Sports Illustrated has announced its 2015 Athlete of the Year as Serena Williams, an obvious choice considering she has won 53 of 56 matches and three of four Grand Slam tournaments this year. But the cover decision, photographed by Yo Tsai, was also epic: Williams was the first and only Sportsperson of the Year to be covered in 𝚋𝚊𝚋𝚢 oil and photographed without pants. Prior to this issue, the closest the Sports of the Year cover had come to semi-nudity was a 1988 cover featuring baseball players Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa wearing white togas, each revealed a nipple. It was an interesting choice to hyper-feminize Williams and align her with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit magazine covers versus the previous year’s Sports Personality of the Year covers because reporters, officials and viewers alike lambasted the champion tennis player — and her sister, Venus — for being “too masculine.”

While they may not frequently comment on the physique of male tennis players, sports experts love to discuss the body — and specifically the booty — of Serena Williams. Back in 2009, Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock claimed that no matter how good of an athlete Williams is, she will always be held back because of her butt. “I’m only knocking Serena’s back pack because it’s preventing her from reaching her full potential as an athletic icon,” Whitlock wrote. In 2014, a Russian official referred to the Williams sisters as the “Williams brothers.” The Guardian columnist Erika Nicole Kendall notes “[He]r body has been described in language not unlike the kind you’d find in old timey slave auction advertisements or Old English freak show exhibits.” In July 2015, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling took to Twitter to call out a man named Rob for saying Williams is successful only because she “is built like a man.” Rowling replied with a photo of Williams in a red dress and Christian Louboutin heels and wrote, “Yeah, my husband looks just like this in a dress. You’re an idiot.”

Williams has never denied her interest in dressing up — she’s well known for designing her own custom ensembles for the court, including a Puma catsuit in 2002, and her manicures are artistic creations. And it’s perhaps undeniable that Sports Illustrated, desiring a catchy cover, would want to show off her strong, toned legs — but Williams is not the only Sportsperson of the Year with formidable legs. The first ever Sportsman of the Year, Roger Bannister of 1955, broke the world record for fastest mile run while he was still a student at the University of Oxford in England — but even he was depicted in action in a pair of running shorts. The choice to depict Williams in hyper-femininity, staring right back at the male gaze of the camera (77 percent of Sports Illustrated readers are guys), is an act of defiance against all the people who claimed she would be held back in her career for being “too curvy and 𝓈ℯ𝓍y” or “too manly and unattractive.” On this cover, she is the expected woman, pantless and oiled with long glossy hair, that usually appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s highly ogled Swimsuit Issue, but her $74 million in prize money and athletic track record disproves remarks that she’s only successful because she is “built like a man.”

“No other active U.S. athlete rules a sport the way Serena Williams rules hers, and few reflect our era better,” wrote S.L. Price in the cover story. Sitting on her gilded throne, Williams looks both powerful and 𝓈ℯ𝓍y, staring directly at the camera. “I do want to be known as the greatest ever,” she told Sports Illustrated.