Natalie Wojcik is one of four on the University of Michigan women’s gymnastics team vying for individual national titles at the NCAA Championships on Thursday in Fort Worth, TX.
She recorded her second-straight uneven bars regional title with a 9.975, which brought her career tally to 99 individual event titles.
Her numbers speak for themselves, but it was feedback she received in February after a routine on the beam during a competition against Minnesota that left her speechless.
The routine earned her a perfect 10.0, a program record, but that exposure resulted in a lot of negative feedback. ESPN and Big Ten Network posted videos of the record-breaker, which meant the negative comments began trickling in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdQ-9KLF46s
“Those negative comments and the volume of them was really surprising to me,” Wojcik told Olympics.com in March.
Wojcik said the comments were centered around the appearance of her body. She posted a TikTok displaying some of the comments.
I wanted to share these videos on here in addition to TikTok. I am so grateful for everyone on this platform that has had my back in these threads. Female athletes deserve to be treated with respect. pic.twitter.com/8xgNeJbnmG
— Natalie Wojcik (@wojcik_natalie) February 16, 2023
“Please get a leotard that fits on your bottom!” One commenter said. “No one wants to see your butt cheeks hanging out.”
“Is there a reason though why you don’t get a fitting leotard? Asking people not to look there is impossible, the human eye goes to the most distracting part,” another comment said. “Sadly I completely missed your routine. Just saw the wedgie the entire time.”
“Along with that visibility, unfortunately, came a lot of negative comments relating to kind of my body and my leotard,” Wojcik added. “And so most of them kind of centered around the idea that my leotard wasn’t fitting me properly or that they just aren’t made the same way that they used to, or gymnasts aren’t having the same bodies that they used to.”
Wojcik said that earlier in her career, she might not have said anything about the comments. She finally realized she has a voice on those social media platforms where she can show highlights of her accomplishments, but be honest about the challenges she faces in her world.
“I truly just wanted to bring awareness to the content of what they were saying,” she said. “I just wanted to highlight the fact that visibility of women’s gymnastics — and of women’s sports in general — shouldn’t have to come along with the objectifying of women’s bodies or the sexualization of women in sports.”
Wojcik is a graduate student at Michigan. As the COVID-19 pandemic ended her sophomore year, she used that time to turn the program into a national championship in 2021.
During the NCAA Championships, Wojcik will search for her second individual NCAA crown following the 2019 NCAA beam title as a freshman.
The objectification she experienced following her bean routine had her become an advocate for coverage of women’s sports. She spoke on that recently in an interview with Michigan Daily.
“It’s important to me that along with the visibility and accessibility of watching gymnastics, that also comes with treating female athletes with respect,” Wojcik said.
It certainly is.
[Olympics.com; Michigan Daily; Photo Credit: Natalie Wojcik, Instagram]
