GIRL POWER: FORGET SUPERMODELS, ATHLETES ARE WHERE IT'S AT

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

We can never hope to achieve this...

But we can get close to this

"Girl power" has had a sudden resurgence in usage these past two weeks. As we have witnessed women breaking records, running fast and far, jumping high and long and displaying seemingly inhuman feats of strength, agility and physical skill there has only been one way to sum it up in a Twitter hashtag and that is #girlpower. Whenever another Team GB female (or females) won a medal, "Girl Power" was sure to be trending and appearing in Facebook status updates within minutes. It feels like a breakthrough. You only have to take a glance at the dreaded DM's sidebar of shame to see that a little something has shifted. In the last fortnight those stories about Kim Kardashian's gym visits or TOWIE Lauren's latest diet have been significantly peppered with stories of women who have triumphed to win medals or just compete, whether that's Saudi Arabia's Sarah Attar running 800m as her country's first ever female track and field competitor or Gemma Gibbons winning her Judo semi-final and mouthing "I love you, Mum" towards the sky, before going on to win Silver. Where girls have been really quite unpowerful in celebrity media until now, the Olympic athletes have shown that girls can worry about more than boys and fat bottoms. Hadley Freeman and Elizabeth Day (both at The Guardian) have written in the past day or two about how we can embrace Olympic athletes as our new body image role models. You see, anyone can look like an Olympic athlete because these men and women come in all shapes and sizes but are united by the fact that they are the very best version of themselves. You don't have to be freakishly tall, thin and ethereal as you do to even approach supermodel standards. While Kate, Naomi, Stella et al looked awesome last night in their golden Brit designed gowns, we could never hope to emulate their figures because they have one in  trillion kind of genes. But go for a run, swim some lengths, pedal a few miles, lift a few weights and elements of an Olympian body will be yours. We need to harness the girl power.