Dutch athletes bare all

The site had 1.8 million hits on Monday alone

A group of young Dutch sportswomen have come up with a novel way of raising money to enhance their future careers - by stripping off for a pay-per-view website.

Public funding for sports in the Netherlands is not sufficient to pay for athletes' trips to the Algarve in Portugal for vital winter training.

So several clubs joined together to raise money by making a calendar of female members posing nude on athletics tracks and podiums, and later decided to start a website with the pictures.

The purpose is we want to make a website with artistic nude sport photos, you can't see any special body parts Alex Bor Co-founder

Set up in July, www.sportmeiden.nl has proved a massive success, with 1.8 million hits last Monday alone.

The site consists of a free section with introductory photos, from which interested viewers pay to see more.

'No porn'

Though only 12,000 viewers have visited the pay-per-view section, Alex Bor, a photographer and co-founder of the site, told the BBC that the women involved had now raised enough money to pay for their winter training.

Mr Bor denied that the site was pornographic or exploitative.

"The purpose is we want to make a website with artistic nude sport photos, you can't see any special body parts," he said.

He said that an original idea to photograph the women performing sporting feats had to be abandoned because it made them feel uncomfortable.

A note at the bottom of the homepage says that anyone looking for more than artistic nudity on the site should leave.

Nudity is not uncommon in sport, with three Romanian gymnasts causing a storm by performing naked for a Japanese TV station last December.

And Australian women's football team the Matildas posed without kit for a sell-out calendar in 1999.