Of the couple of photos where an athlete looks like they may be wearing the tight-fitting trou, the photo is cut off at the waist. If you’ve watched rowing before, it’s no secret the guys wear extremely revealing shorts, called trou. And it’s not lost on the rowers themselves. As former college rowing coach Charley Sullivan once wrote for us in 2012: The underground can be a place for many a bizarre encounter. Sometimes you catch someone’s eye or you bump into someone you’ve not seen in years. Suffice to say, the very nature of public transport is you never know you you’re going to meet or what may be sharing your carriage.

Of course rowing isn’t the only sport with revealing attire. Wrestlers stand in front of the camera, an arm lifted in victory, with nowhere to hide. Divers: same thing. If you choose to row, and you have a penis and a testicle or two, said equipment will inevitably be on full display. In front of God and your grandma and everyone. This is a major piece of education that we do with our guys about two days before their first fall regatta, about the same time we give them their first pair of rowing shorts, or “trou” as we call them, short for trousers.

Bulges bursting out of briefs

However, things have changed a bit since 2012. Scanning Getty Images of medal ceremonies at the 2016 Rio Olympics and 2020 Tokyo Games, there’s hardly a bulge to be found. Athletes now adorn loose-fitting pants so as not to make grandma blush. We’ve all been there before, ever since we sat on a bumpy bus ride in our teens. The inappropriate erection. Of course, it’s only natural but it’s something that can cause no end of embarrassment and anxiety. Whether it’s with a hastily placed folder, zipping up your coat in record time or a bit or surreptitious ‘rearranging’, in polite society you need to cover it up, STAT! Let’s strip it down even more. You can’t beat a guy in a pair of briefs with his bulge fully on show. It seems that, although we’d rather see the guys on the pitch running around shortless it is a treat to see the lining of their briefs under their sport shorts. It also raises a conversation about how men and women in sports are sexualized differently. For example, women in beach volleyball have to wear revealing bikinis, while men have to wear shirts to cover their bodies. Yes, this is alive and well at the Tokyo Olympics. Yet since then, rowers have made a change, changing into something less revealing with the cameras trained on them.

Much of Western society has had a fear of the bulge for years. While there are certainly some straight men who have found their way into Speedos for a trip to the beach, for the most part the choice is the baggiest trunks available.