Megan Rapinoe 'Devastated' Over 2020 Olympics Postponement But It's '100 Percent' Right Decision
The U.S. women’s national soccer team will have to wait one more year for redemption.
The 2020 Summer Olympics, originally set to take place in Tokyo this year, have been moved to next summer as the world continues to reckon with the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
While “devastating,” star soccer player Megan Rapinoe completely agrees with the preventive move.
“Absolutely right decision, 100 percent agree with it,” Rapinoe, 34, tells PEOPLE, adding that she and girlfriend Sue Bird, a star basketball player also set to compete for Team USA, had been calling for the postponement “for a while. There’s just no way that I can imagine that a convening of that many people — even if you did only athletes — that that was going to be safe.”
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The spread of COVID-19 has completely shut down the sports world, with every major league figuring out plans on how to finish — or start — their seasons. The uncertainty has Rapinoe feeling “thankful” the Games have just been postponed — not fully canceled.
“That would have been not only devastating for us, but for so many athletes out there who maybe this is their first one, maybe this is the only one that they would have gone to,” she says.
Still, that leaves the dominating soccer team waiting one more year to redeem their standing as Olympic greats after an unfortunate early exit at the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro. The women additionally hope to add another record to their impressive list by winning a World Cup and an Olympic gold medal back-to-back.
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The U.S Women's National Soccer team beat the Netherlands 2-0 led to victory by Megan Rapinoe and Rose Lavelle
The team also has their ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation over equal pay comparable to the men’s national team. The federation now has a new president after Carlos Cordeiro stepped down following a legal filing that received widespread backlash for painting the men’s team as inherently more skilled, faster and stronger due to their biological sex.
Now Cindy Parlow Cone, a former USWNT player who was part of the groundbreaking 1999 World Cup winning team, is president, but Rapinoe remains critical of the federation and Parlow Cone’s role in the filings as vice president under Cordeiro.
“As with the federation, I’m always very hopeful. They’re the only federation that I could ever have and we’re the only team that they can ever have. But I mean, I think there are questions, obviously. She was the vice president, I’m not sure how much visibility she had into a lot of it,” Rapinoe says. “But our ears are open at all times.”
She says, “We’re always willing to have a constructive conversation, in so far as we believe that the federation is serious about equal pay and serious about pay equity and serious about, frankly, a paradigm shift going forward in the way that the federation operates.”