For her: full length
Unfortunately, the most successful female sprinter of all time did not win the 100-meter title at the World Athletics Championships. But as always, the hair contest. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce once again wore all sorts of rainbow colors on her head in Budapest, here we see her doing the first sprint, with flaming orange hair fading to Barbie pink at the tips. The Jamaican always takes a pile of perpetually recolored wigs to competitions, which is why she had to fix her head of hair mid-race last year because the headgear threatened to fly off, which is an achievement in itself at the pace. But you have to admit: when she runs and her mane flutters in her own wind tunnel, it just looks great. It’s about sport and not about appearances, many will now say again. Wrong approach, to stick with hair jargon, looks are nothing more than armor for an inner feeling that every woman needs to win. Fraser-Pryce has the British tabloid Mirror said in an interview that she got the habit from her mother, who always wore a special wig for important job occasions. When she puts one on, it’s like slipping into her role, wigs are her superpower. And it’s true: Ever since Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s legendary hairdressing monologue in the series “Fleabag”, we’ve known that hair makes the difference between a good day and a bad day, and even over a whole life. He ends with: “Hair is everything!” We see it the same way, whether real or fake.
For him: half a thing
High jumpers tend to be some of the eccentrics among track and field athletes. Maybe that’s what the dream of flying entails. With this in mind, the new world champion Gianmarco Tamberi has been sporting half a facial beard at important competitions for years. Densely forested on the left, shaved baby smooth on the right, nose and tip of the chin as a boundary line. At first glance, this look doesn’t seem all that dynamic or even cool, but rather like the result of the desperate search for a trademark that leaves a lasting impression, but also doesn’t require too many sacrifices. On the other hand, such a clear halving goes well with a sport in which everything revolves strictly around a boundary bar. So it would be quite conceivable that in the case of high jumpers in the phase of the highest concentration, the whole world is crossed by such an imaginary line. Of course, Tamberi is not the only man with a “half beard”, the net even spits out an uncomfortably large number of halved full beards and mustaches. Most of these were created to raise awareness for a good cause, or are the result of a lost bet, so in the popular sense, pretty big sacrifices. Nothing should be ruled out in these times, but the half-beard will probably not become a beauty trend in the foreseeable future. Symmetry may be the beauty of fools, but such a mannered separation of the east and west halves of the face is neither aesthetic nor provocative, just plain clownesque. But if it helps with flying…