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Book cover of The Other Olympians

The Other Olympians

A True Story of Gender, Fascism and the Making of Modern Sport

Michael Waters

SOCIETY & SOCIAL SCIENCES
23

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Coup de coeur
Coup de coeur (LGBTQ+), by Amanda
Illuminating the stories of trans, intersex and gender-nonconforming athletes in the 1930s, The Other Olympians explores the history of gendered sports and sex testing, a result of the fear within the International Olympic Committee of women's sports and athletes not fitting into a strict gender binary. All while delving into the politics of the IOC, especially concerning the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Waters maintains his focus on the lives of athletes affected by transphobia and misogyny with one clear message for all those who have questioned their gender or made the transition from one gender to another: you are not alone.

In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women's sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany's atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC's nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 06 Jun 2024
Dimensions: 234 x 153 x 153 mm
ISBN: 9781529910216