Parisian Pride

NOTE: The information below is accurate on the date of publication. Further research may reveal information which changes or replaces some of the details. Check later postings to keep up to date by selecting “Olympics” in the search box or the tag list.

With the Olympic opening ceremony tonight it is time to celebrate the achievements of our many lgbt+ athletes in their journeys to Paris 2024. As in previous years I have been collaborating with Outsports to compile list of lgbt+ athletes. My full all-time list of over 770 Olympians will be published after the games have ended and the newest results have been added.

From the day I dedicated myself to researching lgbt+ Olympians in 2010 I have also been researching those who had competed in qualification events, ranking lists, and national Olympic trials. I haven’t published this list before, and I was hoping to publish it today. Unfortunately, I’ve had health issues which have been slowing me down and there’s no way it would have been ready today.

Instead, I’ll present some research I did while researching the Paris 2024 qualification competitions.

For the past 6 Olympics (since Sydney 2000) the sport with the most lgbt+ competitors has been women’s football. This year is no different, and it has provided a remarkable new statistic.

In previous years qualification to the Olympics for European women’s football teams has been based on their results in the most recent Women’s World Cup finals. This year the IOC decided to use the 2024 UEFA Women’s Nations League as the qualification event for Paris 2024 instead.

With 51 national women’s teams in UEFA the IOC decided to restrict qualification to teams in the top division only, League A. This year League A contained 16 national teams, and 51 matches (including the Nations League Finals) were played. Every match had at least 1 openly lgbt+ player in one or both teams. I don’t think there has been a team qualification tournament in any other sport that has had 100% lgbt+ representation in every match. I’ll keep checking, but I’m fairly confident that this is the case.

The team with the most openly lgbt+ players was Sweden with 10. Sadly, they didn’t qualify for Paris 2024. If you combine the players on the English, Scottish and Welsh teams they came to 14. However, the IOC does not recognise these three teams as eligible for the Olympics, only if they play as one team, Team GB. None of those three teams reached the required final placing to qualify for Paris 2024. If one of them had, then the IOC would have accepted that Team GB had qualified.

In fact, a smaller-scale version of this will occur in pool stages of the women’s football, because all 4 teams in Pool A – France, Canada, Colombia, and New Zealand – all have at least 1 lgbt+ player.

While on the subject of female footballers, there are many sites on the internet which publish lists of footballers they claim are openly lgbt+. Most of these sites are fan sites, and often gossip machines, and rarely provide definitive proof of any players’ sexuality. The only reliable site for listing female lgbt+ footballers is Oustports.com who actually obtain evidence of each players’ sexual and gender identity. And I’m not saying that because I collaborate with them. Even Wikipedia invariably offers nothing more than a gossip fan site as a source. The Wikipedia lists of lgbt+ Olympians is similarly untrustworthy and not to be taken as fact. I have written in the past of at least two people on their list who should not be there, interestingly both of them competed in the previous 2 Paris Olympics (Robert Graves and Count Robert de Montesquiou).

Let’s finish with some of my most recent research into past Olympics. In September last year I mentioned that Leonard Chalmers and Léon Curia was the first Olympians to transition gender. It seems I was wrong, and that there was one before that.

In the 1936 Berlin Olympics there was a Czech javelin thrower competing as Stefánie Pekarová (b.1913). In 1938 the Czech press printed news that Stefánie had undergone gender reassignment surgery and was referred to as Stefan Pekar. In the few online references to him it seems that he may have been born intersex and assigned female at birth. Those references also day that all of Stefan’s sporting results in female competition were annulled. This wouldn’t happen today, though there were a few calls for Caitlin Jenner’s Olympic results to be removed and his medals returned.

It also appears that Stefan’s attendance at the Berlin Olympics may have been nominal. He did not compete in the events into which he was registered. This was not unusual in those days. I suppose we could consider him as the equivalent of a modern alternate athlete (until 1992 the IOC permitted alternates the right to call themselves Olympian and share in any medal their team won – the IOC don’t now, but I still do).

However, we do know that Stefan competed in the Women’s World Games, the games created in 1921 by female athletes who were refused the right to compete in the Olympics at that time. At the 1934 Women’s World Games in London Stefan won bronze medals in the shot put and triathlon (javelin, high jump and 100m sprint).

Sadly, there is no record of Stefan Pekar after his transition was reported in 1938. No-one has yet discovered his date of death, so he will remain an enigma.

International Olympic historians like myself are always unearthing new information about those early Olympians. Not all Olympians were mentioned by name in the very early days, especially if they were part of a team event in which only the team name was recorded. There are historians who specialise in identifying these anonymous Olympians, and I hope that I am playing my own part in this research by recognising the Olympians within the lgbt+ community.