“I never cared in the slightest that males were paying more attention to us because we did a nude calendar. We were more surprised by how much people were into it, but half of them were blokes, of course. “I wasn’t surprised by the negative reaction. “It was a bit of fun, it got us our 15 minutes of fame which, for us putting in a lot of groundwork, training hard, doing everything, was nice.
“It rocked the boat a little bit over here, but we did get a bit of coverage and the word Matilda started to mean something, though probably not for the reasons we wanted. “The photographer just said: ‘(Are) there things you’re happy to do?’ I was like ‘whatever’ and they said, ‘how about you just stand?’ and I went ‘yeah, go for it.’ I just don’t care about nudity. People were up in arms,” says Boyd, now a dog trainer.
Scott Barbour/Getty Images AsiaPac/Getty ImagesĪt the time, Boyd told journalists “if people want to call it porn, that’s their problem,” and 20 years on the Australian, who describes herself as an “out there kind of person,” still has no regrets, even though it was her picture which proved to be one of the most controversial. Striker Boyd made 28 appearances for the Matildas.
#NAKED GIRLS PLAAYING SOCCER FREE#
“A lap dance of honor at the Olympics? A free trip to a massage parlor with every season ticket?” “Whatever next?” one Sydney columnist wrote, according to Sports Illustrated. Needless to say, the press conference for the launch of the calendar was packed with journalists.
#NAKED GIRLS PLAAYING SOCCER FULL#
There were full frontal poses, no props hiding breasts. Pretty much the girls who were in the calendar were the same girls who didn’t mind getting their gear off, having a shower, getting dressed and moving on.” Some girls would shower in their bras and undies and those sorts of girls would never put themselves on the calendar. “It was no different to the changing rooms. “It was all done very tastefully, at no time did we feel preyed upon, no-one felt that we were just objects,” Boyd, speaking from her Brisbane home, remembers. That she was naked was of little concern to the-then 27-year-old. Nudity did not bother Boyd, who would go on to become Miss August in the calendar that would sell, in her words, “s**tloads.”Īs she waited for her turn to be photographed, she seated herself on the stage and made idle chit-chat with the photographer to pass away the time. The solution? After a seed was sown at a boozy party in 1999, 12 players agreed to pose nude for a black and white calendar which would go on sale in December of that year. The Matildas needed to, somehow, enter the nation’s consciousness. Just months earlier they had competed at the 1999 Women’s World Cup, a tournament still regarded as instrumental in the advancement of the women’s game, to little fanfare. There were no sponsors, few fans, and little money to be made from the beautiful game. Though they were international athletes, for the majority of players it was a struggle to work, train and survive. With a home Olympics on the horizon, Australia’s women’s football team, better known as the Matildas, needed money to help prepare for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on home soil. “We wanted to rock the boat,” Boyd tells CNN Sport. There was a storm brewing in the Australian capital and the country’s women’s football team was in the eye of it. In the autumn of 1999, Katrina Boyd and her teammates assembled at the Australian Institute of Sport for a photo shoot they all knew would make headlines. Stir it up, cause a fuss, rip up the rule book and watch the masses react.
Sometimes, the only way to get noticed is to be controversial, to be out of the ordinary.
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