Shi Tingmao competes in the women's 3-meter springboard final at the Tokyo Olympics on Sunday. Photo: VCG

 Female athletes have not only been winning gold medals and showing the best of China's sports spirit at the Tokyo Olympic Games, their healthy and strong beauty has challenged traditional notions that women must be slim, fair-skinned and delicate, opening people's eyes to the fact that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

The hashtag "The Olympic Games have strongly corrected my aesthetic views" has swept Chinese social media platforms since Monday, earning more than 480 million views as of Tuesday afternoon. 

The hashtag started with a post from Sina Weibo user "Feijia" containing a photo of Chinese female fencer Sun Yiwen. In the post, Feijia said she was stunned by the athlete's beauty.   

In the photo, Sun is seen with her sword slung across her shoulder as she raises eyebrows, looking completely different from popular web celebrities who are fond of putting forth a delicate image.

The netizen said she was attracted by Sun's unrestrained and bright image. "It is a kind of confidence accumulated by decades of contests and hard training," she commented.

She then explained that she began to pay attention to even more female athletes - table tennis players, swimmers and weightlifters -at the Games, noticing each of them shining with beauty despite lacking fair and fineskin, slender waists or the legs of supermodels.

"They are gorgeous. They have flawed skin, strong bodies and unyielding eyes. They are deep and introspective or innocent and bright, all personalities formed through unimaginable hardship. Their bodies and souls have been refined," the post said.

The post was supported by numerous netizens, who uploaded photos of these athletes competing, fighting and winning.

It is refreshing to see such a trend as a certain view concerning female beauty has been gradually taking over Chinese social media platforms in recent years, one that says woman should be young, thin and fair-skinned to be considered beautiful.

So many web celebrities and stars try to cater to this view, making themselves look as slim, white and young as possible. They take photos and selfies that conform to one standard of beauty - small faces with big round eyes. 

However, human beauty isn't limited to a single model. The Olympic Games offer the perfect platform to display all the other models that are out there - women who are gorgeous because of their wisdom, power, speed and confidence.

As one Chinese netizen wrote, "I hope more people can fall in love with these types of beauty instead of the simple beauty in the entertainment industry so that our lives and the world will become better."