Parenting & Family Quote by Eva Herzigova

There is a quiet defiance baked into Herzigova's plainspoken line. A supermodel saying she was "very much into sports" as a child isn't just a harmless biographical detail; it's a strategic counterimage to the industry's preferred myth of effortless, ornamental femininity. Sports imply muscle, appetite, competition, sweat - all the things fashion often edits out while still profiting from their silhouette.

The sentence also works because it's almost aggressively unglamorous. No poetic flourish, no brandable hardship story, just a blunt admission that her earliest identity wasn't built around being looked at. That ordinariness reads like authenticity, and authenticity is its own kind of currency when your job is to be a surface. The subtext: the body you see on a runway didn't arrive fully formed to please you; it was trained, used, and owned by someone with goals unrelated to beauty.

Context matters. Herzigova came of age in the 1990s supermodel era, when models were becoming celebrities and the public wanted personality as proof of "realness". Talking sports is a socially legible way to claim agency without sounding defensive: it signals discipline and health, but also a tomboyish independence that sidesteps the tired "I never knew I was pretty" script.

It's a small line that subtly renegotiates power. She frames her body as something she did things with before it became something other people consumed.