Iowa State basketball player Audi Crooks is one of the best athletes in the country, and that’s no exaggeration. In the past week alone, she has been named second-team All-American by The Associated Press and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, and she’s a semifinalist for the Naismith Trophy Women’s College Player of the Year. They’re well-deserved accolades as Crooks — the second-leading scorer in college women’s basketball — is coming off a monster season: averaging 25.5 points per game while shooting nearly 65% from the floor, grabbing 7.8 rebounds and scoring double figures in 97 consecutive games. She also became the fastest in Big 12 women’s basketball history to score 2,000 points, solidifying herself as a generational talent. Today she leads her 8th-seeded Cyclones into the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.

So why, given her remarkable collegiate career, is there such a cultural obsession over Crooks’ body? Basketball is a sport dominated by size. When it comes to the 6-foot-3 Crooks, however, the criticism — mostly around the size of her body — is often as loud as the applause of her on-court performance. In a particularly troubling Reddit thread, Crooks is accused of being “out of shape,” of not taking her “conditioning” seriously and of being the reason Iowa State was bounced early from the Big 12 Tournament. 

Such body-shaming insults are lobbed at athletes of all genders who defy narrow perceptions of how an athlete’s body should look. Just ask Serena Williams, who spent a record-breaking professional tennis career being accused of having a body that was “too masculine.” In 2009, Williams said she was called “fat” and “unfit” after she had surgery and fell to No. 200 in the women’s tennis rankings. “You have to enjoy what you look like,” she said at the time. “Sometimes I read things [that say] I’m too fit or my arms are too muscular, but that’s how I am.”

Before the 2024 Summer Olympics, rugby star Ilona Maher responded to a fat-shaming TikTok comment that said she had a BMI over 30, suggesting she was not an ideal athlete for Team USA. “BMI doesn’t really tell you what I can do,” she said. “It doesn’t tell you what I do on the field, how fit I am. … So yeah, I do have a BMI of 30. I am considered overweight. But alas, I’m going to the Olympics and you’re not.”