Written by:
Katie McKy
Photographer:
Andrea Brewer
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 14#5
Greece gave us Sappho and the Olympic Games, so one might assume that when it comes to lesbian athletes, Greece is, indeed, the word. But as athletes around the globe prepare for this summer’s games in Athens, we wondered, just how many Sapphic Olympians will be there, and how many have come before?
Answering these questions is akin to counting hummingbirds, for lesbian Olympic hopefuls simply don’t linger anywhere. Like all aspiring Olympians, they are currently darting from competition to competition, seeking their nectar — the numbers they need to qualify as Olympic competitors — and tuning themselves for performance peaks in the trials that determine Olympic berths at the 2004 Athens Olympics, which begin on August 13.
So having them hover long enough to answer questions about their sexuality is problematic. Qualifying requires tunnel vision akin to the view through a soda straw. (Perhaps looking through one of those red coffee-stirring pipettes is a more apt analogy.) With such singular focus, relationships can be relegated to a back burner.
“My relationships during my years as a competitive fencer always took second place in my life,” admits Jana Angelakis, a 1984 Olympic fencer. “I was a fencer, aspiring to be the best, and I trained accordingly.”
And preparation can deprive an athlete of more than sweet lovin’.
Nicole Freedman, 32, a cyclist for the American team in the 2000 Olympics and an impending Olympian cyclist for the Israeli team in 2004, nearly lived the sort of life that Chris Farley’s motivational speaker warned of on Saturday Night Live: “Living in a van down by the river.” To sustain her training after graduating from Stanford, Freedman began living in a van parked near campus, which did not thrill her parents.
“‘You need to get a real job,’” Freedman recalls them saying. “‘We just spent $100,000 on college for you and you want to be a, what, a professional ping-pong player or something?’ But I only lived in that van for four years.”
Because that blue Econoline van with flattened tires happened to rest on a bit of affluent Palo Alto, the privilege of living there cost her $200 a month. Still, there were mitigating factors.
“At least I had a quiet roommate,” says Freedman. “She was a spider.”
Freedman turned out to be the little engine that could. Undersized and underpowered, she transformed herself from a literal five-foot-two, 97-pound weakling to a 109-pound U.S. National Road Race Champion in 2000. That was only five years after she started racing full time and six years after she entered competitions. That championship qualified her for the 2000 Olympics.
Freedman’s sudden ascension surprised the cycling world. Like a mutt from the dog pound, she had a hodgepodge pedigree that underwhelmed. As a college freshman at M.I.T., she admits, she was a “nondribbling, nonshooting guard”; when she transferred to Stanford, she was dropped from the cross-country and track teams.
“I still don’t understand,” she says, “how I managed to get lapped in the 800-meter [race].”
Despite the deprivations she endured to achieve an Olympic berth (recall the arachnid roomie here), there were those who still believed she wasn’t — as the pundits say — worthy. But Freedman doesn’t attribute such naysaying to homophobia.
“Homophobia isn’t a daily issue for women cyclists,” she insists. “That’s remarkable, considering where we started. I am fully aware of how much we owe to our athletic predecessors, such as Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova.”
Holly Metcalf, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist in rowing and a member of the New England Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, agrees that homophobia doesn’t necessarily dominate lesbian Olympians’ lives.
“I encountered many out athletes at the Olympics,” Metcalf says. “I think it’s so much easier today for women to be open about their sexuality in athletics, but that doesn’t necessarily extend into pro sports or even the NCAA, where the money becomes a factor.”
Freedman attributes the relative dearth of homophobia in Olympic competition to the desire to field the most competitive team.
“Cycling is a team sport,” she says. “And at the highest levels, people want the strongest team. Teams are assembled accordingly.”
Jana Angelakis concurs: “I can only speak for fencing, but I never experienced anything but respect and admiration for my athletic accomplishments from my peers and coaches. … My coaches believed in my ability to become a champion.”
However, elite competition doesn’t preclude homophobia. In her 10-year career, Freedman says, it’s jolted her a few times.
“I only had one blatantly homophobic teammate. Her repertoire was full of gay jokes,” she recalls. “I wondered: Hey, do you realize I’m right here? You know I’m gay, so what’s the disconnect? To her credit, at least she was perfectly open and honest about her position. One time she asked me if I thought she was homophobic and I said, ‘Of course.’”
Freedman also encountered homophobia at the epicenter of American Olympic preparation: the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.
“I was lightly harassed by one of the cycling coaches,” she recalls. “We were driving back to the dorms and an Indigo Girls song came on the radio, I mentioned that I liked the song, and he started digging into me. ‘Hey, this all makes sense. You must be gay. Are you gay? Are you? Tell me.’ He went on for about 10 minutes. I confronted him later and told him that my sexuality was none of his business, but he told me, ‘I was just joking. Can’t you take a joke? You must have issues with it yourself, but if it is true, you have an obligation to tell the national team because some of the athletes may have a problem with it and it is not right to room with them.’ What really irritates me is that I don’t even like the Indigo Girls that much.”
As the founder and coach of Team Basis, a professional women’s cycling team, Freedman recognizes that homophobia can also infiltrate professional cycling via the perception of what’s most marketable.
“The problem is that corporate sponsorship supports cycling 100 percent, so teams tend to be a bit conservative in assuming that the sponsors want cute, ponytailed, feminine blondes. Thus, for the most part, most athletes are not so publicly open.”
However, Freedman sees some corporate support for out athletes whom they sponsor: “My instinct is that most companies that are progressive enough to support women and cycling are plenty open to supporting openly gay athletes. And soliciting support is eased by where I am in my life. Most of my corporate contacts are women in their late 20s and early 30s. We have a lot in common — mutual friends, colleges and experiences — which eases the pitching of sponsorship.”
Now, 10 years after she started her career, Freedman is surprised that she is still racing.
“My vague plan,” she says, “was to retire into a cardboard box with all my earnings after 10 years, but I still love racing and I want to continue. Cycling is the way I want to experience the world. If I want to see the California coast, I want to be on my road bike. If I want to see Switzerland, I want to be on my mountain bike.”
Angelakis, who qualified for the boycotted 1980 Olympics and holds the all-time winning percentage record at Penn State in the foil, has managed to parlay her passion for physical expression through PEX, a fitness facility that she founded 15 years ago in New York City.
“We change lives,” she says, “one hour at a time.”
The demands of entrepreneurship, which have Angelakis overseeing 20 staff members and furthering her business in “ultracompetitive New York,” still squeeze her sexuality to the side.
“I guess I don’t define my life or me as being a lesbian first and foremost,” says the former fencer. “To succeed as an entrepreneur, I’ve had to be available 24/7. When you first start a business, you don’t wear many hats. You wear every hat.”
Angelakis doesn’t feel disadvantaged by her sexuality. “Being a lesbian,” she says, “hasn’t held me back or propelled me forward.”
Like Angelakis, Metcalf has carried her laser-like Olympian focus into the rest of her life. Founder and executive director of the Row as One Institute, Metcalf and her staff deliver rowing instruction to inner-city girls, older folks and breast cancer survivors. For Metcalf, rowing blends the physical and the metaphysical. When she waxes about rowing, she suggests that life can be sublime in its details.
“Rowing demands that you balance individual physical and mental strength with those around you,” insists the Olympian. “You are all held in 60 feet of fiberglass, forced to move perfectly together yet managing the challenges inherent in doing so with diverse sensibilities. You are rewarded for synchronicity by cutting through the water and hearing that water lap the hull of a perfectly balanced boat.”
A number of Web sites (especially www.outsports.com) track openly gay and lesbian Olympians, although, as OutSports suggests, there isn’t a horde of them. One could attribute that to homophobia, but Angelakis, Freedman and Metcalf suggest that the focus of lesbian Olympians, like the focus of all other world-class athletes, precludes anything beyond a foil, a bike and oars.
So, in the end, why would lesbian Olympians navigate life sans the accoutrements of comfort — not only love, but something more than a van in a driveway? What is it about the Olympics that sustains their ferocious focus? Can it be articulated, or must one settle for the mountaineers’ shoulder-shrugging axiom, “Because it’s there”?
Maybe Olympians are like artists, with kindred compulsions. Whereas artists articulate using paint or ink, athletes use muscle, brains and bones. Or perhaps there is also the attraction of being in the company of women who, as Freedman says, are comfortable being “physical and aggressive … that aren’t so interested in clothes and fashion.” Basketball courts, athletic fields, locker rooms and the Olympics gather such women.
But post-Olympics, there is a little room for love. Angelakis and her girlfriend recently purchased a home in Connecticut; Metcalf and her partner are enjoying motherhood. Freedman is preparing for Athens while managing Team Basis and says she still finds “suburbia and 2.2 kids” as slippery as a newt.
“I feel like I make a terrible partner,” Freedman admits. “I’m so focused on cycling. My life right now is a little like juggling grizzly bears. And coaches will remind you to keep your eyes on the ball — or the bears.”
Due to training, Freedman missed the opening and closing ceremonies of the last Olympics. Those ceremonies can drop the jaws of the most jaded, for what Pindar, the Greek lyric poet, asserted in the fifth century B.C. still applies: “As in the daytime there is no star in the sky warmer and brighter than the Sun; likewise there is no competition greater than the Olympic Games.”
To honor the athletes, 9,000 cast members and creative, production, technical and operational personnel will deliver the opening ceremonies. It’s a show that will make Cirque du Soleil seem like a Little Rascals backyard circus (envision Petey, the dog, as the lion). Here’s hoping that Freedman will have time to walk Athens’ Olympic Stadium, an apt backdrop for the joining of the spirit of Sappho and the spirit of the Olympics.
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