Oh that was a body positivity campaign was it? I didn’t realize.

Their fans are well accustomed to seeing Team GB’s women’s Olympic rugby players assert their prowess on the pitch. They are less accustomed, however, to seeing them in lingerie. 

Faced with a stiff training session ahead of the impending Olympic Games, the last thing sports aficionados would expect to encounter is these accomplished athletes practicing their moves in a series of racy lace bras, knickers, teddies and suspenders. Where were their sports bras? In fact, where were their clothes?

For this particular training session at Richmond Rugby Club in south west London, the women’s usual kit was very much surplus to requirements. Team GB members Ellie Boatman, Celia Quansah and Jasmine Joyce were training in rather unusual circumstances, their every move captured on camera by Bluebella, the London-based lingerie brand whose underwear they were modelling in the shoot.

Released this week, the images are part of Bluebella’s ‘Strong Is Beautiful’ campaign, an initiative first launched in 2016 with the aim of encouraging teenage girls not to drop out of sport. 

Well, maybe, but also, and primarily, with the aim of encouraging teenage girls to buy Bluebella’s sexualized underwear.

According to a statement by Bluebella, the campaign’s rationale is “to encourage girls to be proud of their bodies and keep playing team sports. To emphasize their point, the athletes posed in body revealing lingerie for an impromptu training session.” 

But it’s primarily to sell the merchandise. This is a for-profit enterprise we’re talking about here, not a feminist organization.

But if the brand’s intentions were good, it rapidly transpired that the campaign had scored something of an own goal. 

Come on now. Are we pretending the underwear sellers never had the faintest clue that anyone would see the photos as insulting? Are we pretending that never crossed their minds? Get serious.

Maybe I have to be blunt. The underwear in the photos is not just underwear. It’s highly sexualized – it’s meant to make viewers see the women as fuck toys. Practical underwear is practical; lacy strappy tiny transparent bits of lace decorating drawing attention to the breasts and crotch are not practical.

While it’s not unusual for male athletes to star in underwear campaigns, these are usually shot in a studio, not during a training session. His nickname might be ‘Goldenballs’, but David Beckham has never been photographed on a football pitch, kicking a ball in nothing but a pair of designer boxer shorts.

Let alone a pair of designer boxer shorts the size of a postage stamp and made of lace.

For the broadcaster and former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies MBE, the campaign is problematic in a number of ways. “If we’re trying to encourage young girls of all shapes and sizes to be involved in sport, it’s a regressive move to suggest they have to be ‘sexy’ at the same time as doing said sport,” she tells The Telegraph. “We wouldn’t do this to young boys.”

Duh. Wouldn’t you think that’s obvious? Even if the people of Bluebella aren’t feministically-inclined surely it could have occurred to them that men don’t do rugby ads wearing bikini pants and nothing else so why are we doing it this way with women?

The campaign has also been met with ire by Women in Sport, the charity whose research that over half of secondary schoolgirls (64 per cent) drop out of all sport before the age of 16 due to body insecurities was quoted by Bluebella in a press release.

“We’re very uncomfortable that we have been mentioned in this campaign without our knowledge, as this is not the way we would want our statistics to be applied,” says Women in Sport CEO, Stephanie Hilborne. “We urge the brand to reconsider its approach to this campaign.”

Girls drop out of sport due to body insecurities so let’s make them feel even more body insecure. Good thinking.