Fascism, queerness, & the making of modern sports: MICHAEL WATERS discusses his book THE OTHER OLYMPIANS

Photo by Xander Opiyo

Michael Waters has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, Vox, and elsewhere. He was the 2021-22 New York Public Library Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar in LGBTQ studies and lives in Brooklyn.

His new book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), explores the lives of several pioneering trans and intersex athletes from the 1920s and 30s and 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.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity).

Interview by Tyler Nesler

You discuss a number of figures in this book, but you primarily focus on one of the most famous sprinters in European women's sports, Zdeněk Koubek, who in 1935 declared that he was living as a man. Could you talk about what initially drew you to his story and why he remains an important figure in the ongoing culture wars around gender identity?

Koubek was quite successful in the world of European track and field sports. He won a gold medal at the Women's World Games, essentially a rival to the Olympics in the 1920s and 30s. It was the highest level of athletic achievement for athletes playing in women's sports. After winning a gold medal in 1934 and setting a world record in the process, he stepped away from sports for a little bit and in 1935 he decided to transition gender and begin living as a man.

One of my main sources in this book is this incredible memoir that Koubek wrote about his life. He chronicles his rise into sports and also how parallel to all of that, while growing up, he always felt this attraction towards masculinity. He had these older brothers, and he would wear their clothes until his mom sort of snapped at him for it. In December of 1935, he announces to the world for the first time that going forward he’s going to be living as a man and he wants to play in men's sports.

What was so striking to me in doing this research is that when Koubek’s transition was covered in the press, reporters would get his pronouns confused a lot. They would use some words to describe him that we wouldn't use today. But I think there is this real sense of curiosity about him and his story and also about the permeability of these male and female categories. I think people were just curious medically about how a transition like his was possible. There was a sense that a lot was new on the horizon when it came to the body and to the possibilities of science. And you had these doctors in major American magazines writing op-eds about how we're all a balance of male and female and maybe one usually overtakes the other.

That was the parlance that was used at the time. But there are some cases where people live with more of a mix of the two, and discussions about how transitions like this are actually more common than most people would normally think, which was really surprising rhetoric to me for 1936. That's what really drew me into this story in the first place. I started doing this research in 2021 when coverage of these topics in major American newspapers was quite transphobic. And it was striking to see that there was such a different direction of discussion in the 1930s.

Zdeněk Koubek

I also found it striking how much more balanced and dynamic that coverage was back then compared to recent times. But what's also interesting is in the early Olympic games, and in the sports world in general, there was a lot of hand wringing over whether or not women should even be competing. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic games, declared that female athletes did not “constitute a sight to be recommended before the crowds I gather for an Olympiad.” How do you think these attitudes contributed to the later obsessions over identifying gender in sports and the practice of sex testing?

I really wanted to look at who was governing the Olympics in these early years. The modern Olympics trace back to 1896. Pierre de Coubertin is this French baron who sees the Olympics as this place for just white male athletes to participate. He has a very narrow vision of who the Olympics is for, and he saw no place for women in it. He didn't like the idea of women playing sports at all, which was quite a common viewpoint at the time.

There were all sorts of fear-mongering about what running track would do to women's health. And then also there's this idea that sports would be masculinizing to women. There were very gendered fears around this idea that if women are running track that's doing something to their bodies and even to their gender that's making them unfeminine.

A lot of that is also tied to race and to class. I think it's interesting that there were a couple of sports available to women at the early Olympics, but they were often sports like golf or tennis that are associated with the European upper class, especially the white upper class. Those were sports at the time you had to be a member of a club to play. Whereas track and field, which was a little more open to different people, was often a source of fixation for sports officials on this idea that women athletes were not feminine enough.

The International Olympic Committee itself at that time is made up almost entirely of white men. And even of those officials, about half of them at one point in time in the 1910s were directly descended from some kind of European aristocracy. These were just incredibly wealthy, privileged people, in part because the IOC was an unpaid position in which you travel the world to go to these meetings about sports, that's a lot of money to travel and then also a lot of time off of a job. And so it really appealed to this group of people who had generational wealth and potentially were not as in touch with the rest of the world. So I think the governing context is important too, because it really was this group of men who decided that women's sports were a danger in all these ways. And in fact the IOC would not get its first woman member until 1981. So, 90 years into its existence roughly.

That blew me away when I read that.

Yeah, it's crazy. I think that's the context for why sports officials reacted the way they did when Koubek announced that he was transitioning.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Another figure that you write about is Alice Milliat, who created the Women's Olympics, later renamed the Women's World Games. She was a pretty tireless advocate for women's sports. Can you talk a little bit about all the ways that she worked to legitimize women’s professional sports?

The idea for the Women's World Games really came out of the fact that there were so few sports available to women at the Olympics and especially so few track and field sports. She didn't like the idea of men governing sports and she didn't like the idea of just the IOC having so much power over world sports. So she wanted to create her own thing. And the Women's World Games was a kind of scrappy organization that ended up gaining a lot of traction in the 1920s. Tens of thousands of people showed up to the competitions. It got a lot of endorsements from high profile politicians in whichever country it would be held. In fact, so many people were showing up for the Women's World Games that members of the IOC themselves worried that it would soon eclipse the Olympics.

Milliat is a fascinating figure for a lot of reasons. You even see that in order to get legitimacy, she does sort of appeal to these same concerns about femininity. Often when she was interviewed, she would point to her athletes who had children to prove that sports wouldn't damage them the way so many people in the press and scientists were afraid of at the time.

There was also the British field athlete, Mark Weston, who announced that he too was undergoing a gender transition. This is around the same time that Koubek made his announcement. And this leads me to questions about Wilhelm Knoll, who was the head of the International Federation of Sports Medicine and the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the organization that governed the international rules of track and field. And he also happened to be a Nazi party member who wrote of his desire to remove unsuitable elements from sports. What was his public reaction to both Weston and Koubek’s announcements and what long lasting implications did this have for the perception of gender roles and sports, especially within the Olympics?

I think Knoll is an important and not a well-known figure in all of this. He was a sports doctor at a time when there were not very many of them. This was an era in which you would have Olympic athletes snort cocaine or drink brandy before a race. There was a very rudimentary understanding of sports medicine. And so Knoll, just by being this prominent sports doctor, had a lot of influence. And he was an advisor to a lot of different sports federations, including to the IOC at the time. And when he learns about Koubek and Westin, he has this kind of confusing reaction to them. He sees the idea of gender transition as being a threat to women's sports itself. And he takes issue with the fact that Koubek and Weston had participated in women's sports.

He was an ardent Nazi. He wore his brown shirt uniform to classes at the university where he taught. And he had this idea that we should weed out “unsuitable” people from sports. And he regarded athletes transitioning as kind of a threat to sports itself. And so he writes an op-ed and then he follows it up with a series of letters to different sports officials calling for them to institute medical exams in women's sports for the first time. But he doesn't really specify who he's trying to screen out. It seems like he's trying to target intersex women specifically, although it's just all this kind of confusing jumble.

Most of the officials ignored him except for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), now known as World Athletics. It's the governing body for all track and field sports. And the Federation thinks there's some merit in this idea of instituting these medical exams in women's sports. They received this letter in June 1936. And then in August 1936 was the famous Berlin Olympics with participants like Jesse Owens, and it was hosted by the Nazis. We know it for a lot of different reasons, but actually it was at that Olympics that the first policy limiting which women were allowed to play in sports and women's sports specifically was passed. And it was really at large part at the behest of this one Nazi sports doctor.

And that legacy lasts all the way up until today, which I want to get into in a little bit with the current Olympics. But going back to Koubek specifically, one aspect of his life that I find really compelling is he had this period as a theater performer. After he announced his transition, he went to New York, and he performed in a Broadway cabaret show where he sprinted on a treadmill. And what's interesting to me about this is it seemed to walk a fine line between something resembling a carnival act and a genuine showcase of this person and what they can do. And I wondered about how your thoughts on this. Was it exploitative, or how did Koubek even feel about it?

That's a great point. I do think there is an underlying sensationalism in all of the press coverage of Koubek. There are contours of exploitation in some of the ways that he's depicted. He's often by himself in a photo or in an interview or on a stage positioned as someone who is different in some way. And there was this sense of wanting to understand that these male and female categories are more porous than we thought, but I imagine it must've been lonely for Koubek especially. It is hard to know what he thought of it.

In his memoir,  he doesn't talk about feeling exploited so much. He does say that he doesn't want to be sensationalized. But he also just wants his audience to understand him. And so perhaps he had more thoughts about the whole experience than he would've been willing to say publicly at the time.

When he came to New York, he was this sort of press darling in the media for two months. And there is this newsreel interview with him where you can see these reporters telling him to do all of these things that would draw attention to his masculinity, which I think just was perplexing to audiences. They had him put on a suit and take off a suit. They had him put on shaving cream and shave in front of a mirror, and they asked a lot about his girlfriend because he was dating a girl at the time. And that was also kind of scandalous to people because he was perceived as a woman just a year earlier. And that would've been an illegal relationship. And then all of a sudden now it's not. And I think those things are always present, both his fascination with queerness really, and the idea of gender and sexuality as being a little more porous.

He also performed in France alongside Josephine Baker, which also was a really fascinating aspect to this.

Yeah, absolutely. I loved that detail. After he is on Broadway in New York, he goes right to Paris and is dancing with Josephine Baker, and there's some great photos of them together, and he's smoking cigarettes with a bunch of adorned French women. Josephine Baker was iconic for so many reasons. And just the fact that they shared a space was really cool.

And almost surreal, in a way. That was a fun surprise discovering that. I wanted to touch on that because I was just really curious about how much agency he really had with those performances. But it sounds like he was kind of enjoying himself in a lot of cases.

I think from what we can tell he was, and he also did profit a little bit from this whole experience. One detail I really liked is that he hired an ex-professional boxer to be his manager. One of this boxer's main tasks was to get in the way of reporters who tried to take a picture of him for a period of time. Koubek was charging for photos. He also charged for a lot of interviews. So it's a complicated story, but he certainly was able to make a few bucks and had at least some degree of agency over the press that he chose to do.

Was there any kind of speculation that he was being opportunistic about this?

I don't think so. He underwent a series of surgeries as part of his transition, which he said were free of charge because of scientific interest from the surgeons, but he also had to pay for a lot of other things. He had to hire a lawyer to get his identity documents changed. There are a lot of mundane administrative parts of transitioning gender, even in the 1930s, that were quite expensive. And I'm sure a fair bit of that money went to just attorney's fees and other kinds of healthcare associated with transition.

Regarding sex testing, after a few decades had passed from the 1936 Olympics, very few people even seemed to know why the testing existed or when it started. But then in the 1980s there was the Finnish geneticist, Albert de la Chapelle, who began criticizing the IOC’s policies on genders as unscientific. Officials struggled with how to articulate a response. What are your thoughts on that?

I think what is interesting to me in researching this history is that in 1936, the IAF codified this idea that there should be sex testing, this regulation of bodies, and especially women's bodies, and that there were athletes who should not be allowed to participate in women's sports. And in the decades since, they kept switching tactics, trying new things they could focus on as a way to regulate women's sports and who was allowed to play in women's sports. And there was never actually a moment in which a sports official stepped back and thought seriously about just the fact that the body is a spectrum, that gender is a spectrum, that sex is a spectrum. And certainly there was not a moment when they acknowledged the humanity of these athletes.

I would say that for me, the lesson of this is that I think we just didn't ever have a conversation about the realities of sex and of gender and certainly never tried to prioritize the athletes themselves who were pushed out.

Now with the 2024 Summer Olympics underway, where are we at with these issues of gender identity and sex testing? I understand that mandatory sex testing for the Olympics was banned in 1999, but in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, you wrote that in Paris, sex testing will be in full force. Could you talk about the details of this and why it seems like it reverted back to strict term enforcement?

Technically, the policies that are enforced today are sort of couched as eligibility requirements. And so these requirements mean that certain athletes are not allowed to play in the women's category. What has happened is the IOC itself no longer sets these overarching policies around who gets to be in women's sports. And in fact, in 2021, the IOC made this statement that talked about its desire to prioritize inclusion of trans and intersex women in sports. And you could call that sort of an empty statement if you believe in their righteousness. Perhaps it was a real effort to try to prioritize inclusion. But either way, what has happened is that these individual sports federations that govern groups of sports, like track and field, volleyball, cycling…they all have their own federations.

They set their own policies, and many of them are quite extreme in terms of who they'll allow to compete. So most of these policies essentially outright ban trans women from playing in sports. And a lot of them also ban a lot of cis and intersex women who maybe have higher testosterone levels than these sports federations would allow for. And so it's these very pretty arbitrary policies that are affecting a large cross section of athletes. I think the phrase “sex testing” is no longer used, but there is still this real enforcement of which women are allowed to play. And now it's not happening on the level of the IOC, but it's happening on the level of these individual federations.

It sounds like it’s still kind of complicated and messy, unfortunately. But I think this is a fantastic book, one that’s very needed in these times and in this political climate, both in the U.S. and worldwide, with the Olympics underway. It was great talking with you, Michael.

Yes, thank you so much, Tyler.

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Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.

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