Meet Nina Cash, a Sports Illustrated rookie model at 57: the retired academic and mum of 3 does campaigns for Peloton and ages gracefully without fad diets – interview
- Cash, who will appear in the May 2024 issue of Sports Illustrated with six others, had read about Kathy Jacobs, who also made the magazine’s Swimsuit Issue at the age of 56
- The doctoral degree holder, who hails from Filipino descent, was signed as a model earlier in life but said the ‘ethnically ambiguous look wasn’t in’ at the time
Dr Nina Cash attributes her thriving second career to one seemingly serendipitous detail: that there were no one-piece bathing suits available when she went shopping at a local K-Mart on the Gold Coast in Australia a couple of years ago.
“All I could find was a leopard-print bikini,” Cash told Style. Her Filipino-Catholic-military family background bestowed her with more modesty than an animal motif two-piece would have allowed. Still, she slipped into it for a sunrise beach walk, and happily allowed her husband to take some candid shots.
“Later, we looked through them, and I thought to myself, ‘not too shabby for a 57-year old retired academic!’” Cash recalls.
The photos were good enough to convince Cash to submit an application on the final day – January 1, 2023 – for the Sports Illustrated rookie model campaign. A couple of years earlier, Cash had read about Kathy Jacobs, a 161.5cm (5 ft 3”) woman from Calabasas, California who had made the magazine’s swimsuit issue at the age of 56.
Cash was one of seven women to be chosen – although she was at least 23 years older than everyone else in the group. They were flown to Porto, Portugal to be photographed, and will appear in the May 2024 issue, which will also celebrate the magazine’s 60th anniversary.
“It’s been magical,” Cash said of the experience. “There are very few things, at the age of 57, that make you feel like a five-year-old the night before Christmas. But this was exactly like that.”
It’s also been a change of pace for the veteran educator, who earned her bachelor’s degree 20 years after high school, and her master’s a further decade later. She didn’t get her doctoral degree until she was 55 and by the time she retired in 2022, she was an associate dean at a university.