Megan Rapinoe to retire from soccer
Lesbian activist, anti-racist, transgender ally and two-time World Cup champion Megan Rapinoe announced on Instagram Saturday that this championship season will be her last. “It is with a deep sense of peace and gratitude that I have decided this will be my final season playing this beautiful game,” Rapinoe wrote, in a post that featured a photo of the 38-year-old when the Redding, Calif., native was a little girl. “I never could have imagined the ways in which soccer would shape and change my life forever, but by the look on this little girl’s face, I think she knew all along.” “Congrats, baby!!” wrote Rapinoe’s fiancée, former WNBA star and Olympic Gold Medalist Sue Bird, on her Instagram post. “That little girl is going to continue to do so much good in this world (but she sure did kill it on the field).
I love you!” Bird told an interviewer last year if it were up to her, she would have married Rapinoe in 2021, but that most likely they won’t tie the knot until after this season.
Rapinoe met Bird at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and reportedly started dating that fall, but Bird didn’t come out as gay until July 2017, as the Blade reported.
The following summer, Bird and Rapinoe became the first same-sex couple in ESPN’s The Body Issue. In 2019, Rapinoe posed for Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, becoming that iconic magazine’s first out gay woman to do so.
