Dress Codes: How high is too high? The evolution of the women’s running brief

The high-cut brief has become standard on the track for female Olympians — but the style has proved divisive.

When women first competed in Olympic track and field events in 1928, they wore loose t-shirts and wide shorts, sometimes cinched with a belt. Those breezy, decidedly non-aerodynamic silhouettes wouldn’t fly today (quite literally) as contemporary female sprinters, hurdlers and long-jumpers don tight performance spandex and high-cut briefs that purport to reduce drag and lessen chafing. But how high of a cut is too high? That question surfaced — loudly — when Nike revealed its mens and womens kits for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games at an event this past April, and one image of two mannequins side by side went viral. On the left, the men’s uniform featured a tank and mid-length shorts combination; on the right, a women’s leotard seemed to rise to dangerous heights, with a narrow crotch and the mannequin’s plastic pubic bones visible. “Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display,” former US track and field athlete Lauren Fleshman wrote in response in an Instagram post, citing “patriarchal forces” as the reason for the women’s kit design. Other athletes chimed in, from American long-jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall, who said her “hoo ha was going to be out” at the Paris games, to pole vaulter Katie Moon, who shared a picture of herself in the kit on social media and wrote that she thought it was more an issue with the mannequin. In a statement shared with CNN in April, Nike emphasized that the leotard was just one of 50 total pieces in the collection — and, in fact, sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson had modeled a singlet with shorts at the event — and that tailoring would be available as needed. The collection’s press release described a process of consulting with athletes to meet their needs, which a spokesperson from USA Track and Field (USATF) acknowledged as accurate. Still, some might be watching out for the contentious pieces as athletes compete over the weekend. The controversy follows a headline-making protest at the 2020 Tokyo Games, when the German women’s gymnastics team rejected bikini-cut unitards in favor of fuller coverage, in a statement against “sexualization in gymnastics,” the German Gymnastics Federation said at the time.