The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports

"Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail the struggle for understanding and equality." --Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today's culture wars.

In December 1935, Zdeněk 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: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 06/04/2024
Pages: 368
Weight: 1lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780374609818


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/29/2024
Booklist 05/01/2024 pg. 14

About the Author
Michael Waters 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.