The headline refers to ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue—not to Olympians competing without clothes. From 2009 through 2019, the former annual magazine franchise photographed elite athletes nude or strategically covered in portraits designed to show what athletic bodies can do.
The headline refers to ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue—not to Olympians competing without clothes. From 2009 through 2019, the former annual magazine franchise photographed elite athletes nude or strategically covered in carefully composed portraits designed to show what athletic bodies can do.
The athletes were not presented as one uniform ideal. The Body Issue included bodies shaped by explosive power, endurance, injury, disability, pregnancy, scars and years of repetitive training. Its most compelling stories were less about nudity than about the physical cost and capability behind sporting achievement.
What the Body Issue was
ESPN launched the Body Issue in October 2009 as a storytelling project about the athletic form. The publication’s stated focus was the body’s strength, vulnerability, imperfection and capacity—not simply its appearance. Photographs varied by athlete and setting: some used strategic concealment, props or athletic environments rather than presenting an entirely uncovered body.
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The franchise ran annually from 2009 until 2019. ESPN described the 2019 edition as the final print Body Issue, and that issue reached newsstands on September 6, 2019, alongside the end of ESPN The Magazine’s print run. The Body Issue remains a historical digital archive rather than a current annual magazine series.
Kerri Walsh Jennings: athletic identity and pregnancy
One of the franchise’s defining images came in 2013, when Olympic beach-volleyball champion Kerri Walsh Jennings posed while eight months pregnant. The photograph expanded the usual visual vocabulary of athleticism. It did not present elite performance as something that exists only in a permanently lean, competition-ready body.
Walsh Jennings’ appearance connected athletic identity with pregnancy, physical change and the complicated reality of a body that can be both highly trained and in transition. Her inclusion also helped demonstrate why the Body Issue could be more interesting than a conventional collection of glamour portraits: the stories were about what bodies endure and accomplish at particular moments in an athlete’s life.
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The 2014 Body Issue, released on July 11, included several prominent Olympic and Olympic-linked women. The roster included:
- Venus Williams, the five-time Wimbledon champion;
- Jamie Anderson, an Olympic gold-medal snowboarder;
- Aja Evans, an Olympic bronze-medal bobsledder;
- Hilary Knight, a U.S. Olympic hockey player;
- Megan Rapinoe, a U.S. women’s soccer star; and
- Amy Purdy, a Paralympic snowboarder.
These athletes made the same broad point through very different physical languages. A snowboarder’s balance and control are not built in the same way as a soccer player’s acceleration, a hockey player’s skating power or a bobsledder’s ability to withstand violent changes in speed and direction.
Venus Williams and the body’s recovery
Williams’ individual feature focused on her body and recovery after health and injury challenges. Her story was a reminder that an elite athlete’s body is not merely a machine for producing results. It is also something that must be monitored, protected and rebuilt.
The emphasis on recovery gave the feature a more substantial subject than appearance. A successful career depends not only on strength and technique, but also on the ability to respond when illness, pain or injury interrupts the expected athletic trajectory.
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Evans’ feature highlighted the physical demands of serving as a bobsled brakeman. Her role required explosive running power, precise timing and the ability to cope with extreme forces, including stress placed on the lower back.
In that context, the portrait becomes a way of asking what the body has to withstand for a few seconds of competition. Bobsledding can look brief from the outside, but the short race is the endpoint of strength work, repeated practice and a highly specific tolerance for impact and acceleration.
Ali Krieger, Aly Raisman and Natalie Coughlin in 2015
The seventh annual Body Issue, published in 2015, included U.S. women’s soccer defender Ali Krieger, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman and Olympic swimmer Natalie Coughlin, among other athletes.
Krieger offered one of the clearest first-person explanations of the project’s appeal. She said that showing vulnerability mattered to her, that she was proud of her body and sport, and that nudity was one aspect of presenting herself honestly as a female athlete. That is Krieger’s perspective, not a universal explanation for why every athlete participated.
Her comments also show why the images should be read as portraits of agency as well as physicality. Choosing to pose can be an intentional decision to control how an athlete’s body is represented. But the existence of that choice does not erase the wider media environment in which women athletes are often judged for attractiveness in ways male athletes are not.
The U.S. women’s hockey team made the story collective
The strongest example of the Body Issue as a team story came in 2017, when six members of the U.S. women’s national hockey team posed nude on an ice surface:
- Kacey Bellamy
- Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson
- Alex Rigsby
- Meghan Duggan
- Brianna Decker
- Monique Lamoureux-Morando
At the time, the players were 2014 Olympic silver medalists and 2017 world championship gold medalists. The team later won the 2017 world championship against Canada in overtime.
The shoot was connected to a larger campaign for equitable treatment, improved training conditions and stronger support from USA Hockey. That context changed the meaning of the photographs. They were not only individual portraits of athletes displaying muscularity; they also formed a collective statement from women whose work had not always been matched by equal institutional support.
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The players challenged the assumption that a female athlete’s body should be understood primarily through thinness or conventional femininity. They talked about strength, power, acceleration and explosiveness, including the importance of legs and glutes in skating and shooting. They also emphasized that athletic bodies are physically diverse.
That diversity is central to the franchise at its best. A hockey player’s body does not need to resemble a gymnast’s, a swimmer’s or a distance runner’s to be visibly athletic. Sport builds bodies for particular tasks, and those tasks leave different marks.
Empowerment and sexualization can exist at the same time
It is too simple to describe the Body Issue as either universally empowering or inherently exploitative. The evidence supports a more complicated reading.
1. The athletes’ agency
Participants chose whether to take part and, in interviews, some described the experience as empowering, honest or liberating. Krieger’s comments about vulnerability are one example. The hockey players’ emphasis on power and body diversity is another.
2. ESPN’s editorial framing
ESPN presented the project as athletic portraiture and a celebration of what bodies are capable of. Across the franchise, the editorial concept made room for subjects such as pregnancy, disability, cancer scars, injury and recovery—not just conventional displays of fitness.
3. The surrounding media economy
Female athletes can still be marketed through appearance and desirability alongside, or sometimes ahead of, their sporting achievements. Contemporary criticism of women’s sports coverage has pointed out that women may be pressured to sell attractiveness as well as athletic excellence. That criticism applies even when an individual athlete freely chooses to participate.
Agency and commercial framing are not mutually exclusive. An athlete can make a deliberate, confident decision to pose, while viewers and media institutions can still interpret or package the image through a sexualized lens. A responsible account should preserve both facts rather than assigning one single meaning to every photograph.
Was this connected to ancient Olympic nudity?
The headline may also bring to mind ancient Greece. According to the Getty’s overview of the ancient Olympics, male athletes in ancient Greek competition performed naked. Explanations for the practice include practical considerations and Greek associations among nudity, athleticism and physical excellence.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsThe comparison is useful only up to a point. Ancient athletic nudity was part of the culture and rules of particular male competitions. The Body Issue was a modern magazine photography project, and its subjects were Olympians or Olympic-linked athletes posing outside competition. It was not a continuation of Olympic regulations, and the modern participants included women and a Paralympic athlete in a very different media context.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why these photographs still matter
The Body Issue’s lasting value is not that it showed famous athletes without clothing. It is that the franchise created a visual language for discussing the labor of athletic bodies.
Those bodies absorb collisions, generate acceleration, repeat the same movement thousands of times, recover from surgery and injury, carry scars and sometimes change through pregnancy or disability. They are instruments of performance, but they are also vulnerable and temporary. The photographs made those contradictions visible.
The best examples also shifted attention from the finished result to the physical process behind it. Walsh Jennings’ pregnancy, Williams’ recovery, Evans’ experience of bobsled forces and the hockey team’s campaign for better conditions all connect appearance to circumstance. The body is not an isolated object; it is where training, work, identity, health and institutional support meet.
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Where the franchise stands now
ESPN’s Body Issue should now be described as a former annual franchise that ran from 2009 through 2019. ESPN’s archive identifies more than 200 athletes across the project’s history, but there is no verified newer annual print edition in the available research.
Readers looking for a physical copy should treat it as sports-media memorabilia rather than a current magazine subscription. An ESPN Body Issue back issue may be worth seeking through established resale or collectible channels, but availability, condition, edition and seller status should be checked before purchase; no current inventory or price is established here.
For documentary audiences, the archive is most valuable when viewed as a record of changing conversations about women’s sport. It captures athletes explaining the bodies that made their careers possible—and, in some cases, demanding that the institutions around those bodies recognize their value.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did female Olympians compete naked at the Olympics?
No. The athletes posed for ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue outside competition. The franchise was an editorial photography project, not an Olympic event or rule.
Is ESPN’s Body Issue still published?
The Body Issue ran annually from 2009 through 2019. ESPN identified the 2019 edition as the final print Body Issue, and no newer annual print edition has been verified here.
Were the Body Issue photographs empowering or sexualized?
No single explanation applies to every participant. Some athletes described posing as empowering, honest or a way to show vulnerability, while critics noted that women athletes are often evaluated through appearance and desirability as well as sporting achievement.
Was ESPN’s Body Issue based on ancient Greek Olympic nudity?
The ancient Olympics did include athletic nudity among male competitors in ancient Greece, but the Body Issue was a modern magazine project involving Olympians and Olympic-linked athletes posing outside competition. It was not a continuation of ancient Olympic rules.
The Bottom Line
Female Olympians did not compete naked at the modern Olympics. They posed for ESPN’s Body Issue, a 2009–2019 editorial franchise that used athletic portraiture to explore strength, vulnerability, recovery, pregnancy, disability and body diversity. Its meaning is best understood through both the athletes’ agency and the legitimate criticism of how women’s bodies are marketed.
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