a lifetime in repeat on Tumblr

Basketball doesn’t make people tall

I want that commenter to look at some of the top athletes who win medals in sports like weightlifting and shot put in competitions as high up as the Olympics

Chase Ealey

Joe Kovacs

Courtney Bennett

I even found this blurry picture when looking at pictures of Courtney Bennett of the winners of the Ohio Valley Conference Indoor Track and Field Championship who are ALL fat

Another picture of winners from a track and field championship who are all fat

This picture of Lasha Talakhadze is literally the FACE of the Wikipedia article for Olympic weightlifting

Li Wenwen who made an Olympic record lifting 397 pounds, or 180 kg

Holly Mangold

Kia Stevens, described online as a “Five-time Women’s Champion” who “was not only ranked as No. 1 in the inaugural Pro Wrestling Illustrated Top 50 Females list, but was the third woman to EVER enter the WWE’s Royal Rumble event.”

You think pro-football player Alejandro Villanueva of the Baltimore Ravens was thin?

There are even fat people who are runners, the very sport that commenter claims is for skinny people only. Not only are there countless fat people who run for fun all the way up to the most famous marathons you can think of, but most of these fat people stay fat despite years and years of running marathons. I was reading an article about fat marathoners written by a fat marathoner. This is her finishing a 5K marathon in 2018, which she says she is the exact same weight here that she was when she started running four years prior (The article is from 2019 at which she was STILL the same weight as before she ran marathons):

My own step-mom runs marathons every year and is fat. She has an enormous collection of medals for running long marathons.

The reason why you don’t see more fat people in sports is not because fat people aren’t capable. It’s because we are excluded. There are no sports equipment, exercise equipment, or athletic clothing made with our size in mind. When Nike decided to make some athletic clothing in fat people sizes and displayed them on a fat mannequin in their store, people were outraged. And this was despite all of these people demanding us fatties to exercise and lose weight for them (since they believe weight loss is as simple as eating less and exercising more, which even science says it is not.)

Fat people are turned away when we try to join athletic clubs and teams. If we do get to join, we’re shamed and ridiculed for our bodies. People stare at us when we try to play sports or even do so much as go for a walk. The media portrays us as inherently bad at sports, so some of us grow up internalizing that and decide not to even try because we already have been told there’s no point. I was terrible at PE as a fat child not because fat children can’t do sports, but because PE was the designated humiliate-fat-children time of the school day, so I wanted as little to do with it as possible and had been made to believe by others that my body meant I could never succeed at sports in the first place, so why even try? I would let each child go in front of me in line so that I would never have to go up to bat during baseball where all eyes would be on me. I chose the boring and tedious written assignment all alone in my classroom for a week in 5th grade instead of doing swimming lessons at the local pool with my classmates so that no one would see my fat body in a swimsuit, so that the kid I had a crush on and already believed would never like me back because I was chubby wouldn’t see my body. I was ten years old, and I loved to swim. Do you know how alienating and horrible it feels to be the only fat child taking ballerina lessons while all the other children have lithe, thin bodies that society has made synonymous with ballerinas and their beauty?

In middle school I did whatever it took to opt out of PE requirements not because I didn’t want to be able to run around after stressful classes, but because I didn’t want to undress in a locker room full of thin girls who would laugh at me. I took an online class for my PE requirement in high school so that I could exercise in the comfort and privacy of my own room on my old exercise bike I loved using everyday regardless of school requirements. And at that point I had actually unhealthily starved myself in an attempt to conform and was now mid-size but was still afraid for people to see my body.

I loved jumping on my trampoline and swimming everyday in my pool in the Florida heat as a child. My mom would always tell me I had green hair as a kid because my then-blonde hair would turn green from the constant chlorine. I ran around pretending to be a horse because I loved how horses galloped. I played tag. I wrestled with my brothers. Until all of that was beat out of me over the years as I was taught that fat kids are not meant to show their bodies or be active. My earliest memories are of the shame I felt for being bigger than my friends, and looking at old pictures I realize now that I wasn’t even that fat at the time, but I had already been taught that my body was wrong and hideous.

And nowadays at age 24, soon to be 25? I would never step foot in a gym and subject myself to all of the people snickering at me, “encouraging” me, and believing I was there to lose weight. I’m also terrible at sports because I never learned how to do them. And without my beloved exercise bike I used to exercise at home, I don’t exercise much at all anymore because the options are either yoga or exercising somewhere that isn’t behind the closed doors of my apartment. I even feel too ashamed of my body to dance alone in my room.

The media also doesn’t give much spotlight at all to fat athletes because that wouldn’t help keep thin privilege and diet culture making corporations hundreds of billions of dollars. So these athletes I showcased earlier in this post you might not have ever even heard of despite them winning gold in the Olympics and other famous competitions. A lot of fat Olympians can’t even get sponsors because they’re fat and thus not a conventionally attractive or “normal” athlete, so no one wants to sponsor them. And when you can’t make money doing sports because no one wants to see fat people doing anything other than comedy acts where we pretend to be walking fat stereotypes, how are you going to continue being an athlete as a career?

And even when you are a professional athlete as a fat person and doing what every fatphobic thin person demands of you, famous news outlets will make headlines about you like this:

”The NFL Has An Ob*sity Problem. Bigger, faster, stronger, unhealthier,” by the Huffington Post, and by far not the only news outlet that has made a fatphobic garbage article about fat athletes.

You can’t win no matter what you do. You could be fat and the greatest athlete in the world, and yet media and fatphobes like that original commenter will still berate you for having a body that doesn’t conform to their whims.

If you don’t see fat people in a sport, it’s not because we can’t play it or be good at it. It’s because we are excluded at every single point in the process of trying to play that sport. And being athletic is not a qualifier for being a fellow human being who deserves respect and compassion to begin with.