“To me, ‘sporty’ means someone who actually plays sport, knows the rules of netball or football, and signs up for their local team to hurl, kick or whack a ball around a muddy field on a Sunday morning. It reeks of school sports day – that annual festival of humiliation for any ‘non-sporty’ types.”

Alice Porter, another fitness journalist, tells Strong Women that she was never sporty at school: “I didn’t hate PE, but I wasn’t on any teams at school. All this time, I’d never have described myself as sporty but when someone used that word the other day to describe me, I realised that that’s how I must come across. I do CrossFit umpteen times a week, I swim, I play tennis, I do yoga… so I am doing sports, but I’m not competitive at all. My friends who are sporty are those who played sports growing up and really want to win – I’m there on a tennis court to have fun and enjoy it. I think feeling sporty or fit enough is partly to do with how you grew up and partly about your attitude towards exercise. For me, it’s about having fun.” She finishes by saying that she doesn’t feel sporty because, well… she’s a woman. “You’ll know what I mean when I say that,” she adds.

We know that competition is a massive factor behind girls dropping out of sports early. The Women’s Sports Foundation found that by the age of 14, girls are hanging up their sports kits at two times the rate of boys, while Women in Sport published a report last year that found girls as young as five don’t feel like they belong in sport. It said girls hear and see messages that say they’re simply not as competitive or as good at sports as boys, with young girls internalising gender stereotypes. The result, it concluded, was that by the time girls reach 18, just 28% describe themselves as ‘sporty’ compared with 58% of boys.

“I’m a fitness editor who works out 6 times a week, but like lots of women, I still can’t call myself ‘sporty’”