A record number of athletes openly identifying as LGBTQ+ are competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics, a massive leap during a competition that organizers have pushed to center around inclusion and diversity.
There are 191 athletes publicly saying they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and nonbinary who are participating in the Games, according to Outsports, an organization that compiles a database of openly queer Olympians. The vast majority of the athletes are women.
That number has quashed the previous record of 186 out athletes counted at the COVID-19-delayed Tokyo Olympics held in 2021, and the count is only expected to grow at future Olympics.
“More and more people are coming out,” said Jim Buzinski, co-founder of Outsports. “They realize it’s important to be visible because there’s no other way to get representation.”
https://www.outsports.com/2024/7/17/24097560/celebrating-out-lgbtq-athletes-2024-paris-olympics/
The list of out athletes is heavily weighted to parts of the world where being LGBTQ is both legally and culturally accepted. This includes countries in North and South America, Western and Northern Europe and Australia and New Zealand. There are out athletes from 27 of the 206 participating nations (including the Refugee Olympic Team).
The countries with the most out athletes at the Paris Olympics: USA (31), Brazil (30), Australia (22), Germany (13), Spain (12), Great Britain (11), Canada (11) and the Netherlands (10).
There are only three out athletes from Asia that we know of at the time of publication: two boxers from the Philippines and one from Thailand. There are only four athletes from Africa: three South Africans, and one from the Refugee Team, boxer Cindy Ngamba, born in Cameroon and now living in Great Britain. There is only one athlete from any Muslim-dominated country (a Turkish volleyball player), places where being out and gay is often illegal or dangerous, and none from Russia, which has cracked down on LGBTQ rights in the past decade.
Thank you for the source, much appreciated!
Isnt russia banned from the olympics?
Russians can’t compete under a Russian flag, but Russian athletes may still participate under a neutral flag