Volleyball is hardly the most chaste sport; bikini-clad players bop about, squeezing their hands together (with a cleavage by-product) to blast balls into the air and as lechy spectators leer on. But you’d have thought that coaches would be professional enough to not let the sexualised atmosphere – placed on the players, might we add, we’re sure they play in those clothes because they help keep them cool – get to them.
However, Sabina Altynbekova, who plays for the Kazahkstan U19s, is so pretty that it’s turned her coach, Nurlan Sadikov, into a bit of a dick. ‘It is impossible to work like this. The crowd behaves like there is only one player at the championship,’ he told Tengrin News, as translated by the Daily Mail. According to a translation of the article, her looks have ‘hampered’ the team’s playing.
He’s not the only one to feel that way, as apparently everyone watching the Asian Championships’ volleyball competitions is obsessed with Sabina. Everywhere from papers – where long features are being written about her – to fan forums, where people have drawn out anime fantasies of her. She now has 263,000 Instagram followers, despite just 83 posts!
‘Fans just stare at her and they are not following the championship any more,’ reported Vesti, a Kazakh paper.
Plus, after a bit of digging, we've found out what she has to say about the whole matter. She told Vesti: 'I was flattered at first but it's all getting a little bit much. I want to concentrate on playing volleyball and to be famous for that, not anything else.'
This sort of distraction in the form of obsessive fans doesn’t only befall women - we all remember the referee (or whoever it is in a diving competition) asking the crowd to settle down as Tom Daley was cheered as he jumped in the 2014 Olympics, spending his down-time between dives standing against a wall and looking sad (in his trunks). The difference was, Tom’s coach didn’t badmouth him for looking so pretty.
Plus, it might be that Sabina’s brilliant good looks could actually help the Kazakh under 19 team. Seriously, it’s true, according to science. A study done in 2009 found that ‘athletic prowess may be a sexually selected trait that signals genetic quality’.
In the experiment, heterosexual women were shown images of top ranking football players then asked to rate them in order of attractiveness. It so happened to be that the more attractive ones were better players. Does this mean ugly people can’t be good sportsmen and women? Not necessarily, but the correlation means that good looks and athleticism are related: ‘It's safe to say that there are probably many things that lie between 'good genes' and athletic prowess,’ Justin Park from the University of Bristol, where the study was conducted, told the New Scientist.** ‘We really have no idea what physiological processes mediate the effect.’
So maybe, just maybe, Sabina’s good looks go hand-in-hand with her playing ability? Either way, it’s time for her coach to deal with it in a less whingey manner – she can’t help the way she looks, so perhaps her coach could be better off by telling the spectators to stop being such horn dogs.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.