Lauren Fleshman: ‘There is a betrayal of women’s bodies in the sports system’

“I f males got boobs during puberty there would be a free sports bra in every locker and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation,” says Lauren Fleshman, laughing but not joking. “When teams issue uniforms a sports bra should be part of that uniform.”

Fleshman, a former professional runner and elite college athlete with multiple national titles during her time at Stanford University, is now running a race to highlight how the sports industry fail women.

The problem is that this race may never end, and also has many different lanes to run in at the same time. Pick a lane, any lane, and Fleshman can probably highlight where inequity exists.

“As soon as girls start developing breasts, any discussion in our culture is sexual,” Flashman says. “We should be able to talk about breasts in the context of movement the same way we talk about elbows and knees. It’s part of our body and as our bodies are developing the physics of our movement changes. There is almost a cultural celebration of a girl getting her first regular bra and it is time we had a similar rite of passage for the sports bra. It can be normalized before it gets awkward.”

Puberty’s influence on young athletes is just one subject Fleshman explores in Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World. The book’s marketing material describes it as “part memoir, part manifesto” but it’s also an eye-opening account of life as a college athlete and a behind-the-scenes peek at the business of professional athletics in the United States, through a female lens.

“We have a fundamental institutional betrayal of women’s bodies happening in the sports system,” Fleshman says. “It is a problem that requires a pretty basic shift in thinking and if we can shift that thinking