Sarina Wiegman was six years old when she cut all of her hair off. The hair-cutting was not the stylistic choice of an unusually avant-garde child, but rather a means to a very simple end – playing football. She was, of course, playing with boys – when Wiegman was born, in Sixties Netherlands, women’s football was still banned by the Dutch football association.
So, like many girls at the time, her hair was simply a temporary sacrifice to play the sport she loved, allowing her to slip in undetected amongst the boys on the pitch. “Sometimes they’d find out – usually when a parent on the sidelines was upset about us winning – and in those moments, derogatory remarks would be directed at me,” she writes matter-of-factly in her new memoir, What It Takes. “But I always tried my best to brush it off and not let it affect me.”
