Tag: athlete

Olympic Gold medal-winning American track and field athlete, Kerron Clement, has come out as gay.  33-year-old Clement opened up about his sexuality for the first time during a Nike event to mark the launch of a new community athletic rainbow track in Los Angeles. Speaking at the facility which was dedicated to the late Gilbert

The Long Beach City Council recently voted unanimously for a third time in favor of renaming the city’s newly built main library after lesbian tennis legend and feminist trailblazer Billie Jean King. Of the 20 people who reportedly spoke on the proposal were representatives of the Long Beach Century Club, LGBTQ advocates and the city’s tennis community, according to the562.org. King herself is expected to attend the library’s grand opening and dedication on Sept. 21. In June 2019, local sports journalist...

A ruling by Switzerland’s highest court means Caster Semenya of South Africa is barred from competing in her signature event, the 800m, later this summer at the 2019 World Championships. The Swiss Supreme Court reversed its temporary suspension of a new policy by the International Association of Athletics Federations that required Semenya to undergo hormone treatment for six months prior to any event, to lower her natural level of testosterone. The South African world champion sprinter has dominated in...

The 26-year-old former Newcastle Jets star, who now plays for National Premiere Leagues club Green Gully SC, became Australia’s first professional male footballer to come out as gay while still playing the game back in May. In an op-ed for Professional Footballers Australia, the athlete explained that it has “taken a long time” to get to a place where he can be open about his sexuality, and that he wanted to come out to feel “comfortable” with himself. “I couldn’t be...

Australian Simon Dunn is an athletic jack-of-all-trades whose name has frequently graced the online pages of Outsports. He’s someone who has worn a number of titles throughout his career in the sports world: Former bobsledder and his country’s first out gay man to compete in the sport. Rugby player who isn’t shy about trolling homophobic colleagues by publicly kissing his boyfriend after wins. Owner of more social media accounts than shirts. ...

Former Australian bobsledder and rugby player Simon Dunn is not having the homophobic meme featuring his likeness that’s been circulating on social media. The meme, which began making the rounds last week, features Dunn’s face next to a list of qualities describing “gay people that I respect.” The traits include: “acts like a normal human being; has a personality; doesn’t force upon you the fact that they’re gay; literally is a normal person that you can be friends with.” Below it are...

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard’s gold medal-winning performance at the Pacific Games continues to reverberate long after the event, with a New Zealand women’s group demanding sports authorities put a stop to “unfair” competition. Hubbard, who competed for New Zealand in men’s weightlifting before her transition in her thirties, won two golds and a silver in three of the women’s heavyweight categories at the Games in Samoa earlier this month. She topped the podium...

Alex Johnson is a professional rock climber and a member of the USA Climbing Bouldering National Team. The 30-year-old, who has been climbing since 1997, told People Magazine she now has her sights set on Tokyo 2020. It will be the first Summer Olympic Games to include rock climbing as an event. Last week, Johnson joined USA Women’s World Cup winners Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris among others on the set of NBC’s Today Show, to celebrate the one...

Each week, Outsports stops the clock for an instant reply of the week that was. It’s our way of memorializing the glorious victories, the ignominious defeats, and the players and personalities who made them, lived them or just couldn’t avoid them. We realize our roster may differ from yours, and we welcome your comments, contributions and critiques. We read them all! Details on how to reach us are below, after our look at the week’s winners and losers. Winner: Odell Beckham,...

Being Out is a feature that looks at LGBTQ people in sports who have come out since Outsports first published in 1999. Today: Runner David Melly. David Melly fondly recalls his Cornell University track and field team as “our merry band of weirdos.” Alone as an openly gay athlete when he joined the cross country and track and field teams in 2011, Melly was pleased that in his senior season three of the five top runners identified as LGBT. It was...

T-minus 24 hours! The gay footballer who’s been peeking out from the closet for the past few weeks is apparently making his big reveal on Wednesday, July 24. On Sunday, July 21, he tweeted “24.07.19 ????.” This still-anonymous Twitter account, purported to belong to a gay English Football League player, first got our attention with a July 5 announcement. “I’m a professional footballer, playing for a club in the ,” that tweet read. “I will be revealing my identity soon, but I...

Exactly one year out from the opening ceremony of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, the field of athletes is already starting to take shape. We know that out world champion Tom Daley will be representing Great Britain. It will be the fourth Olympics for Daley, who came out as gay several years ago. We also know that the women’s soccer teams of Brazil, New Zealand, Netherlands and Sweden have all officially qualified. All of them had out...

The city of Tokyo unveiled its gold, silver, and bronze Olympics medals on Wednesday as it kicked off its countdown to the 2020 Olympic Games, which starts on July 24, 2020. The official account of the Tokyo organising committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games released a video on its Instagram account of the medals. This is the second time the Japanese capital has played host to the event after 1964. The 2020 Olympics will include five new sports to enjoy, including...

The two figure skaters had been engaged for two years before they married in a beautiful ceremony in northern Spain, the country where Luis was born. Same-sex marriage has been legal in Spain since 2005. Eric became the first openly gay male athlete to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics when he competed in the 2018 sporting event in Pyeongchang, South Korea alongside partner Meagan Duhamel. He retired shortly after. Luis is a former national champion in his home...