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Chloe Angyal

Student/Intern/Writer

Chloe Angyal is a senior majoring in Sociology at Princeton University. Raised in Sydney, Australia, Chloe aspires to be a writer, a voice for her generation, and an all-around good person. In her spare time, she loves to dance, sing, ice skate, drink good wine, eat good food, rock out to bad music ...

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Legs closed, please

Regular readers of my columns could be forgiven for thinking that the only Olympic sport I’ve watched so far is gymnastics. That’s not entirely true – I watched the diving, waterpolo and swimming, too – but gymnastics is the only sport which compelled me to schedule my day around the its telecast. As a former gymnast, I love to watch world-class gym competitions, and because they’re only broadcast once every four years (there’s no “Monday Night Gymnastics”, is there?), I try not to miss them. I also try to catch as much of the media commentary and analysis of gymnastics as I can. Just as it’s only broadcast once every four years, the sport is only talked about by the mainstream media during the Olympics, where the US is almost always in medal contention. So I enjoy it while I can.

But I didn’t really enjoy the photo coverage of gymnastics during these Games. Gym can provide some truly spectacular images – its combinations of flexibility, strength, power and balance make it a sports photographer’s dream come true.The sport requires women to twist themselves into remarkable positions, often while defying gravity, spinning, rotating and soaring above the bars, balance beam or vault. As such, any gymnastics competition presents literally hundreds of amazing gymnastics shots, just waiting to be taken. And I mean “amazing” in the literal sense: you are amazed that any human could make her body bend and fly the way that these girls make theirs do.

Looking through the photo coverage of Australia’s national daily, The Sydney Morning Herald, however, I couldn’t help but notice an unpleasant trend. Of the first eight shots in that slideshow, seven of them showed women with their legs spread at 180°. In other words, the slideshow began with seven consecutive crotch shots. Seriously, count them.

This is disturbing for several reasons. The first is that even if, as China is claiming, all of its gymnasts meet the age requirement and are sixteen (highly unlikely), these women are still very young. Most of them are still teenagers, with the few “old” exceptions – 20-year-old American Alicia Sacramone is considered “mature” in this competition, and 32-year-old German Oksana Chusovitina is an unprecedented age anomaly. The fact that photographers and newspapers are focusing on the spread legs and exposed crotches of barely-legal women is a little worrisome to me.

Secondly, gymnasts don’t actually spend that much of their time in the spread-eagle position (called “straddle” in gymnastics terms). Sure, a lot of their leaps hit the amazing 180° position you see in those photos, as do their high-flying release moves above the uneven bars, but in the grand scheme of things, there are many more positions to hit and many more photos to take than the ones that expose their nether regions. Again, it’s disappointing that photographers and papers choose to focus on positions which, when snapped and shown once or twice, are remarkable. Four or five times is repetitive. Six or seven times? That’s laughable, and borderline pornographic.

Finally, in the spirit of gender equality, I took a look through the photos taken of male gymnasts during these Games to see if photographers and publishers were equally captivated by their crotch-exposing flexibility as they were by women’s. The answer? A predictable negative. Images of male gymnasts feature bulging biceps and rippling abs, to be sure, but pictures of men in straddle are rare. And it isn’t because male gymnasts don’t hit straddle. Half of every pommel horse routine is spent in a leg-spread, and men are required to hit a split position at least once during a floor routine, but you’d never know it from the still photos being published in the papers.

So, while I appreciate some of the media coverage of the gym during these Games (the commentary efforts of Bela Karolyi, for example - Karolyi is the Romanian coach who produced countless American champions, and should be kept on retainer by NBC after the Olympics, to call sports other than gymnastics. Seriously, the man and his moustache can liven up anything, even golf or baseball), I’ve been unimpressed by the creepy and crotch-centered still photo coverage. But, I should also note that there are many excellent examples of gymnastics photography out there. I’ve included several of them to demonstrate what gymnastics photography can look like, so you can compare it to the status quo at these Games.