adidas Women’s Training Medium Support Better 3-Stripes Bra
About Pattaya
This coastal city faces the Gulf of Thailand in Chonburi province, about 150 kilometers southeast of Bangkok. It was a fishing settlement until the 1960s, when nearby U-Tapao air base and wartime leave traffic turned it into a permanent resort city with its own special municipal administration from 1978.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
The Better 3-Stripes bra is a medium-support training bra from adidas, built for the middle of the impact range — tennis, gym work, and running at a steady pace rather than sprint intervals.
Support comes from compression rather than encapsulation: a wide elasticated underband and a close-knit body hold the shape, with no underwire and no moulded cup structure. Removable pads are included and can be taken out for a flatter line.
The back is a racerback, which keeps the straps clear of the shoulder blades through a service motion and stops them sliding off the shoulder on a reach.
The knit is a recycled polyester and elastane blend with AEROREADY moisture management, so perspiration is drawn to the outer surface where it evaporates instead of sitting against the skin.
The three-stripe detail runs down one side in the same colour as the body rather than in contrast, so the mark is a texture rather than a graphic.
Pattaya is on Thailand’s eastern Gulf coast, where the monsoon runs from May to October and humidity stays high for most of the year — conditions in which a bra that moves moisture outward is doing real work rather than nominal work.
Specifications
| Type | Medium-support racerback training bra |
|---|---|
| Support | Compression, no underwire |
| Padding | Removable cups |
| Fabric | Recycled polyester / elastane, AEROREADY |
| Back | Racerback |
| Closure | Pullover, no clasp |
| Care | Machine wash cold, hang dry |
| Sizes | 2XS through 2X |
adidas rates its bras on a low, medium and high scale; medium is the band most tennis players choose, being enough for lateral movement without the rigidity of a running-specific high-support bra.
LET adidas Women’s Training Medium Support Better 3-Stripes Bra SHOW YOU Pattaya
Bra: adidas Better 3-Stripes Tennis Sports Bra: LOOK AT IT. Look at it! That is ALL TEAK and — everybody needs to hear this bit — NO NAILS. Not one nail. The entire thing is pegged together and carved from top to bottom, every single surface, and a Thai businessman named Lek Viriyaphant started it in 1981 and it is STILL not finished. Still going! The carvers are still up there right now! He died with it half done and left instructions to carry on regardless, which is the single greatest round-buying gesture in recorded history — the man ordered for everybody and then left the building. I am emotional. I am genuinely emotional on a promontory above the sea at Naklua. Is there a bar out here? There should be a bar out here.
Bra: adidas Better 3-Stripes Tennis Sports Bra: Right — voices down, and that goes double for me, I know exactly what I am like. The golden Buddha up here is seated at about eighteen metres and went up in the 1970s, and you reach it by the long staircase flanked with nagas. The reason it works is entirely the position. Pratumnak Hill is the ridge between the two beaches, so half the coast can see it from wherever they happen to be standing. Whoever chose this spot understood that being visible from everywhere beats being loud in one place — which, and I say this as the loudest object in Thailand, is not a lesson I have personally absorbed. Take your time up here. Honestly. This one is not a party stop and I would not want it to be.
Bra: adidas Better 3-Stripes Tennis Sports Bra: Okay, THIS is my kind of story. This land was bought back in the 1950s to be a fruit plantation. FRUIT. It did not work out — and instead of grinding on at it for another twenty years, the owners tore the plan up and replanted the whole thing as a tropical garden, and opened it in 1980. Best decision anybody has ever made about anything, and it was made by giving up! And now it holds one of the world's GREAT cycad collections, and I am reliably informed cycads are an enormous deal in that world, and anything that has been going that long has earned a toast. To the garden that changed its mind! Fifteen kilometres south, off Sukhumvit, and worth every one of them. Somebody find me something with a slice of something in it.
Bra: adidas Better 3-Stripes Tennis Sports Bra: Here it is. THE ORIGIN STORY. 1959. Pattaya is a fishing village — a fishing village! — and a group of American servicemen drive down from Korat, rent houses on the beach for one weekend, and then go home and tell everyone they know. That is it. That is the entire foundation. The loudest, brightest, neon-est street in Thailand was built on roughly a hundred blokes having a very good weekend and being physically unable to shut up about it. WORD OF MOUTH! The greatest campaign ever run and not one person paid for it! The pier at the end is where the island ferries go from, so technically this is where the tour finishes — but I put it to you all, in complete seriousness, that it does not have to. Show of hands.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.