‘People said I got injured because I was too skinny’: Lucy Charles-Barclay calls out the body-shaming of female athletes

Lucy Charles-Barclay knows a thing or two about endurance. A professional triathlete specialising in long-distance events, she won the Ironman 70.3 World Championship back in 2021. For the uninitiated, that’s a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike, and a 26.22-mile run. It took her just over four hours.

Earlier this year, Lucy sustained a potentially “career-ending injury,” which forced her onto the sidelines for the first time in her triathlon career. Facing an indefinite period of rest and recovery was difficult, to say the least:

“I didn’t know how I could fix it,” Lucy tells GLAMOUR. “It meant a lot of rest, to begin with, and not being able to do anything. And that quickly became probably the hardest time because I’m not used to doing nothing, and it really felt like my purpose of being an athlete was taken away.” 

“I definitely felt quite empty,” she adds. If that wasn’t serious enough, the injury prompted unsolicited ‘advice’ from those commenting on Lucy’s social media. 

“Obviously, when I was injured, I wasn’t training,” explains Lucy. “So I gained quite a lot of weight. And there weren’t many comments about it, but there were some, and it’s hard to ignore them in the world that we live in, where you are constantly criticized, and people have their opinion of you. 

“Everyone said, ‘She tried to get too skinny, she’s not eating, that’s why she’s got this injury’.”

“There was quite a lot of noise going on when I got injured, and people blamed it on the fact that I’d gotten too lean and too skinny, and I tried to get like that, whereas I’d never tried to do that. It was just something that happened as a result of my training. I’d actually gotten quite sick last year, and that meant I lost a lot of weight because I had a sickness bug. So none of that was on purpose, but everyone said, “She tried to get too skinny, she’s not eating, that’s why she’s got this injury.”

Whether they’re in entertainment, politics, or – as in Charles-Barclay’s case – sports, women are consistently subject to higher levels of body-shaming than their male counterparts. It’s something Charles-Barclay has been aware of for a long time: “I’ve always viewed my body as kind of my machine for sports,” she explains. 

“So it has to look a certain way, and that’s not me trying to make it look that way; it’s just going to look how it looks doing what I’m doing. But I was a slightly abnormal shape growing up because I’d always been a swimmer, so my shoulders are incredibly wide for my frame, and I always feel like I can’t fit into normal clothes because my shoulders are so wide.”

Charles-Barclay describes her body shape as something she’s “had to navigate” rather than something she’s “gotten down about.”