Danica Patrick has just become the first woman in history to win an IndyCar race.

This could have been a moment to celebrate the success of a woman in an otherwise male competition. Instead, we heard this:

“So here she is in a bikini!”

“For me, as a brand, it’s a really good thing to be in such a sought-after magazine,” Patrick told Wheels.ca, in response to backlash following her 2009 reappearance in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

“Being female and looking OK and getting all made up is a lot of fun,” said Patrick.

Are we to discern from this line that she thinks being the world’s most well-known woman racer and being female are entirely separate spheres? Or that Danica Patrick, the athlete, is lower priority than Danica Patrick, the marketing gimmick?

It seems that T&A peddlers like Playboy and makers of fine nudie calendars have a Pavlovian reaction to notable victories of sportswomen. As soon as they hear of them, they come running to offer five-figure sums in exchange for a little peek.

Thankfully, a number of female athletes have turned these offers down.

“ Are we to discern…that Danica Patrick, the athlete, is lower priority than Danica Patrick, the marketing gimmick?

Winnipeg curler Jennifer Jones had the opportunity to be featured in a calendar dreamed up by Spanish curler Ana Arce, who complained to TSN that there “are so many beautiful girls playing (in curling) and nobody knows it.”

However, Jones refused saying, “I’m too shy.”

To her credit, Jones also said, “Image and sex appeal in women’s sport are still very much how many women athletes are popularized.” This proves the unfairness of this trend isn’t lost on her. But might she have enlisted if her shyness didn’t get in the way?

As early as 1999, lawyer Jocelynne Scutt had a similar take: she said this phenomenon would not be happening if “women got access to sponsorship at the same levels as men.”

Rebuttals came from such figures as then-Australian sports minister Jackie Kelly and, naturally, Australian Playboy editor Sam Barclay; they insisted that individual choice, not financial or media pressure, was what drove female athletes to pose.

Fair enough. But one wonders why this choice is made so often in the sports world, and so often among women. (Mind you, who would ever offer Sean Avery money to pose in his gitch?)

It’s symptomatic of a larger problem: Success and hard work in sport seems to be synonymous with masculinity. The easiest recourse is to give everyone the most obvious reminder possible of their actual gender.

“To say female athletes should not pose nude . . . is an insult to free-thinking, independent women,” sniffed Barclay.

Or maybe it’s an insult to Playboy when one of them thinks freely enough to say, ‘Take this $20,000 and shove it, perv.’

Published in Volume 63, Number 21 of The Uniter (February 26, 2009)