Olympic Beauty Tips

The Olympics are here and I've been watching it a little. I love the Olympics. It's the only time many really interesting sports have any hope of having any sort of television coverage that draws ratings worth commenting on. I also love the fringe of any category that draws my interest and the people who are Olympians in sports like water polo, fencing, and synchronized swimming are truly freaks. They don't dedicate themselves to a sport in dreams of fame and big bucks. Those opportunities just aren't there in those sports. There may be a handful of people able to earn respectable livings at these sports, but even these rarities aren't the multimillionaires of football, basketball, baseball and European soccer. They actually found some fringe sport they truly loved and then sacrificed having a life to become the best at it. That's truly cool.

But any consideration of the Olympics of course ends in discourse on physical beauty. There's the obvious reason that athletic people tend to be beautiful people purely because they are at the peak of health and fitness, but I think we can take this discussion a little deeper. Let's start with this photo.

Now, I'm not one of those who's going to make jokes about butch women capable of kicking my butt being the only ones playing softball. The fact that it took me scrolling through four pages of "Jennie Fitch" on Google image search to find a decent softball-related photo of my subject kind of helps argue against the old stereotype, but my point of complaint here is her eyebrows. It's one thing to shape them up to prevent bushiness or unibrow syndrome. In fact, I do a little plucking in the middle myself. I've just seen way too many women who take this grooming practice too far and Finch is a perfect example. Too much arch makes you look like an old lady living her WWII glory days and too thin makes you look like a burn victim.

This takes nothing away from Finch's incredible ability as a fastpitch softball pitcher, but we're talking fashion here.

I was going to do a Hot and Not pair of captioned photos here with the beach volleyball being paired with Not and the indoor volleyball being paired with Hot. The only problem is that I had to dig through twice as many photo search pages for beach volleyball to find a photo that wasn't obviously taken with prurient interests in mind. Despite being more thoroughly clothed, I couldn't find a decent photo of indoor volleyball. The best I could do is provide you with this link. Some of those show the standard Olympic uniforms well and without the perv quality of the rest of the stuff on the web. As for my critique, there's just something that detracts from the look of pro beach volleyball bikinis. I've got nothing against the swimsuit style. They can be quite attractive, but these don't even come close to the appeal of the standard volleyball uniform. Making matters worse is the fact that beach volleyball is the only Olympic sport where the uniform seems to be more geared for sex appeal than utility. If the guys can play in loose-fitting shirts and shorts, why can't the women compete in something less pornographic?

Heck, playing in a field hockey skirt would be an upgrade for the beach volleyballers. I actually have nothing against this uniform. It looks pretty good on the players and seems to function well for the sport. However, I always wonder about the logic of keeping the skirt in tennis and field hockey for women. I know there's the whole bloomer thing like with cheerleaders, but I really think I'd be more comfortable playing a rough sport like field hockey in shorts than I would in a skirt, but that's just me.

My final complaint is the men's water polo players. Why exactly are these guys all in Speedos? I can understand a guy like Michael Phelps wearing these, but even the swim racers rarely wear these things anymore. They've realized that covering more actually reduces drag, so why do the water polo guys still cling to the past and wear way too small of a swimsuit? No one looks good in these dinky little things even if you do have an incredible physique (look at the bodies on these guys when they get out of the pool). They embarrass pretty much everyone else in the male physical ideal department except the gymnasts, but please switch over to the knee-length tights like the more minimalist swimmers like Phelps.

And it seems that I've been a little easier on the men than I have the women, and it may be a little true. However, I ignored any silly looking outfits that looked that way for entirely practical purposes (some of the full bodysuits for swimmers or the things wrestlers wear). Most male athletes just wear some variation of shorts and athletic shirts. You can't really fault them for that.