Simon Barnes at TimesOnline is all hot and bothered about what these amazing new swimsuits the Olympic swimmers are wearing are doing to their breasts:
Those who have been watching the swimming at the Olympic Games could be forgiven for asking the obvious question. I mean: what's happened to women's breasts? Once, female swimming champions had them, now they don't. They have broad shoulders and wide chests, but no lumps on them. It's not quite as it should be. Is it masculinising drugs? Some kind of anti-cosmetic surgery? An early example of massed gene-doping?No. It's the Speedo LZR Racer. This is a swim suit that improves your hydrodynamic efficiency, and it does so by holding you in, by compressing the body. This has a dramatic effect on biomechanical efficiency, it means that your muscles don't flap about so much. Because of this, the process of recovery after each stroke is infinitely easier for the body to deal with.
An expert in biomimetics has suggested that the suit also helps your body to deal with pain: the compression makes the body send less urgent messages to the brain. You can bear it all much better. In short, you go faster. You can always regain your femininity when you have wriggled out of the damn things after the race.
Regain your femininity. Cuz God knows, there's nothing feminine about winning a medal at the Olympics, especially if you have to endure "looking a bit flat-chested" in the process.
Nah, just kidding. Barnes says it's all worth it for the extra speed the suits give. It's jolly generous of Barnes to let us know it's okay with him that the gals are making him suffer by not displaying their breasts for him. Cuz he's not gay, you know. Even though the diving makes his thoughts turn to homosexuality:
Sex and the springboardJust managed to catch another round of the synchrinised diving. It was the springboard today, and the British pair, Nicholas Robinson-Baker and Benjamin Swain, were doing their stuff. Their achievement was, it must be said, in reaching the final. Theirs is a sport not without beauty, but it always seems to have a homoerotic whiff about it as well. It all looks like a wonderfully elegant gay suicide pact.
So not gay.
(Technorati tags: Olympics, swimming, sports journalism, sexism)
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