Thank God the Baron can't see

By PETER CALDER

The American sports show interviewer at a tennis tournament in America marched up to a likely-looking couple of lads and quickly extracted the admission that they were there to see the 19-year-old Anna Kournikova.

"You like Anna Kournikova?" he asked. Their slightly desperate nods seemed laden with lust.

"What is the strongest point of her game? Her serve? Her groundstrokes? Her backhand winner?"

The boys looked bemused by the question. "Hey, maaaan," they came back, "we don't know that much about tennis."

But they know what they like. Kournikova, who has never won, never come close to winning, a Grand Slam tournament, is the darling of the tennis world and the corporates circle its stars as sharks circle shoals of reef fish. She's admired for the serve, the groundstroke, the backhand winner. But she's admired even more by tennis-ignorant fans for the knickers which peep from under a dress so short it stops at her navel, for her centrespreads in glossy magazines (mercifully not, to my knowledge, fully naked yet, but that's only a matter of time), for her pouty, brooding good looks.

The implicit - and sometimes quite explicit - sexualisation of the women athletes at the Games has made for an interesting study of how far we've come (or rather failed to come) as we step into the modern Olympics' third century.

Sydney 2000 - the Games of the Dames, as one headline here has it - marks the centenary of women's participation.

And it has been an extraordinary gathering of women. Of 11,084 athletes, more than 38 per cent are women, up from 34 per cent in Atlanta. And women have competed in 44 per cent of events.

More gratifyingly, the Olympics are a form of enfranchisement for women who come from nations where, says Katia Mascagni , the head of the IOC's Women in Sport programme, "many women are reluctant [not to say forbidden] to compete in shorts and shirts."

The small teams from Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine each include a woman, and Iranian female pistol shooter Manijeh Kazemi competed in traditional headwear.

Yet all this might count for nothing when the cameras linger on the buttocks of Tatiana Grigorieva, the Russian-born Australian pole vaulter.

She is not, if you read what is written about her, a magnificent athlete but a gorgeous blonde. Her achievements on the pole vault runway are as nothing compared to her photo shoots for Sports Illustrated.

The Sydney papers were full of pictures of the athlete wearing nothing but leather briefs and a faraway gaze, which had been shot for the boy's mag Ralph (which is named, presumably, for the sound its readers make while leafing through the pages).

Grigorieva is not, of course, a mere victim of this attention but a willing participant in it. She has engaged New Zealand-born Derryn Hinch, television loudmouth turned Internet mogul, to market her and we know where he's coming from. "She's an athlete," he observes in passing, "but she's also good-looking. She's got the sexiest bum in Australia."

The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, complained in the 1930s of the prostitution of the movement he had founded.

"My friends," he told the IOC, "I have not laboured ... for you to make a spectacle of [the Games], to use them for business and political ends. Sport must decide whether it is to be a market or a temple."