The Other Olympians

<b>Michael Waters</b> has written for The New Yorker The Atlantic The New York Times Wired Slate and Vox among other publications. He was the 2021–2022 New York Public Library Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar in LGBTQ studies and lives in Brooklyn New York. <p>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.</p> Deeply researched and evocatively written Michael Waters's <i>The Other Olympians</i> impressively interweaves the lives of early 20th century trans and gender non-conforming athletes with the history of the modern Olympics the rise of European mid-century fascism and our complicated - and often nonsensical - attempts to define and regulate sex gender and the multitudinous human body. <i>The Other Olympians</i> adds crucial prehistory to understanding our modern thinking on gender and athletics.