Daniela Hantuchova is a smart Slovakian woman: fluent in four languages, learning a fifth - Italian - the daughter of a computer science professor and a toxicologist and the world's No.9 tennis player.
She is also exceedingly thin, having lost considerable weight in the 12 months since last year's Wimbledon, at which she was often compared - favourably - to Anna Kournikova.
For Hantuchova's 180-centimetre frame, the Australia Nutrition Foundation's healthy-weight range begins at 65 kilograms. She has said she is now significantly below her official tour playing weight of 55.5kg.
Wimbledon, and women's tennis overall, is often more about looks, body image and marketability than sport, but this year's fascination has shifted from the size of a player's backside and Venus Williams's new corset-style white dress to that of thinness.
Hantuchova's low body-fat levels are the talk of the town. She has made no secret of her love for modelling and in between practising she can be seen showing off designer clothes. Her coach has gone as far as to suggest it is her desire to be part of the fashion of thinness that has affected her.
But is her bony figure, while considered by some ideal for the catwalk, appropriate to play a vigorous sport? Hantuchova says it is a nice problem to have, for she can eat anything she likes. It is just that she has been training too hard for Wimbledon, she says. She rejects suggestions that she suffers from anorexia or an eating disorder and notes dryly: "I have burned off more calories than I have taken in, I have to eat a bit more."
1 comment:
Too thin is now an oxymoron. Or maybe it started with Cosmo and what's her name saying you can't be too rich or too thin. I just about sick to death with the obsessive concern we have for these silly girls who can't get thin enough. Let them get thin enough and we won't have to think about them at all--they will have died of thinness. I once wrote a series called the Aging Barbie pieces. I thought I saw a connection between the thin girls with huge fake breasts, teetering on high heels, hair bleached and extended and spending every penny they can on a personal trainer to keep their bodies hard. Barbie was/is the ultimate hard body. Now I'm reading Naomi Wolfe's great book, "The Beauty Myth." I recommend it to everyone, male and female. Stop buying into Madison Avenue bullshit.
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