Hello and welcome to the hijabi Olympics

The trouble is that the overdrive gushing goes in the other direction and ends up fetishising - rather than just ignoring these bits of material as immaterial, writes Shabi [Reuters] You know what makes the Olympics historic this year? It isn’t that the Rio Olympics are the first to be held in a South American city, or that it’s the largest ever Olympic village. It isn’t that, for the first time,

[flagburner]

"...the trouble is that this hijab-focus is part of a much larger vat of pointless, gratuitous commentary around sportswomen, how they look and what they wear - which obviously has nothing to do with the actual field in which they've worked hard to become globally ranked competitors."