2023-07-09 09:29:03
The talented American player has distinguished herself – in addition to her sports performances – by her fights for equal pay in football between men and women, and by defending the rights of the LGBT + community.
She will have left her mark on her sport forever. On the eve of the Women’s World Cup, 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. season at the age of 38.
A talented player with an eloquent track record but also a feminist activist and defender of the LGBT + cause, she is one of those athletes who have put their notoriety at the service of causes beyond the scope of their sport. “It is with a deep sense of peace and gratitude that I have decided that this season will be my last to practice this magnificent sport”, wrote on his social networks the American striker, who is about to play the fourth World Cup of his career in Australia and New Zealand (July 20-August 20). “I could never have imagined how football has shaped and changed my life forever,” she added.
Double world champion (2015, 2019), Olympic champion in 2012 in London and winner of the Golden Ball in 2019, the striker with 199 caps (and 63 goals) spread over 17 years is also a committed activist who theorized the responsibility of sportsmen and women to take a position 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.
A career marked by battles
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 like an imperative to me rather than a choice,” she says in her autobiography “One Life”, published in 2020. Feminist activist, on the front line of the fight for LGBT + rights since coming out in 2012 , the co-captain of the American selection, engaged to ex-basketball player Sue Bird, also did not hesitate to attack Republican President Donald Trump head-on, calling him a representative of “white supremacists”.
Before the Mondial-2019, she warns that her teammates and she will not go to the White House if invited. “Megan should win before she speaks,” Trump replies on Twitter. World champions a few weeks later, the Americans kept their word.
Megan Rapinoe, who discovered football at the age of three with her older brother Brian, was also at the forefront of the fight 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 role, 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.
What’s next?
Last month, the attacker who plays in the American championship (NWSL) under the jersey of OL Reign, the franchise of Seattle, underlined the importance of the World Cup to come in Australia and New Zealand for the recognition of female sports practice. This World Cup, she said, is “a real opportunity to break the ceiling in terms of enthusiasm, media and sponsors and more broadly business around this sport”.
“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 better than they found it,” she wrote in his message broadcast on Saturday.
Reacting to her announcement, the American coach Vlatko Andonovski insisted on the two facets of the player. “Megan Rapinoe, he said, is one of the most important players in women’s football history and a personality like no other”. “She has created so many memorable moments on the pitch for her team and for her supporters that will be remembered for a very long time, but her impact on people as a human being may well be even greater.”
After the World Cup, Megan Rapinoe 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, she immediately added, “it seems a little crazy”.
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