Bodies, bodies, bodies

Or the everlasting question: Are tools sexy?

Mar 15, 2024

Athletes have a weird relationship with their body. Maybe everyone has but I was an athlete my entire life until 18 months ago so that’s the only experience I know - having a weird relationship with my body. And from what I can gather being around other top athletes for most of my life, so they do. Not all of it is bad, some of it is just, well, weird.

For example. If you’ve ever been around an athlete - professional or aspirational - you will notice them having no shame in taking off their clothes at all times. They will change in the middle of a shop, take their shirts off in the park when it’s just above freezing but sunny (so do English people for no apparent reason) and walk around in open slippers in public. They have no shame or so it seems. I would argue, however, it has less to do with shame and more with a dissociation process every athlete has to go through early on in life in order to even become an athlete.

Let me explain. There comes a moment in an ambitious teenager’s life when they have to express whether they want to become a professional athlete. Not always in words yet definitely in a sudden narrowing of mind, a passion becoming an obsession. All of a sudden, being an athlete becomes a serious pursuit, something worth adjusting your life to. The stakes immediately change. The expectations rise (from everyone around, yes, but also from oneself) and practice turns from play to project real quick. Approximately around this time is when training sessions become so hard you lose your breath, you feel your heart thump under the skin of your head, your muscles jitter spattered with moments when you look death straight in the eye and say: not today, Satan, not today. You never actually die, obviously, but there are moments when you’re convinced you will. I feel like death is mentioned more often in the gym than in a funeral home.

When I realised that this was my life now, that this was not a one off but my new day-to-day, I started dissociating from my body. I would slowly count to ten when I thought my heart was bursting and my lungs were combusting knowing well that a human being can withstand anything for ten seconds at a time. I practiced this technique for a while until finally one day I felt the pain leave my body. But it wasn’t really pain leaving my body, it was more me leaving my body watching it from the outside, laughing at it from a safe distance. On first glance, this might not sound healthy but it felt like survival in those instances. Golfers wouldn’t know how that feels like (there it is: throwing shade at golf).

Strictly speaking, athletes’ bodies are not bodies - but tools. Tools that need to be cleaned and groomed, prepared and rested, well taken care of. They are things you can put away when you’re done needing them. Things you can show off in public because a tool is not sexy. Although Freud would disagree, I’m sure. Athletes take their shirts off in public and change in the middle of the shop because in their minds their bodies are de-sexualised. Just a tool, nothing else. Now that I write it, I do feel like tool was the wrong metaphor for emphasising a lack of eroticism. My bad.

The real privilege of youth is not the bouncy skin and the robust hairline. The real privilege of youth is the never-wondering whether your body will show up, the never-worrying about it, the never-knowing it’s there in the first place. Because it always is. Until one day it isn’t anymore.

Only when the body gets hurt, injured, unwell do we come to terms with it being part of a bigger entity which is the self. The self - how scary. It is part of us, we realise, because it is not at our disposal any longer. Rather, we are at its disposal.

Female athletes come to this realisation a lot sooner. People start asking you, whether you are a swimmer or something. You catch hushed voices saying things like manly physique or I wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley, she has broader shoulders than me. Well, I hope for your sake that we don’t meet in a dark alley because I do have broad shoulders and I could take you easily. But I’m digressing. In the beginning, you don’t take these comments to heart because - remember?- it’s not your body. It’s just a tool you happen to need a lot. But eventually, one of these comments hits its target and you call adidas, ashamed and nervous, and ask them to send you T-shirts rather than sleeve-less tops. It is what it is. I’m now retired and am glad my rest-muscles are still holding up. At the very least, that experience helped me integrate my body with my self.

Thinking and writing about it now, I don’t think it’s healthy to view your body as a separate entity like a severed limb you have to carry around. Even though I do appreciate athletes taking off their clothes in all walks of life.

What concerns me is the uneasy feeling that this experience that was seemingly reserved for athletes and models, for people who work with their bodies, has now taken over society, especially young girls. Uploading pictures of yourself, of your body, having it judged by others and judging others reinforces the experience of your body not being part of yourself. It’s just something you see on the internet. The threshold of altering it becomes easier to cross.

I don’t have any tips on how to amend all of it. It just takes one emotional experience felt in the body which we think is not ours to make us realise that in reality it is. Words don’t help here only experience or as I like to call it: life.

rest-muscles that could still take you in a dark alley

Things that make me happy:

The Holger Rune versus Daniil Medvedev rivalry. Wrongfully underrated. One plays the role of a brat and the other just seemlessly glides into a strict dad role scolding the brat. Magnificent!

Things that make me unhappy:

…are secretly things that make me happy. Play having to be halted in Indian Wells DUE TO A BEE INVASION. If this doesn’t scream climate change, I don’t know what will. But the more bizarre the reason for suspending play, the happier I become. Shoutout to the beekeeper who brought a giant vacuum to take care of it all and never even wore gloves or goggles or a beekeeper’s suit. The hero we didn’t know we needed.