OH, NO she didn’t. But yes she did. Amanda Beard, in the words of Marvin Gaye, what’s going on? “I felt it was a great opportunity,” Beard says before training in California.

“And the fact that I was on the cover of Playboy was more amazing. I was extremely flattered. It was a great opportunity and I jumped on it.”

Beard - with seven Olympic swimming medals, two of them gold, on her resume - is the cover girl for the July issue of the magazine. She poses nude in an eight-page spread.

Beard, 25, is making waves, and she welcomes it.

“It’s doesn’t bother me at all. Not at all,” she says of the criticism that she crosses the line in the issue. “Since I was 13 years old, there has been stuff written about me. And everybody is entitled to their own opinion.”

Suffice to say, the opinions are rampant. Such as this one from Chicago newspaper columnist Carol Slezak: “Women have made a lot of progress, but equality is still a long way off. And every time an athlete decides to trade on her sex appeal, she sets everyone back. Beard had a choice. She chose to be selfish.”

Yes, that’s one opinion. Why is posing for Playboy considered a selfish act? Remember, this woman has achieved at the highest level of her sport, unlike some female athletes who have capitalised on their sexuality without even coming close to winning a title. We all know who they are, so no names need to be mentioned.

Critics can’t say magazines such as Playboy are Beard’s only outlet for recognition. She doesn’t have to rely on sexy - and widely controversial - magazine covers to camouflage a lack of talent.

The woman from Venice with the exotic “really, really light blue Beard family eyes” has two gold medals, four silvers and one bronze in her vault of bling. So Beard, literally, can strike a winning pose.

She acknowledged that being a winner helps her cause, despite the heavy flak from some corners. “It gives me credibility,” Beard says. “It does help my case - that I have those Olympic medals.”

And she believes she’s a pioneer of sorts. “I’m breaking down barriers,” she says. “Playboy is an amazing magazine. I think it’s an honour to be in it.”

So there. What’s the problem?

And here is another opinion from the other side. “I’ve had a lot of women come up to me and tell me what I did was amazing,” Beard says. “They say we’re seeing a healthy body portrayed as beautiful.

“I would say 75 per cent of the people who have approached me like that are women. I love it. Young mums and college girls, they think it’s a wonderful thing.”

Fresh off her domination of Timed Finals’ Top 5 Most Appealing Swimmers, Amanda Beard will be appearing in Playboy. A reliable source has told me that Beard has decided to finally appear in the magazine, and will do so in five weeks. Ms. Beard is no stranger to photo shoots, as she has appeared in spreads in FHM, Maxim and the SI Swimsuit Edition. She also, during 2004, carried the title of Most Downloaded Female Athlete.

This is interesting because it comes fresh off the debate about women’s current place in sports, after radio personality Don Imus was fired for calling the Rutgers Womens Basketball players “nappy headed ho’s.” On the heels of that, some are beginning to question where women now stand in sport. Although women in collegiate sports in America has grown from 16,000 in 1971 to 180,000 in 2006, a recent study conducted by Margaret Carlisle Duncan of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Michael Messner of USC revealed that ESPN’s “SportsCenter” covered male stories in a 20 to 1 ratio.

What upsets some people like Dr. Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, as she told the New York Daily News, is that “It used to be that female athletes were portrayed as wholesome, All-American girls. Now you get female athletes in GQ, Playboy and the Swimsuit issue. The result of it is coverage that is very damaging—that trivializes and marginalizes women athletes because it does not give them the respect they deserve as competent athletes.”

So that’s one side to the argument. I say, and please don’t take this as being mysoginist because I think it’s true for both sexes, it’s her body so let her do what she wants with it. Humans love winners and they love beautiful people. Ms. Beard is both. So don’t say that her appearing in photo shoots in anyway trivializes what she has accomplished because it doesn’t, it only brings what she has done to a wider group of people. On top of this, Playboy is not a smut magazine as its list of interviewees includes Bill Gates, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul McCartney, Gore Vidal and numerous political and social leaders.