Who will win? Antonio Bat/Epa/REX/Shutterstock

It seems you can judge an athlete by their face – if they are a man, that is. Male athletes with a higher world ranking tend to be judged as more attractive by women, but there is no such trend among women.

Several studies have previously reported a link between facial attractiveness and sporting performance in men, leading to suggestions that women respond to facial cues that reflect athletic ability in potential partners.

Some have suggested this is because, in our evolutionary past, women might have benefited from choosing a partner with speed, skill and endurance. As a better hunter, the idea goes, he would have brought home more food, and he might pass on his fitness to their children.


But these studies have been criticised, notably for only looking at men. They also tended to focus on team sports, therefore failing to isolate individual performance.

To find more evidence, Tim Fawcett and colleagues at the University of Exeter, UK, collected photos of 156 men and women who competed at the 2014 Winter Olympics in the biathlon – an event combining cross-country skiing and shooting. Each athlete was rated for their facial attractiveness by members of the opposite sex, who didn’t know the purpose of the study.

Sporting performance was measured by looking at the highest world ranking the athlete had achieved in their career.

Athletic attraction

For male athletes, there was a highly significant correlation between attractiveness and sporting performance. For women, there was no relationship. The results support the idea that men’s faces in some way signal their athletic ability, and that women have evolved to prefer faces associated with endurance.

“There must be some kind of cues in those photographs that are enabling the women to judge sporting performance,” Fawcett told the Behaviour 2017 conference in Estoril, Portugal, earlier this month.

What those facial cues are remains a mystery. The researchers considered two measures that might be involved: the width to height ratio of the face, which is higher in men and linked to testosterone levels, and the degree of mouth curvature, to see if women simply found smiling faces more attractive. But neither of these variables were linked to the attractiveness ratings.

The lack of a trend in women is unsurprising. In women, studies have found a strong correlation between attractiveness and oestrogen, a hormone that doesn’t aid athletic ability. And because men can produce more offspring by having sex with many women, there is less evolutionary pressure to be selective about choosing partners based on specific traits.

A study in 2014 by Erik Postma found a correlation between attractiveness and performance in male cyclists in the Tour de France. “It is great to see a study that tries to replicate my finding in a more individualistic sport,” says Postma, who is now at the University of Exeter, but wasn’t involved in the study. “The results show that despite our extensive culture, biological principles still apply to us.”

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