In the last year or so, athletes in many different settings have used their platform to advocate for racial and social justice–both inside and outside of sports. I’ve had the privilege of writing about several of these leaders and the change they are making.
On December 10, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee said it would no longer sanction Team USA athletes for peaceful demonstrations. Last year, the USOPC reprimanded hammer thrower Gwen Berry for holding up her fist on the podium at the 2019 Pan American Games. Now, the USOPC has changed its stance.
In this article I wrote for Women’s Running, Olympians Gwen Berry, Moushaumi Robinson, and Tianna Bartoletta shared their insight on what this change means.
“I feel like this proves that USA athletes should be vocal,” Berry says. “We should stand for what’s right, and we should never back down from our moral integrity, because that’s what America is supposed to be.”
Also this year, the WNBA and NBA shut down games after Jacob Blake was shot, and the MLB showed support for #BlackLivesMatter. And some powerful decision-makers have reversed course to support athletes who use their platform to advocate for racial and social justice.
When Gwen Berry raised her fist on the podium at the 2019 Pan American Games, she knew it would have consequences. “I felt like it was worth the risk, because it’s something that people don’t pay enough attention to, because America has a lot of distractions,” she said. “I feel like people just think that everything is OK here, and it’s not.” She lost sponsors after being reprimanded.
What many athletes have been saying is that you can’t separate the athlete from the human being—and you shouldn’t want to.
A group of individual runners and leaders in the running community created a coalition that is pushing the running industry to be more inclusive and to address systemic racism.
And it has taken a strong stance: “As a collective industry, we admit that we have not acknowledged the barriers that BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] have faced, did not make enough effort to understand those barriers when brought to our attention, and have not been motivated enough to remove them. That ends now,” the coalition’s statement of purpose says. “We come to this coalition knowing that the running industry is rooted in whiteness and systemic racism and that this is no longer something we will stand for.”
The summer of 2020 may have been a turning point for college athletes’ advocacy.
As the Black Lives Matter movement has grown in recent years, many pro athletes have been using their platform to support it, but college athletes have been less visible. Now, they are speaking out and refusing to “shut up and dribble”— ushering in a new era of college-athlete activists.