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The Best American Sports Writing 2014

Page 29

by Glenn Stout


  None of this feels good. Large breasts are associated with back and neck pain, skin rashes, carpal tunnel syndrome, degenerative spine disorders, painful bra strap indentations, and even anxiety and low self-esteem. In one study of women racing in the 2012 London Marathon—cup sizes AA to HH—about a third reported breast pain from exercise. Eight percent of those described the pain as “distressing, horrible or excruciating.” Reports of pain grew with every cup size.

  It’s no wonder that athletes rack up strategies—and bills—for battling the bulge. Well-endowed golfers flock to former player-turned-coach Kellie Stenzel, who teaches them to shift their posture forward so their swing clears the top of their breasts; the bigger the chest, the deeper the lean. “These women have a real feeling of relief, like, ‘Nobody ever told me that before,’” Stenzel says, adding that despite Wright’s claims, she’s never seen a chest she couldn’t coach into compliance.

  American archer Kristin Braun says her chest causes clearance issues as she draws her bow; in order to get around it, she anchors the string farther away from her body, which can diminish power and consistency. Australian hurdler Jana Rawlinson received breast implants in 2008, then promptly removed them in hopes of speeding up her times. “Every time I raced, I panicked about whether I was letting my country down, all for my own vanity,” she told reporters. And inside the Octagon, Rousey’s boob issues go deeper than the cotton-Lycra blend. “The bigger my chest is, the more it gets in the way,” says Rousey. When she’s fighting at her most curvaceous weight, “it just creates space. It makes me much more efficient if I don’t have so much in the way between me and my opponent.”

  But nowhere do breasts pose more of a liability than in the world of elite women’s gymnastics, where any hint of a curve can mean early retirement. “Look at missiles that shoot into the air, batons that twirl—they’re straight up and down,” says Joan Ryan, author of the 1995 exposé of gymnastics and figure skating, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes. In order to stay stick straight, elite gymnasts undereat and overtrain, which delays menstruation. “You can’t afford to have a woman’s body and compete at the highest level,” Ryan says.

  To keep competitors from reaching puberty, coaches would push away bread baskets at the table and rifle through their belongings to sniff out hidden treats, says Dominique Moceanu, who was, at 14, the youngest, teensiest competitor on the 1996 gold medal USA Olympic team. “The sport pushes us to be breastless little girls as long as possible,” she says. But though breasts were forbidden, privately “we longed for them.”

  Laying off the carbs may do the trick for preteens, but most adult athletes can’t starve their boobs out of existence. So every year, some competitors head to the Marina del Rey, California, office of Dr. Grant Stevens in pursuit of a streamlined frame.

  Stevens, a plastic surgeon with backswept blond hair and a boyish face he maintains through injections of Botox and Restylane, is known as the inventor of a scalpel-free procedure that leaves women multiple cup sizes (and up to $15,000) lighter with minimal recovery time. The doctor says he’s treated volleyball players, golfers, ballet dancers, and assorted Olympians, though he won’t name names. (He trains his lasers on men as well, because nothing calls their abilities into question like a pair of man boobs.) But many of his patients have already lost out on the years of weightless chests needed to reach the highest levels of competition. At the size they walk in with, Stevens says, “they would never get to be a pro athlete.”

  Not all athletes agree that large breasts constitute a competitive disadvantage. In 2009 then 18-year-old Romanian tennis player Simona Halep announced she was having her breasts surgically reduced from a 34DD to a 34C, saying they were slowing her reaction time and causing back pain. Upon hearing about Halep’s plan, retired South African beach-volleyball player Alena Schurkova took the opportunity to launch a big-boob-pride campaign. “If she does this, it sends out the message that girls with big boobs can’t play sports, and that is just wrong,” Schurkova said. “I am 32E, and I have never found them to be a problem. I could be double what I have”—six pounds per boob!—“and I would still be okay to perform.”

  Maybe so, but Halep’s downsizing appears to have paid off: before she went under the knife, she was ranked around 250; by 2012, she’d cracked the top 50.

  When Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to don a bib at the Boston Marathon in 1967, science was unprepared to grapple with the female frame in motion. Critics warned her that the repetitive movement could cause her breasts to atrophy and her uterus to drop out of her vagina. (She ran the race in a flimsy fashion bra under a T-shirt and sweatshirt.) The sports bra wasn’t even invented until 10 years later, when a group of women sewed two jock straps together and slung them over their shoulders. (An early version of the original Jogbra is now preserved behind glass at the Smithsonian.)

  The advent of the sports bra “was like the birth control of the women’s sports revolution,” Switzer says. Still, for the next 10-plus years, scientists stayed out of athletes’ efforts to make their breasts stay put. Finally, in 1990, Oregon State University researcher LaJean Lawson invited female subjects onto a treadmill and filmed the results in the first-ever study of breast movement. Today, labs have sprung up in the UK, Australia, and Hong Kong to study breast biomechanics—and deliver the results to bra manufacturers seeking to develop cutting-edge solutions.

  At Britain’s University of Portsmouth sits a laboratory outfitted with black floors, black curtains, and a treadmill surrounded by infrared cameras aimed directly below a subject’s neck. Here, Jenny White, a lecturer in the school’s sport and exercise science department, invites women to take off their shirts, outfit their breasts and torso with reflective markers, step onto the treadmill, and break into a jog. On a set of monitors, White and her group of female researchers track 3-D images of the migrating dots in an attempt to better understand how breasts move through space. Her research has confirmed that size does matter: as breasts get bigger, they accelerate quicker, move faster, and bounce higher. What she doesn’t know—yet—is whether these speedy breasts really slow athletes down.

  Part of the problem is that, 23 years after Lawson’s seminal study, data collection is limited to relatively sluggish treadmill jaunts. “We can’t take them to the park to do a decathlon,” White says. It’s easy to get a group of women to run at the same low speed. It’s almost impossible to get them all to jump to the same height, swing a racket at the same trajectory, punch with the same power, or run at a world-record pace. And while breasts are all built from the same basic elements, the proportions and densities of the tissues vary among individuals; they fluctuate throughout the month; they transform in puberty, pregnancy, motherhood, and menopause. “It makes our job quite difficult,” she says.

  The research does reveal the self-selection process by which some women end up on the court while others—disproportionally, those with bigger breasts—are relegated to the stands. Hormones could play a part: “Studies suggest that curvier women may have higher estrogen levels, while higher testosterone levels are associated with more competitiveness and aggression,” says Florence Williams, author of Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History. “So it’s possible that if you have more estrogen, you might be somewhat less inclined to compete.” Other factors include the pain and embarrassment associated with larger breasts in motion. Deirdre McGhee, a senior lecturer at Breast Research Australia, has been studying breast support and bra fit for the past decade—and watching young athletes drop out as their breasts pop up. “They’re embarrassed. They don’t want to talk about it. And so they stop,” McGhee says. “They just don’t move.”

  McGhee counsels women to engage in physical activity that puts less of a strain on their breasts. But as the breasts get bigger, the field narrows. Busty ballet dancers are transferred to hip-hop. Postpubescent gymnasts get put on the rings. Runners are instructed to play in the water instead.

  If all else fails: yoga.

  The
physical and social barriers that come with a larger cup size mean that the Schurkovas and Haleps of the world stand out. Nothing appears to be weighing Serena Williams down on the court, but her measurements represent such an outlier that when Caroline Wozniacki stuffed her tank top and skirt with towels at a Brazilian exhibition match last year, everyone knew which great she was ridiculing. Serena took the impression in jest, dismissing charges that it was racist. (Apparently, Wozniacki’s temporary augmentation didn’t weigh her down either; she won the point.)

  But even when an athlete’s breasts aren’t notably large—and no matter how expertly she works to contain them—she still must contend with oglers who fixate on her peaks instead of her performance. When Halep announced her plans for surgery, more than 1,400 men signed a petition begging her to stay busty. Water polo matches are so notorious for nipple slips that bloggers hover over the pause button in hopes of glimpsing an areola. And in the rare case that a breast is on full display, all hell can break loose. Even as Carmouche was threatening to break her neck, Rousey felt as if her falling bra was a life-or-death situation too. If she failed to get a grip, “I’d be morbidly embarrassed,” she says.

  Nebiat Habtemariam can relate. At the 1997 world championships, the 18-year-old Eritrean runner suffered the longest wardrobe malfunction of all time during a qualifying heat for the women’s 5,000-meter run. Lacking her own gear, Habtemariam asked to borrow another runner’s red singlet for the race. What she failed to borrow was a sports bra. She spent her 18 minutes on the track with one breast perpetually in view. She didn’t leave her hotel room for the rest of the week.

  But the run of shame wasn’t the end of Habtemariam’s story. She kept running—in two more world championships, three Olympic Games, and countless other competitions. Last year she was the third woman to finish the Milano City Marathon, her lime-green and blue sports bra securely in place. It was further confirmation that the world’s best athletes are those who have managed to transcend the limits—and the addendums—to the human body. Or as Rousey put it about her one-two punch of neutralizing Carmouche and her little black bra at the same time: “Multitasking!”

  ELI SASLOW

  “Anybody Who Thinks This Is Porn or Abuse Doesn’t Know My Family”

  FROM ESPN: THE MAGAZINE

  THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR walked onto the field unannounced, wearing jeans and sandals, and Todd Hoffner knew in that moment that something was terribly wrong. Nobody interrupted his football practices at Minnesota State Mankato without advance notice and permission. His success as head coach was based on maintaining total control; each practice was scripted to the minute. He believed small disruptions in preparation became big problems during games, so he sometimes asked his players to recite a motto: No mistakes. No distractions. No surprises.

  Now, on August 17, 2012, his life was about to become the story of all three.

  The athletic director approached Hoffner at midfield and told the coach he wanted to speak with him privately. “What’s this about?” Hoffner asked, but the athletic director simply motioned for him to follow. Only a month earlier, Hoffner had earned a new four-year contract with a raise of more than 15 percent, and he had already stated his plans to stay at Mankato for the rest of his career. Hoffner and the AD walked into an adjacent building, where a woman from the university’s human resources department was waiting. She handed Hoffner a typed note on university letterhead, and he hurriedly began to read, each phrase blurring into the next. Investigative leave. Effective immediately. No longer permitted on university grounds.

  “Is this a joke?” Hoffner asked. “What did I do?” The woman from HR refused to answer. She told him to leave campus immediately. She said he would learn more about the university’s reasoning in the next few days.

  Hoffner drove back to his house in the nearby town of Eagle Lake, his hands shaking at the steering wheel, and told his wife, Melodee, who was equally at a loss. For the next three days, he barely slept. Mel vomited from stress. Todd watched game film at midnight in the living room, seeking comfort in routine. Together they made a list of potential reasons for Hoffner’s banishment. He had worked his assistant coaches 70 or 80 hours a week despite their occasional complaints about long hours. He had cussed, punished players for breaking his rules, and, every once in a while, lightly grabbed a player. Did they suddenly decide you drive people too hard? his wife asked.

  Some other colleagues saw Division II football as an obscure stopover on the way to bigger jobs, but not Hoffner, a farm boy from Esmond, North Dakota, who had started his coaching career in nine-man high school football. Now he was entering his fifth season as Mankato’s head coach, earning six figures and winning division titles—by some measures the most successful coach in the school’s history. Now strangers at the grocery store stopped to congratulate him and take his picture. Now he had a house in the suburbs where a motivational poster hung in the kitchen: IF YOU BELIEVE IT, YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT.

  He had always wanted only one kind of life, a coach’s life, and now, at age 46, he had it. There was his beautiful wife who dressed in Mankato purple, his three young kids and their tradition of Family Fun Nights on Fridays, his one free night during the off-season, when they would go to Chuck E. Cheese’s, then come home to watch a movie. He was muscular, competitive, and stoic. His friends considered him the model of a football coach: beloved by some assistants, feared by some administrators, but respected by almost everyone on campus.

  Now he phoned the university and heard he would receive an overnight letter, which didn’t show up for days. So he began to slowly disassemble the life he had built. He wanted to prepare for the worst, in case he was suspended or demoted or even fired. He called coaches at other small colleges, asking about vacant assistant positions. He canceled his golf club membership, convinced he wouldn’t be able to afford it without a job.

  He was about to suspend his cable on a Tuesday morning when five police cars pulled up to his house. Two officers approached the door. Hoffner greeted them outside.

  “What’s all this about?” Hoffner asked.

  This time he got an answer, and it only confounded him more.

  He was under arrest on suspicion of producing and possessing child pornography.

  By the time Blue Earth County assistant district attorney Mike Hanson sat down with two police detectives to watch the videos that would determine Todd Hoffner’s guilt or innocence, half a dozen people at the university and beyond had already seen the evidence and rendered their own verdicts.

  The inquiry began on August 10 because of an everyday inconvenience: Hoffner’s university-owned cell phone had broken, and he brought it to the school’s IT department. A technician offered a temporary replacement phone and agreed to rescue Hoffner’s photos and videos. A few days later, the technician was “very shocked,” he later testified, to find videos of Hoffner’s naked children on his old phone—one of them 92 seconds long and the other 10, both recorded earlier in the summer.

  During the previous year, the university president had sent an email to all employees telling them to report suspected sexual crimes in the wake of accusations against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. “Subject: Sexual Violence Reporting,” the email had read. “Importance: High.” So the technician brought Hoffner’s videos to a supervisor, who alerted someone in HR, who notified the police. But even the police didn’t know whether what they were watching was a crime. The officers found the videos “disturbing,” they said, but they also realized these were ambiguous acts by Hoffner’s own children. They wanted more guidance on how to proceed, so they called Hanson.

  Hanson had worked dozens of child pornography cases in his seven years as a prosecutor for Blue Earth County and had once specialized in sex crimes in Indiana. He had helped convict pedophiles, rapists, and serial sex offenders. Of all the important purposes of his job, the one he talked about most was protecting children.

  He pushed Play on the first video; it showed a l
iving room with three children standing on an ottoman in the center of the frame. There were two girls, ages four and nine, and a boy, eight. They wore towels and faced away from the camera. Around 10 seconds into the video, they dropped their towels and turned to the camera while singing in unison, “Hey, watchya doing naked!” The boy grabbed his penis as he jumped and danced. Hanson thought it looked like masturbation. The girls touched their butts and mooned the camera while they sang and giggled. Their faces sometimes cut out of the frame, but their bodies stayed in view. The children occasionally pushed each other’s backs and bottoms. About halfway through the 92 seconds, they put their towels back on, climbed back onto the ottoman, and then began the naked routine again.

  Hanson had seen all kinds of pornography in his years as a prosecutor. He knew the legal definitions of “lewd” and “masturbation” and “pornographic.” He also believed that a good prosecutor had to trust his own eyes.

  The second video, filmed only a few seconds later, showed more of the same. The girls sang and danced while naked. Then their brother ran into view wearing nothing but a football helmet. Hoffner could be heard chuckling behind the camera just before the screen went dark.

  “If these videos don’t cross the line, where is the line?” Hanson wrote in a court memo he later filed with the judge. (Hoffner has since had the videos sealed in court; The Magazine pieced together their content through court filings.)

  Hanson told the police that what they were watching looked like a crime, and the police decided to pursue it.

  “These videos are not the proverbial baby in the bathtub photographs,” he wrote to the judge. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

 

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