Illustrator Celebrates the Diverse Bodies of Female Olympic Athletes

“When I was watching the London Olympics, I was really amazed by the physical diversity of the female athletes, and how vastly they differ depending on the requirements of the sport” says Wendy Fox, a Melbourne-based illustrator and graphic designer, in a video for her new Kickstarter campaign. She launched the campaign during the Rio Olympics to shine a spotlight on her project, for which she’s illustrated all 276 female Olympians who won gold medals across 139 events in 2012 to celebrate their diverse, athletic forms.

“I realized…I’m watching the healthiest, fiercest, fastest women in the world, and they don’t have bodies that adhere to the model ideal,” Fox continues. “They have bodies that adhere to athleticism.” That’s when it occurred to Fox that male athletes are held up on pedestals, but female athletes don’t get the same recognition — even though 44% of athletes in the London Olympics were women and girls, according to Fox’s video. (In fact, she cites an Australian publication that named ‘Black Caviar,’ a racehorse from Down Under, as its “sportswoman of the year”!)

Fox was able to get her hands on the heights, weights, ages, and nationalities of all 276 women who won gold in London in 2012, and she used the stats to sketch and design their figures in height order in a colorful diagram that she turned into a poster design. “I wanted to create a record of who they are and what they did,” she says. In addition to a poster, she’ll be designing a book.

For Fox, the project is also personal. As she tells Yahoo Style, “I grew up doing ballet but wasn’t really the right body type to be ballerina so the seed was planted young.” She says that the differences in the athletes’ bodies “seemed like a wonderfully positive thing to embrace. I was initially going to just chart the basic anthropometric data but showing the athletes seemed more interesting and engaging.”

But Fox is setting her sights even further. Athletes like Simone Biles, Kim Brennan, and Zhang Mengxue will commemorated too, because the illustrator just announced plans to design a poster and book honoring the gold-medal winners at Rio. “The London project has received a number of design and illustration awards which really helped motivate me to do this again,” she says. “I would love to do if for all the Olympics. Aside from inspiring girls and celebrating female athletes, it is an historical archive that hasn’t really been done before in this way. It’s the intersection of sport, women and design.”

She says on her Kickstarter page that she hopes her work will show what women of all body shapes and sizes are capable of. She hopes it will especially inspire her daughter, who “loves it.” She marvels at the skill and expertise of this vast array of women, and wants to demonstrate that there no one body type that is best — so many different types can accomplish so many amazing feats.

“I think both the book and poster should be in every school, gym, sports club, college and university,” Fox told us. “So many girls miss out on finding a sport to engage with. It is a fun and digestible guide/tool to help them identify opportunities for themselves. The book will have extra very accessible information on the basics of sports science and what traits are required for different sports. For example, it will explore the difference between a power athlete versus an endurance athlete.”

The artist is already getting accolades for her project. “I have had really wonderful feedback from women, sports fans, writers, gender academics, the design community and scientists. NATO’s chapter for women has tweeted it which was pretty thrilling,” she says.

“One of my favorite things is that men who have engaged with the London project have expressed to me that they are now paying much more attention to women’s sport which is amazing,” Fox says.

So will Fox do the same thing for men at some point? “No,” she says on her site. Partly, her decision is due to her feeling that male athletes are already well-represented in popular culture. But also, “Morphologically, men do not possess the same diversity of body shape and size,” she says. Fox points out that a Google search of “female athletes” leads to myriad results objectifying them and extolling their “sexiness,” not their astonishing physical abilities.

Though she’s happy to represent the facts through her artistic endeavor, like most artists, she hopes her work will “provoke thought” and spur questions. “There are many perspectives when viewing women’s gold medalists and so many questions to be raised, debated and answered,” she writes on her Kickstarter site.”How does visual image alone play into choosing a sport? How does that interact with ability and interest? How do women and girls gain access to sporting opportunities and what are the factors that come into play when considering this?” are some of the queries she hopes will come up.

But ultimately, it’s all about inspiration, celebration, and appreciation. “Have fun with it,” she encourages the public. “But most of all enjoy thinking about the amazing power and ability that women have.”

Want to support Fox’s cause? Act fast by clicking here, as the Kickstarter campaign ends August 26th. “I think there is a bit of confusion among this project’s audience as to how Kickstarter works as its pledge rate is very slow and there seems to be confusion as to where the book and poster can be purchased,” Fox says. “I have been told that this is because nobody wants to fund women’s sport and that this is one of the reasons why this project is ‘important’ and ‘needs to happen’ and get out into the world.”

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