzetta Frazier so aptly tweeted, “Lol ‘modest’ like we’re not already half naked in leotards.”

Former England netball captain Ama Agbeze says players in her sport have previously struggled with the fit of their dresses, for practical reasons. She remembers an earlier version of the national kit that caused pre-match changing-room anxiety because the skimpy under-layer of the dress made players feel exposed.

“With the old kit, when it was knickers, anything you did your bikini line was going to be on show, so it was a worry,” she says. “I get razor bumps, but there’d be times where, just before a game, I’d be shaving and not worrying about the effect of the bumps and the pain – or focusing on the game.”

Though the undershorts design for the more recent iterations of the netball national kit have thankfully changed, body hair is an issue that continues to polarise opinion. When Adidas included a model with unshaven legs in their 2017 campaign, she received rape threats; a similar Nike effort used a model with unshaven armpits last year and was dubbed “disgusting”.

Even in sport, women cannot escape the impossibly narrow beauty ideals society boxes them into.

Pole vaulter Holly Bradshaw found a happy medium in foregoing more revealing uniforms for an all-in-one suit. Bradshaw first burst onto the elite scene, aged 20, after recording what was at that time the third highest indoor jump in history. But her celebrations were short-lived when she was allegedly told: “You’ve got a bit of puppy fat, you need to lose it,” she recalls. As a result, she would “not risk” wearing the crop top and pants now, for fear of social-media trolling.

But her challenges with kit do not stop there. This time last year Nike, her sponsor of eight years, chose not to renew their sponsorship deal with her, forcing Bradshaw to find her own kit for the British Championships, where she competed in her club vest.

It is a situation she says caused her “confusion”, “embarrassment” and played on her mind for weeks. Losing sponsors is a reality of sport, but it took Bradshaw months to find a new one, despite having produced her career-best performances in 2018 and 2019.

Bradshaw believes the industry is too image-driven. “Brands are, in my opinion, [going] more towards a modelling industry than sport,” she says. “They [aren’t] looking at who was top, it’s who looks the best, who has a great Instagram [account], posts cool pictures. That’s what they’re rewarding. It was frustrating, it is a significant amount of money that is lost.”

In 2008, sprint hurdler Dawn Harper-Nelson won the Olympic title in Beijing wearing borrowed spikes because she was without a sponsor. She told The Players Tribune that she believes her skin complexion affected her opportunities at the height of her success. “Endorsements did not roll in for me,” she said. “I was told, ‘You’re too dark, that’s not what we’re looking for’.”

This is the reality: issues with kit not only place an emotional and practical toil on athletes, but also a financial one. While brands’ efforts have improved with norm-defying adverts and bespoke female kit, the age-old social issue of women being valued based on aesthetics continues to permeate sport.

Whether on the street or a court, pitch or pool, the female body still remains firmly within the male gaze.