Starre Julia Vartan

This piece, my first-ever for CNN Sports, came out of a pitch related to my book, The Stronger Sex, that didn’t quite work out in another iteration many months back. So I retooled the focus to put it on the worldwide phenomenon of sports uniforms and how most of them aren’t made for female athlete’s bodies, and pitched it to my editor at CNN.

She liked the idea, and I had a very compelling (and infuriating-on-her-behalf) interview with Tess Howard, a ridiculously accomplished Olympian for Team Great Britain in field hockey, and a recent graduate of the London School of Economics (a Masters degree in Political Sociology, with distinction)!

This article starts out with Tess’ experience and her push for changing athletic uniforms, but I also get into the very important subject of Low-Energy Availability and REDs which is basically what happens when female athletes underfuel (don’t eat enough) because they are trying to meet cultural standards around what athletes are “supposed to” look like. This very real stress on female athletes leads to injury and dropping out of sports and is one of the reasons female athletes aren’t competing at their highest levels since, depending on the sport, anywhere from 30-70% of athletes are fueling enough to perform strongly, or build muscle enough to do so.

When Olympian Tess Howard put on her new uniform for Great Britain’s women’s field hockey team in 2021, she felt something she hadn’t expected at the height of her athletic career: embarrassment.

The compression tank top and short, snug skort were meant to be performance wear. Instead, the top was too tight and low-cut, and both pieces were physically restricting Howard’s and her teammates’ movement and breathing.

“You put the top on, and your life is sucked out of you,” said Howard, recalling the skort actually made it more difficult to run. “Before games, we were all stretching it over the backs of chairs in the locker room, trying to make it fit differently.”