“I wanted to challenge the narrative that Muslim women are meek and docile and oppressed. Being unapologetically Muslim, black, a woman… Either you like it or you don’t, and I don’t really care either way.”
—IBTIHAJ MUHAMMAD
Ibtihaj has always recognized her importance as a role model to other young Muslim women and women of color, particularly those drawn to fencing. Rather than feeling weighed down by that responsibility, she is spurred on by it. As she has often said, “Never allow anyone to dictate your journey.” At the Rio Games, she became the first hijab-wearing Muslim American to win an Olympic medal, taking the bronze as part of the team sabre event. I remember watching Ibtihaj and her team win while breastfeeding Aidan, my then almost two-month-old son. The triumph and joy Ibtihaj felt was palpable through the television screen, thousands of miles away. I later learned that her mantra is “I’m ready. I’m prepared. I’m strong. I’m capable. I’m a champion.” That conviction was visible on her medal-winning day in August 2016, and it still is today.
After the Olympics, Ibtihaj kept fencing, kept pushing herself into new territory, and kept shattering stereotypes, including through her frank discussions about her battles with anxiety and depression. In her 2018 memoir, Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream, Ibtihaj wrote about how, in 2014, after she qualified for the U.S. National Fencing Team, she would wake up on the mornings of competitions exhausted, even after a good night’s sleep. During competitions, she often felt lethargic, like she couldn’t move her arms and legs. She knew something more than nerves was happening, and she sought out her team’s sports psychologist, who explained that her physical fatigue was the result of performance anxiety. She conquered this hurdle the way she overcame others in her path, with hard work and focus. Every morning, she did thought exercises and spent time meditating and in prayer. I have no doubt that her candor and courage in sharing this part of her Olympic journey will help others—athletes and nonathletes alike—feel more comfortable with discussing their challenges and with seeking the help they need.
In 2017, Ibtihaj hit a new milestone when she got her own Barbie doll as part of their Shero series. She helped design the Barbie, the first ever to wear hijab, and when it went on sale in 2018, it quickly joined Charlotte and Aidan’s toy box. Our family is eagerly awaiting her first children’s book, The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family, which is due to be published in 2019. After years of not being able to find clothing that was both modest and fashion-forward, she started her own clothing line in 2014. She remains a marquee member of the U.S. National Fencing team and a vocal supporter of human rights and democracy. When asked whether she would ever consider running for office, she answered, “Honestly, I had never thought of it before. But I’m also one of those people who thinks they can do anything.” And we do, too.
Tatyana McFadden
Chelsea
Tatyana McFadden spent the first six years of her life in an orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Born with spina bifida, she was paralyzed from the waist down, and her birth parents couldn’t afford to take care of her. Tatyana recalls that the staff at the orphanage did their best to encourage her independence (“I must have been a handful!” she said later, laughing), and though there was no wheelchair for her, she learned to walk on her hands in order to keep up with the other children.
When Deborah McFadden was in graduate school, an autoimmune disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome left her temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. She used an electric wheelchair for four years, then crutches for eight more while she continued to recover. The discrimination she faced at school and work because of her disability made her into an advocate for others with disabilities. In 1989, the year Tatyana was born, Deborah had helped write the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Five years later, on a visit to distribute U.S. aid, Deborah met Tatyana at the orphanage where she lived. Deborah came back to see Tatyana several times over the next year, and when she learned that Tatyana was going to be transferred to a different orphanage, she couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye. “It had never been on my mind to adopt, but the moment they said they were going to transfer her to this place that, frankly, in your worst nightmare you can’t imagine, I said, ‘You can’t do this,’ ” Deborah said. Twelve months later, Tatyana came to live with Deborah and her partner, Bridgette, in Clarksville, Maryland.
When doctors told Deborah and Bridgette that Tatyana was unlikely to have a long life because she hadn’t had the medical care she’d needed while in Russia, they refused to accept the grim prognosis. Instead, they decided to sign their daughter up for sports to help her build strength. When they tried to sign Tatyana up for swimming lessons, every instructor except one turned them away. The first time Tatyana submerged herself in the water and popped back up to the surface, she shouted, “Ya sama!” (“I can do this!”) That was only the beginning of what would become a lifelong love of sports. “I tried a lot of sports, and I really fell in love with wheelchair racing,” Tatyana remembered later. “It made me feel so fast and free.” After years of building the muscles in her arms, shoulders, and back, she excelled at the sport. She would eventually earn the nickname “The Beast” from her coach because of the way she charged up even the steepest hills.
“I knew I could do anything if I just set my mind to it. I always figure out ways to do things, even if they’re a bit different.”
—TATYANA MCFADDEN
As a teenager, Tatyana set her sights on the Paralympics. She qualified for the U.S. Track and Field Team at fifteen years old, becoming the youngest athlete on the 2004 team. In that year’s Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece, she won a silver medal in the 100-meter and a bronze medal in the 200-meter. The next year, she tried to join her high school track team and got an unpleasant surprise. The school refused to let her race alongside other students, claiming that her wheelchair was a safety hazard for other athletes. Deborah went back and forth with the school before finally making a demand: “You give her a uniform and you let her run around the track.” As Deborah remembers, the school responded, “Sue us,” so that’s what they did.
Tatyana and her mother filed a lawsuit against her school with the help of attorneys from the Maryland Disabilities Law Center. Tatyana’s standing up for her fundamental right to compete alongside everyone else didn’t always make her popular with the other athletes. “[T]hey were always booing,” Tatyana said. “But on the inside, I just knew this was the right thing to do.” The day she testified, the courtroom was full of her friends. Before she took the stand, Tatyana turned to her ten-year-old sister, who has a prosthetic leg, and promised, “Hannah, you’ll never have to fight to run.” They won their case, and Tatyana was granted the right to continue competing. As the presiding U.S. District Court judge told the courtroom before deciding in Tatyana’s favor, “She’s not suing for blue ribbons, gold ribbons or money—she just wants to be out there when everyone else is out there.”
“I wanted to get the same thrill and the same experience as all the other high school students. There’s no competition by myself. It was lonely and embarrassing, and I just didn’t like it. Other competitors would come up to me and they would say, ‘Good race,’ but it wasn’t really a good race because I was running by myself.”
—TATYANA MCFADDEN
Still, the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association continued to throw up roadblocks. They determined that they would allow Tatyana and other wheelchair athletes to compete but refused to allow their victories to earn points for their schools’ teams. With her mother by her side, Tatyana advocated for the Fitness and Athletics Equity for Students with Disabilities Act, which passed the Maryland legislature in 2008. The new law required schools in Maryland to give students with disabilities a chance to participate in school sports, without being treated differently.
After high school, Tatyana attended the University of Illinois, in part because of its exceptional wheelchair athletic program. In 20
08 she competed in the Beijing Paralympic Games, where she won four medals: silver in the 200-meter, 400-meter, and 800-meter, and bronze in the 4x100-meter. Four years later, she won three gold medals in London. That year, she and her sister Hannah became the first siblings to compete against each other at the Paralympic Games. In 2014, Tatyana returned to the country of her birth for the Sochi Paralympic Games, her first time competing in a Winter Olympics; she won a silver medal in cross-country skiing. She said, “I was really nervous because I’ve only been skiing less than a year. I just had to ski with my heart, and having my family here has been absolutely wonderful. I went up against people who have been doing cross-country for years, so I’m absolutely proud of myself.” She made the top of the podium again in 2016 in Rio—four times—and is currently training for her sixth Paralympics in 2020. Tatyana has also broken records as a marathoner, becoming the first person to win four major marathons in a year—Boston, London, Chicago, and New York—and then doing it three more times. Every time I see Tatyana race, whether in person from the sidelines of the New York City Marathon or through the screen during the Olympics, I am in awe of her focus, grit, and athleticism.
In addition to excelling across multiple wheelchair racing distances from the 100-meter to the marathon, Tatyana is also a passionate advocate for athletes with disabilities. She has lobbied Congress for equal access, treatment, and pay—some marathons award seven times as much prize money to medalists outside the wheelchair division, and it wasn’t until 2018 that the U.S. Olympic Committee voted to start giving Paralympians the same medal bonuses as Olympians. She started a foundation “to create a world where people with disabilities can achieve their dreams, live healthy lives, and be equal participants in a global society.” She isn’t shy about the hard work and courage it has taken to achieve her own success and clear a path for others. “It’s taken me a long time to get where I am,” she has said. “I didn’t just wake up, and this all happened.”
Caster Semenya
Chelsea
Caster Semenya grew up running barefoot on a grassy track in Limpopo, South Africa. Her natural talent was evident early on to her family, her coaches, and her fellow athletes. In 2008, the same year she graduated from high school, she finished seventh in the 800-meter at the World Junior Championships. During the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, she exploded onto the international stage, winning gold in the 800-meter race and clocking her then personal best of 1:55.45.
As journalist Ariel Levy wrote in her New Yorker profile of Caster in November of that year: “She has a powerful stride and remarkable efficiency of movement: in footage of the World Championships, you can see other runners thrashing behind her, but her trunk stays still, even as she is pumping her muscle-bound arms up and down. Her win looks effortless, inevitable.” Even watching the video and knowing the result, I was rooting for Caster as she emerged from the middle of the pack, made her way to the front, and pulled far ahead of her competitors, with just one quick look over her shoulder to make sure no one was gaining on her. (No one was.)
Caster’s exceptional talent, her dramatic improvement from the previous year’s competition, and her muscular build drew intense scrutiny—an all-too-common development, especially for women athletes of color. So did her confident, unapologetic post-race interviews and on-the-track celebrations. (Why are women’s celebrations of hard-fought victory so often treated as unseemly when there is absolutely nothing wrong with them and so much that is right?) The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) forced Caster to undergo invasive “gender testing,” ostensibly to assess her hormones and physiology, to determine whether they would allow her to compete against other women athletes. She wasn’t allowed to compete for eleven months, until the IAAF finally cleared her—but the fight wasn’t over.
Two years later, in 2012, I remember watching from home as Caster carried the South African flag during the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics in London. She won a silver medal in the 800-meter, which was later upgraded to gold when the winner was found guilty of doping; Caster passed all her drug tests. In 2016, she became the first person ever to win a gold medal in the 400- , 800- , and 1500-meter races at the South African championships. That year, she also won gold in the 800-meter in Rio at the Olympics.
In 2018, the IAAF put forward new regulations targeting athletes with differences in sex development. Under their proposed rules, women athletes with higher levels of testosterone who compete in events between 400 meters and a mile would have to take drugs or undergo invasive surgery to reduce their testosterone in order to continue to compete against women. It is not a coincidence that their new rules apply specifically to several of the races Caster has won. Caster, along with South Africa’s track and field federation, challenged the rule. She called it “discriminatory, irrational, unjustifiable,” and she’s right. Unfortunately, in May 2019, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration in Sports officially gave the IAAF permission to move forward with the rule, effectively denying Caster the ability to compete in the body she was born with.
The South African government has already said they plan to appeal, pointing to a stunning lack of scientific evidence that higher testosterone levels actually give an unfair advantage at any distance. In fact, the research that the IAAF cited to make their case has been repeatedly called into question by the scientific community. Additionally, the World Medical Association, which represents more than a hundred physician associations and millions of doctors around the globe, has called on its members not to follow the IAAF recommendations, because these new rules contradict their core ethical standards. Members of the public health community have also expressed alarm that sports governing bodies now seem to be in the position of defining gender—a disturbing trend that should be stopped. Caster has repeatedly said she will not take the testosterone-suppressing drugs mandated by the IAAF should she wish to compete. She’s following science and doctors’ medical advice; the IAAF isn’t.
“I just want to run naturally, the way I was born. It is not fair that I am told I must change. It is not fair that people question who I am. I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast.”
—CASTER SEMENYA
Caster has been treated unfairly not only by the governing bodies of her sport but often by the media. One thoughtful analysis by writer Parker Molloy pointed out, “Whether journalists knew it or not, they were priming their readers to think Semenya’s win was unjust. Making matters worse, these stories included quotes from other athletes saying things like ‘She’s not a woman. She’s a man,’ and a dismissive ‘Just look at her.’… [Y]ou’d be hard-pressed to find a story about Semenya that didn’t make mention of her eligibility or include a quote about ‘fairness’ from a competitor upset about not finding a spot on the podium.” The sexism and bigotry aren’t even subtle.
In the meantime, Caster is still running, competing, and living her life. She married her wife, Violet, in 2015, and credits her with encouraging Caster to finish her college degree. She started the Caster Semenya Foundation to coach and support young athletes. “We as women need to come together and support each other,” she has said. “Without that, you will still feel discriminated, you still feel oppressed, you still feel criticized in everything that you do, and you will still feel like you are not recognized.”
The debate Caster has been pulled into has raised big questions: Who gets to define gender? And isn’t the idea of a level playing field in sports a myth, anyway? After all, no two bodies are the same. Some people are naturally taller, others shorter; some more muscular, others less so. As Ariel Levy asked: “Is Caster Semenya’s alleged extra testosterone really so different?” The answer—clearly—is no.
“I am 97 percent sure you don’t like me. But I’m 100 percent sure I don’t care.”
—CASTER SEMENYA, IN RESPONSE TO NEW IAAF RULES
Through it all, Caster has made an impressive and deliberate effort not to let anyone undermine her success, her self
-confidence, or her commitment to championing younger athletes. She remembers Nelson Mandela telling her: “People can talk, people can do whatever they want to do, but it’s up to you to live for yourself first before others.” She sums it up this way: “Be fearless, be brave, be bold, love yourself.” In the end, that may just be the gutsiest thing any of us can do.
Aly Raisman
Chelsea
It’s not the pomp and circumstance that get me most about the Olympics, Paralympics, and Special Olympics. It’s not even the moving backstories that sometimes make me cry. It’s watching athletes brush up against the limits of human persistence, over and over again, just to see what they can do with their artistry, unimaginable strength, speed, focus, and years of training. Sometimes those years start before the athletes even remember. Born in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1994, Aly Raisman was just two years old when she began training as a gymnast. By fourteen, she was already considered an elite athlete. It was to the surprise of no one in her close-knit family that she qualified for the 2012 U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Olympic team the same year she finished high school. In London for the Olympics, Aly helped lead a team known as “the Fierce Five,” which included Gabby Douglas and McKayla Maroney, to a gold medal. And then she and her teammates cheered Gabby on to victory for the all-around gold.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 22