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(Photo credits:  The Athlete by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, via SocImages)

Thanks to fitness magazines and the weight loss industry, we've become acculturated to the notion that fitness looks a certain way.  This photo collection by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein challenges our assumptions about athleticism by presenting Olympic athletes with an array of body types, ranging from the typical "shredded" bodybuilder look to bodies that we might view as "unhealthy" in a different context. 

As illustrator Nina Matsumoto states: 

I tend to fall into the trap of drawing the same body type over and over for athletic characters. This photoshoot serves as awesome reference reminding us artists that strong bodies come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and muscles show up in different ways. It also helps us keep in mind that not everyone who is fit is also lean. There’s often a layer of fat over the muscles, making them less visible for some.

In addition to the collection's commentary on body diversity and assumptions about fitness, I appreciated the simple fact that the athlete's sports were printed underneath their photos.  To me, they provoke reflections on the fact that athletic bodies are trained to peform a specific task at an elite capacity, and thus each of these bodies is therefore "elite" in its own particular way.  That's probably seems terribly obvious, but I find it helpful to be reminded that bodies can and do function at extraordinarily high levels even if they don't necessarily conform to stereotypes about "fitness." 

I also found it refreshing that while all of these bodies are scantily clad, there is nothing particularly titillating about the photographs.  Contrast this collection to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoots (photos at link potentially NSFW) featuring Olympic athletes.  Photos of female athletes for popular magazines in particular tend to feminize and even infantilize them.  Furthermore, they inevitably privilege the body types that most conform to modern standards of "hotness" and focus on Olympic events that have, for what ever reason, become the "sexy" events (volleyball, gymnastics, swimming, skiing, etc.).