Poolside

Three German athletes got photographed naked in a pool during the 2018 World Cup. The national soccer team had declined, so Playboy booked Kristina Levina, Patrizia Dinkel, and Tanja Brockmann instead. Mallorca, topless in a pool, and Dinkel was named Playmate of the Year. She’d wanted the title since childhood, crediting beer and a philosophy of living well to her figure rather than gym work.

What’s almost nice about the whole thing is how obvious it all was. Nobody was pretending—the publication needed content, the athletes wanted exposure, and people wanted something to look at. It’s the kind of transparent transaction that doesn’t come around often in celebrity culture, where usually everyone’s lying about their motives. Here it was just plain. Kind of honest in its own way.

I couldn’t tell you which of the three is which if I saw the photos, and that seems exactly right. They’re not personalities in this scenario—they’re just the visible part of a summer moment that worked because an entire world was paying attention to sports. By August, nobody remembered.