The Other Olympians
Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
WINNER of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction. A Finalist for the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and the 2025 Mark Lynton History Prize. Named one of the Best Books of 2024 by The New Yorker, NPR and BookPage.
"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, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sex testing of athletes has its roots in the Nazi influence on the 1936 Olympic games, according to this revelatory debut investigation. Journalist Waters recaps the early years of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), a subdivision of the International Olympic Committee established in 1913 to settle such "technical debates" as "how to... draw track lines." When the Olympics sought to absorb the Women's World Games in the 1920s, the IAAF got involved in its regulatory capacity; ostensibly concerned about women's "health," IAAF officials suggested shutting down the Women's Games' "masculine" sports like track and field. Other narrative strands trace the German Olympic Committee's 1932 takeover by the Nazis and the early 1930s female-to-male medical transitions of several record-holding European athletes in women's track and field. All this comes to a head with the 1936 Berlin games, when paranoia over men participating in women's sports, promulgated by Nazi propagandists railing against the high-profile athletes' gender transitions, prompted the IAAF to require female Olympians to "prove" their gender by being physically examined, a policy which continued until the 1990s and was succeeded by genetic and hormone testing. Waters's propulsive storytelling is bursting with insight, especially into the lives of trans men during the interwar period. It's an eye-opening look at how fascist philosophy undergirds gender regulatory regimes in sports.
Customer Reviews
so good i had to buy it twice
i bought the physical version and loved it so much i bought it on here to read on my flight. extremely informative and a must read!