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The 2024 Paris Olympics kicked off this Friday, July 26, with about 6,800 athletes filling more than 90 boats on the Seine River for a 3.7-mile parade through Paris. This year’s games will feature at least 175 publicly out LGBTQ athletes, marking the second consecutive summer games with triple-digit representation, and queer athletes from Great Britain, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela and the Refugee Olympic Team will serve as flag bearers in the Parade of Nations.
The Outsports' Team LGBTQ initiative will be providing in-depth coverage of all out LGBTQ athletes throughout the games. The media outlet, which was started in November 1999 in California with the publication of a one-page recap of NFL Sunday football action and has now grown into one-of-a-kind media company providing sports coverage for queer athletes and sports fans around the world, has compiled an interactive list which allows users to filter through a database of LGBTQ+ Olympic athletes by country, sport and competition category. (Click here to read how Outsports compiled the list of out LGBTQ Olympians and other facts about Team LGBTQ.)
“We follow [the LGBTQ athletes] as though they were a country – how they’re doing, how many medals they’re winning…last Olympics, Team LGBTQ would have finished 7th overall if they were a country,” said Outsports co-founder Cyd Ziegler in an interview with Options Magazine.
24 countries are represented by at least one publicly out athlete, and there are LGBTQ+ athletes competing in over 30 different sporting events at this year’s summer games. The United States has the most with 28 out athletes, and Brazil, Australia, and Great Britain all also have ten or more out athletes competing in Paris this summer. However, in many of the countries competing in the Olympics, openly identifying as an LGBTQ person is still illegal, and the total of out LGBTQ Olympians is less than 2% of the expected overall figure of around 10,700 participants.
Ziegler, who grew up on Cape Cod and played varsity sports in Harwich, Massachusetts, said sports have always been a part of his identity as a gay man and as a human being in general, so it made sense to him and his business partners to put the two together. “When I came out in Los Angeles in the mid-90s, very quickly I found a gay flag football league. Sports and being gay were intertwined for me – my social life evolved around the gay flag football league and a gay basketball league in LA, and it was similar for my business partner,” he explained.
Ziegler continued, “In 1999 we said ‘There is nobody else writing about this – gay media doesn’t talk about sports, and sports media doesn’t talk about the gays. We knew there was a bigger community than people thought there was.” In addition to their Olympic coverage, Outsports publishes a popular series of “Coming Out Stories,” where athletes talk about their decision to publicly come out as LGBTQ.
Publicly out women outnumber publicly out men on Outsports’ Team LGBTQ list of Olympians by about an 8-1 margin. “About a quarter of the WNBA is publicly out, and more than half of the USA Women’s basketball team is publicly out,” said Ziegler, using women’s basketball as an example of the much higher visibility of queer role models at elite levels of women’s sport compared to men’s. “There is simply a higher percentage of LGBTQ women playing sports at an elite level.”
However, there are a record number of out male Olympians at this year’s games too. Nico Young, a 10,000-meter runner, is the first out men’s U.S. track and field athlete, while Timo Cavelius is the first out gay male judo athlete. Equestrian, which is actually one of the few non-gendered Olympic sports where men and women all compete against each other in the same competitor pool, accounts for almost half of all the out men competing in Paris.
“The first publicly out gay male Olympian who competed in the Olympics after coming out was Robert Dover, who was a dressage rider, in 1988,” explained Ziegler. “And even then, Robert talked about a thriving community of gay men in equestrian.”
Dover competed for the United States in every Olympics from 1984 to 2004, winning four bronze medals in the team dressage category in his career. This year, notable LGBTQ Olympians include British diver Tom Daley; USA track star Sha’Carri Richardson (who might be the world’s fastest woman); pro basketball players Diana Taurasi, Brittney Griner, Alyssa Thomas, Breanna Stewart, Jewell Loyd and Chelsea Gray of Team USA; Brazilian gymnast Arthur Nory; and trans nonbinary athletes Quinn (Canada soccer ) and Nikki Hiltz (USA track and field).
One of the first-time out Olympians is U.S. women’s rugby player Stephanie Rovetti, a former BYU basketball player who forged a second athletic career in rugby. Raised in Reno as a Mormon, Rovetti found her orientation at odds with her religion, so being out in Paris is very meaningful, she told Outsports.
“Going to the Olympics as an out athlete means a lot to me,” Rovetti told Outsports. “You go and represent all communities you are a part of and that representation on the world stage matters. Coming from a religious background, I hope to be a representation of courage to be your true authentic self.”
Explore Outsports’ full list of LGTBQ+ Olympians and follow their coverage throughout the Paris 2024 Summer Games at https://www.outsports.com/olympics/team-lgbtq/.
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