Simi Pam explores why hair can be a barrier for Black women in taking up sport and exercise

As a semi-professional rugby player and junior doctor in the NHS, Simi Pam does not lack courage; whether she's in a scrum, hitting a ruck or working long hours dealing with the unexpected on the wards in hospital. But last October, the Bristol Bears loosehead prop faced a different kind of challenge.

Pam was forced to cut off her afro hair after she noticed the damage being caused to it by her athletic lifestyle. It forced the 28-year-old to ask the important question: Is hair a barrier to black women taking up sport and exercise?

For Sky Sports News she investigated the subject and travelled around the country to meet other Black sportswomen who wanted to share their experiences. She writes about her journey…

It may seem like a trivial subject to some but the topic of hair for black women extends beyond that of vanity, especially in the Western world.

Within society, both historically and currently, our natural afro texture hair is often labelled as 'unruly,' 'unprofessional' and 'unattractive', and this leads to Black women not feeling confident or comfortable wearing out their natural hair.

One in three Black women reported that hair was a factor in not taking up sport. Those figures are from Good Hair Study - Perception Institute 2017. For white women the figure is only one in 10.

I was born in Nigeria but emigrated to the UK with my parents at the age of three. I am an elite athlete but away from the game I work as a junior doctor full-time in the NHS. Sport is a huge part of my life and I used to be a shot putter at junior level internationally before transitioning to rugby at university.

Afro hair is labelled with these terms primarily because the standards of beauty that we are held to by the media and popular culture. As a result, many black women wear their hair in styles that can cause damage to their natural hair and scalp. Hair straightening, braids, weaves and wigs are the most common practices black women use to make their hair more acceptable to society.

In addition to these styles requiring significant amounts of manipulation to achieve, they are labour intensive, time consuming, and the overall cost of the style is often expensive for each installation. With the monetary and time costs of these styles being so high, black women are usually reluctant to subject their chosen style to anything that may make it frizzy or compromise its longevity, including sport and exercise.

According to the British Beauty Council in 2018, Black British women spend six times more on their haircare than white women.

Braids were predominantly how I chose to wear my hair, and my go-to look was a braided updo ponytail. But this style, in combination with playing rugby, caused a significant amount of damage to my natural hair.

I recall feeling horrified when I looked at the match-day photos from our opening match of the 2022/23 season, where I played with my natural hair out. I played well and scored a try, but what distracted me from admiring the action shots that were captured was seeing the amount of damage there was to my natural hair.

My hair was broken and split within the strands, and there was a lot of traction alopecia evident. I felt so ashamed of how my natural hair looked, and I hated the intense feeling of needing to hide it to be considered attractive. I knew there was no way I could learn to love my natural hair and feel confident with it out while it was so heavily damaged. So, I decided to act. I cut my hair off on October 1, 2022. My overwhelming emotions once my hair was cut? Relief. Excitement. Freedom.

Although I felt a great deal of discomfort regarding my new appearance, I knew that cutting my hair meant I couldn't hide anymore. I knew that reversing the damage and regrowing my natural hair signified the start of my journey towards acceptance and self-love.

So, I travelled to London to the Fulham Scalp and Hair Clinic to seek the help and advice of an expert. Eleanore Richardson, a trichologist at the clinic explained the issue in more depth.

"The style could be in for a week and if we took it out potentially not much damage would be caused as long as it's not tight or not too heavy etc. But it's when people leave it in for longer and longer and longer, with greater weight, with greater tightness that we start to see this drastic worsening conditions of traction alopecia," said Richardson who specialises in Black women's hair and those with mixed heritage.

"So, it's a hair loss caused by that pulling force and unfortunately black women are disproportionately affected by this condition because of the styling practices that are encouraged for their hair type."

Having learned more and studied the topic in detail I wanted to learn about the experiences of others. I decided to talk to other black athletes up and down the country to see if they were going through the same experiences with their hair as I was. In Bath, I met Team GB Skelton and Bobsleigh athlete Tabby Stoecker.

Stoecker told me about the realities she faces. "I haven't given up, but I've just had to accept the harsh realities that my hair is going to get damaged," she told me.

"I found that one of the best ways to protect my hair in my sport is to wear it in plaits or braids... but even then, when you put a helmet on its kind of rubbing and the hair will pull out and break from the plaits. Then when I take them out it's awful, you just see all this hair and I think, 'wow I can't believe this is happening to me'. "

Next on our trip was Loughborough Lightning's rugby player Sadia Kabeya, who spoke about the damage to her hair.

She said: "When I first started playing rugby I had super super long braids all the way down my back, when my ponytail was up it was still everywhere. As I was wearing it for so long my hair would start feeling down because of how much traction there was, like my edges were feeling down as well. That's when I realised, I couldn't have them back-to-back all the time as it was damaging my hair.

"There always is when you have these styles traction and when you play rugby there is even more of that... I know that I don't feel comfortable wearing my natural hair, but do I want to end up at a point that I hate my natural hair so much that I'd rather have it thin and damaged? Playing with such heavy braids and playing rugby and getting caught in running situations definitely had a toll on my natural hair".

For my Bristol Bears team-mate Reneeqa Bonner, her experiences in sport include missing training.

Bonner said: "In the winter months when I was younger playing rugby, I wouldn't turn up for training because I didn't want to get my hair wet, I wouldn't want to get my hair muddy. I went through a stage where I stopped for a season because I was so worried about what I looked like and obviously because my hair was curly if it got wet it would go into a massive frizz ball, so I just didn't want to be seen like that and be judged by people who didn't understand the situation with my hair."

Annie Tagoe is a world 4x100m bronze medallist who has just come back from Budapest where her team finished in third. She is on course to go to the Olympics next year.

"It takes me about three hours to do my hair," Tagoe told me. "Track and field is an induvial sport and unfortunately your appearance does make an impact in the sport. That's how you get your following, that's how you get your sponsorship.

"For me as I become more elite, I want to change my look, I want to represent how my personality feels on that day. The more glam I am, the more I feel I will get more jobs."

The last athlete who I went to interview was European indoor long jump gold medallist Jazmin Sawyers.

"I have gone into depths looking for people with the same kind of hair as me to try and figure out how to look after it properly," Sawyer told me at Loughborough University. "There are some challenges but again I don't take my hair too seriously if it gets damaged, I just shave it off."

Jazmin's attitude was refreshing, and I was surprised to learn my own hair was not irreparably damaged. The trichologist Eleanore Richardson examined my hair.

She said: "Since cutting we've had a lot of regrowth. The benefit of you stopping the braiding when you did is that there is no real long-term damage at stake here. For other patients we do end up seeing a bit of scarring and the moving back of the hairline which is really brutal because that permanently affects what their face, what their hairline shape looks like and how hair can regrow."

It is clear that the problem for black women and their hair in the western world is multi-factorial and complex. It evidently is one that exists, and in order to address and correct the issue, we need to first feel comfortable talking about our natural hair and the damage that popular styling practices cause to it.

I believe that part of the solution is to create an environment and community where Black women feel that their natural hair can be embraced and celebrated. By doing so, we begin to remove generations worth of embarrassment and unworthiness that is attached to our natural hair, thus creating a culture in which black women don't feel pressurised to hide their texture or wear their hair in a particular way.

These discussions may also encourage governing bodies to invest and support initiatives implemented to promote inclusivity within their sport, such as the work that Alice Dearing has done to ensure Soul Caps [larger silicone caps designed to favour the inclusion of black women with typically thicker fuller natural hair, or larger hair styles than their white counterparts] are recognised as appropriate head wear for elite swimming competitions. These changes may then act to minimise hair as a barrier to sport.

Black hair is beautiful for so many reasons. Its curl pattern, texture and thickness are some of the qualities that I am growing to love about my own hair. But I don't want other Black women to have to watch their natural hair become progressively damaged and have to cut it off before they feel compelled to take action towards learning to love their natural hair.

Ultimately, I want as many women as possible to feel that they are enough without hiding their natural hair, whether that is at work, in social settings, or while playing sport.