Adam Rippon’s bum is on the cover of ESPN magazine’s Body Issue
Adam Rippon is baring it all for a body positivity campaign.
The out figure skater, who stole everyone’s hearts at the Winter Olympics in South Korea earlier this year, bared everything as part of his cover shoot for ESPN‘s Body Issue.
The Dancing with the Stars champ appeared completely naked on the cover aside from a pair of skates.
He tweeted: “Getting to shoot @espn’s Body Issue was amazing, but being one of their covers is so awesome, unreal, and honestly WTFFFF!!! ☠️ ⛸”
Speaking to ESPN, Rippon opened up about his “shelf butt” and what the shoot meant to him, saying: “I couldn’t have done this [shoot] while I was in the closet.
“I think that with my experience of coming out, I felt so liberated in so many ways.”
He opened up about his relationship with his body, saying: “For a while, I was trying to be as thin as possible. But what I was doing wasn’t right.
“I was starving myself, because I was trying to be as lean as some of my counterparts 10 years younger than me.
“Eventually I worked with a nutritionist at the Olympic training center. I went in and said: ‘I don’t have an eating disorder, but I have a problem.’
“It was hard to break the cycle, but when I broke my foot [in 2017, one year before the Olympics], I was forced into a place of figuring it out.
“I listened to everything I was taught, and when I got back onto the ice, I was so much stronger and better than I was before.”
He also opened up about the complex burden of being an ‘openly gay Olympian’.
Rippon said: “I hope the next out Olympians are just Olympians. I hope the focus isn’t on them being out but on their incredible stories and all the work it took to be there.
“It was kind of nuts, but it was funny: Through the course of the Olympics, it was like, ‘Gay Olympian Adam Rippon.’ Then it was just ‘Olympian Adam Rippon.'”
He added: “I wasn’t expecting so many people to contact me [after the Olympics] and tell me they were struggling with being themselves.
“I went through that personal struggle and got to a point where I was like, ‘F— it. I’m just going to be me and not worry about it.’
“I am glad I was able to represent a person who was really unabashedly himself.”
(Getty)
Check out the full Adam Rippon shoot and interview here. ESPN’s 2018 Body Issue hits newsstands on June 29.
