2023-07-08 22:43:58
American Megan Rapinoe, world football star and influential voice in the fight against inequality and discrimination, announced on Saturday that she would retire from sport at the end of the season at the age of 38. The American striker, who is about to play her fourth World Cup in Australia and New Zealand (July 20-August 20), announced the news on her social networks: “It is with a deep feeling of peace and gratitude that I have decided that this season will be my last playing this magnificent sport. I could never have imagined how football has shaped and changed my life forever. »
“I feel incredible gratitude to have played for so long, lived through all of our successes and been part of a generation of players who will undoubtedly leave football in a better state than they found it,” she wrote in his message broadcast on Saturday.
After the World Cup, she will take part in the end of the NWSL season, which ends in November. The rest will be written for the one who confided in May 2020 to the media Vice TV that she “did not close the door” to a political career, even if “it seems a little crazy”.
Joe Biden decorated her with the highest civilian honor
Double world champion (2015, 2019), Olympic champion in 2012 in London and winner of the Golden Ball in 2019, the attacker with 199 caps spread over 17 years is also a committed activist who has theorized the responsibility of athletes and sports to take a stand in public debates.
“It would be irresponsible not to use this international platform to try to get things moving,” she said during the World Cup in France four years ago, where the left-hander had splashed the pitch with her talent, finishing best player and scorer of the competition.
It is with a deep sense of peace & gratitude that I have decided this will be my final season playing this beautiful game. I never could have imagined the ways in which soccer would shape & change my life forever, but by the look on this little girl’s face, she knew all along. pic.twitter.com/XGZ1T9i7Wy
— Megan Rapinoe (@mPinoe) July 8, 2023
Rapinoe was thus one of the first to kneel in 2016 during the American anthem to denounce police violence against blacks in the wake of former American football star (NFL) Colin Kaepernick. “It seemed to me to be an imperative rather than a choice,” she said in her autobiography “One Life”, published in 2020. She had also campaigned for equal pay between the men’s and women’s teams in the United States. This long fight, which began in court at the end of the 2019 World Cup, only ended in May 2022 with an agreement with US Soccer establishing equal salary treatment in selections.
For her leadership, Donald Trump’s Democratic successor to the White House, Joe Biden, decorated her in July last year with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, which no footballer had ever received before her.
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