On October 22, 2015, Gus Kenworthy took to Facebook to announce to the world he is gay. “Wow, it feels good to write those words,” he said in a post. “For most of my life, I’ve been afraid to embrace that truth about myself.”
The professional freeskier was on the heels of a silver medal win at the Olympics in Sochi and was then as he is now one of the best in the world. But as Kenworthy tells it in the video above, the success he enjoyed at the Olympics that made him a household name put a monkey on his back. In the public eye, he felt that he couldn’t fully be himself. That is until he bravely took a leap and came out publicly – his newfound status as a household name post-Sochi ensuring the news reached far and wide.
Now, Kenworthy is hoping to requalify for the US Freeski team for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. And while he didn’t make the podium at the most recent Olympic qualifier at Dew Tour in Breckenridge, with one podium finish already he needs just one more to automatically requalify for Pyeongchang.
The video title makes claim that a successful qualification means Kenworthy would be the first openly gay man to compete in the Winter Olympics. According to NBC, that isn’t entirely true. In fact, there are three openly gay men vying for slots on their respective teams – John Fennell, who competed in Sochi but has since come out and hopes to compete in singles luge, and figure skater Adam Rippon.
According to LGBT sports website Outsports, of the 2,900 athletes from 88 countries that competed in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, only seven were openly gay – all of them are female.
That number pales in comparison to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio that saw a record-breaking 55 LGBT athletes competing in different disciplines.
The discrepancy between stats on the Winter and Summer games is unclear, but across both the percent of out athletes swings heavily female.
Siri May, the programs coordinator at OutRight Action International told NBC there’s a prevailing reason for that. “Sports tend to be dominated by heteronormative masculine ideals,” which, she added, “tend to hold the myth of what it means to be a true man.”
Skiing, as with other action sports for that matter, are no different. Our own Ted Endo weighed in on Kenworthy’s announcement back in 2015 confirming as much saying:
“The significance of Kenworthy’s announcement ultimately says much more about his chosen profession than it says about him. Organized sport is one of the last and most prominent of the hoary, pop-cultural institutions that still gasps at the mere mention of homosexuality… Behind all the chest thumping, the powers running professional sport are scared. They are scared of what gay people will mean for the anachronistically masculine images they have zealously nurtured in their tiny little worlds, and on a more visceral level, they are just plain scared of homosexuality because they don’t understand it and don’t care to.”
But as three openly gay American men hope to make their Olympic hopes a reality, the silver lining is, of course, things are changing. And that athletes like Kenworthy, Fennell, and Rippon are symbols of an alternative narrative to the predominant hypermasculine one all sports cultivate.
