by Hope Solo
When the Athens roster was named in late June, the two goalkeepers on the team were Bri and Kristin Luckenbill. Luckenbill was a Dartmouth graduate who had started for three years for the Carolina WUSA team but hadn’t played on the national level. Her emergence left me little hope of being named an alternate—I assumed that the final slot on the team would go to an experienced goalkeeper like Siri. But in early July—a few games before my Swedish team went on an extended break for the Olympics—goalkeeper coach Phil Wheddon called me. “Hope, we want you to be our alternate,” Phil said. “We can see how much you’ve grown in Sweden. Because you’ve been playing competitive games we think you’d be better prepared than the goalkeepers who have only been able to train.”
My first reaction was to reflect on the journey, all the hard work and sacrifices I had made along with my family. My second was to worry about my bank account. My mother was coming to visit me in Sweden, and I had planned a big trip to Italy with Adrian. Those non-refundable airline tickets put a damper on my excitement. But then April sent me an e-mail letting me know I didn’t have to fly back to California for the final weeks of preparation—I could stay in Sweden, finish out the first half of my season, do my traveling, and then meet the team in Greece.
I immediately shot off an e-mail to Lesle and Amy.
I’m writing to tell you guys that I’m going to Greece as the third goalkeeper. Although I want to be the first! :) I feel very rewarded, and I feel a step closer to my dreams. It’s a great feeling and I couldn’t wait to tell you since you two have been through it all with me, right there by my side. It’s taken several years, but slowly, it’s all coming together, and I want to thank you for all your support and for truly believing in me. Washington, and all it had to offer, really set me straight!!! You guys are the best, and forever in my heart and mind! I love you. Hope.
A few days later my mother arrived in Sweden on her first trip overseas. We were excited to be having an adventure together—it felt like a new chapter in our relationship. We drove my maroon Volvo north to Stockholm, over to Norway, up into the beautiful fjords. Like the locals—all of us weary of the long, dark winter—I was eager to take advantage of the beautiful Scandinavian summer, the long days and mild weather and outdoor lifestyle. We basked in the sun on the rocks outside Stockholm. We camped and swam in icy lakes. It reminded me of when I had been a little girl, camping on the beach in Happy Camp, Oregon. One night a little red fox came near our campfire, and my mother coaxed him closer with food. We nicknamed him Foxxy and viewed him as a good-luck symbol of our renewed connection.
I saw a different side of my mother in Scandinavia. She had been sober for a couple of years now and was clearheaded, strong, adventurous, funny, and fun—I saw a glimpse of the girl she must have been in the late 1970s, when she met my father. On a whim, we went into a store in Stockholm and both got our noses pierced. I had never thought of my mom as a girlfriend, someone fun to hang out with, but now we laughed and confided in each other. I had a new friend.
After my mother left, Adrian arrived, and we flew to Italy. I’d heard too much about it all my life to think it could live up to its reputation, but it was wonderful. We walked from town to town on Cinque Terre. We rented a boat and explored caves along the Italian Riviera. We ate pasta and drank red wine out of jugs and danced in the public squares of tiny villages. I sent my dad postcards from his ancestral land. I tried to find Solo family connections but didn’t have much luck. Oh well. I told myself that “Solo” might not even be my dad’s real name.
In early August, I had to meet the national team on Crete for training, while Adrian went off to travel in Turkey. I was always with the team on the field, but because I was an alternate, I was completely segregated the rest of the time. I couldn’t even get into the team meals. Once again, I felt like an outsider. When the competition started and the team played in other parts of Greece, I went to Athens to wait and see if my services would be needed. I couldn’t stay in the athlete’s village, so I got housing through the U.S. Olympic Committee at a local university. There was a suite with two bedrooms. I shared a room with Pia Sundhage, who was scouting for our team; Paul Ellis, the head scout, was in the other room. We couldn’t find any hotel rooms, so our massage therapist lent Adrian his credential so that he could stay on our couch.
I trained in the morning. Sometimes we played two on two, with Adrian, Paul, and Pia. But after that, I was free to do as I pleased. Nike helped me get tickets to Olympic events. We ate dinner late like the Athens locals, drinking wine in rooftop restaurants on warm nights, the Parthenon glowing in the distance.
I wasn’t getting paid much more than a per diem. I had no perks as an Olympic athlete. I was isolated from my team. But in Athens I fell in love with the Olympics. As a fan, I saw the Olympic spirit, the pride of the Greeks, the enthusiasm in the stands, the enormity of the event. The Olympics were different from other sporting events; their meaning hadn’t been damaged by all the modern commercialism and hype. Maybe being in Greece, the birthplace of the Games, helped me understand that there was something profound about this colossal gathering of the world’s countries. I was determined to be a full participant the next time around.
My teammates rode a wave of emotion into the final. The gold-medal game against Brazil was the last competition for the core of the ’99 team. Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Joy Fawcett had announced that they would retire after the Games. No one was sure what the future held for Brandi Chastain or Kristine Lilly or Bri. They didn’t say they were retiring, but an era was definitely ending.
For much of the gold-medal game, there was a sense that the world of soccer was undergoing a changing of the guard. Brazil—led by its skilled forward Marta—completely outplayed our team. I sat in the stands with Adrian, watching nervously. Brazil had scoring chance after scoring chance, hitting the post twice with potential game winners late in regulation. After ninety minutes, the game was tied 1–1. But in the twenty-second minute of overtime, Abby headed a corner kick in for the winning goal. Our team was able to kill the clock and finally celebrate.
I went to the after-party, which lasted through the sweltering Athens night and well into the sweltering Athens dawn. The ’99ers clung together, weeping and laughing and telling tales in a code only they knew. I hung out on a back deck with my friends Cat Reddick and Aly Wagner. As the sun rose over Piraeus harbor, I knew a new era was beginning for U.S. soccer. One that would include me.
IV.
I returned to Sweden for the end of our season, and all my newfound maturity and good feelings collapsed in a whirlwind of personal drama. After our romantic summer together, Adrian was acting distant and strange, and I heard he was spending a lot of time with some girl back in Seattle. A male soccer friend from home came to visit me in Sweden while he tried out with a Swedish team. Wounded by Adrian, I had a moment of weakness; my friend and I had a drunken fling. I was instantly remorseful. Sobbing on the phone, I confessed to Adrian.
“Thanks for telling me,” he said. He sounded mature, but the distance between us grew.
That autumn the U.S. team went on a nine-game victory tour, celebrating the gold medal and bidding farewell to the ’99ers. I wasn’t invited to participate because I had been an alternate—a decision made by the veterans. Instead, I returned to Seattle after my Swedish season ended. Once there, I quickly figured out that I couldn’t live with Adrian anymore. He would go out all the time and not tell me where he had been. He was still trying to punish me for what I’d done in Sweden.
One day, I’d had enough. I loaded up my car with all my belongings and moved out, crashing with my former teammate, Malia. Then I shared an apartment with Cheryl’s brother Ben. I was depressed. My heart was broken. I didn’t have anywhere to live. My beloved Seattle felt like a trap. I needed to leave.
Fortunately, my agent called with another contract offer: this time in Lyon, playing for Olympique Lyonnais, an established team
offering great money and good benefits. In late December, I boarded a plane for France.
Several weeks later, as I was adjusting to life in Lyon, I got word from across the Atlantic of a huge national team shakeup. April had resigned as head coach.
One morning, my phone rang. “Hi, Hope,” said the voice on the other end. “This is Greg Ryan.”
CHAPTER TEN
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
If I had made a list of all the people I thought might coach the national team, Greg Ryan would probably have been dead last. Greg had been April’s unremarkable assistant coach, a terrier-faced man with a perpetually surprised expression. He mostly faded into the background, rarely talking and never taking charge at practice. If he had any leadership skills or technical savvy, I never saw it. I figured he got the job simply because he was a friend of April’s.
But now, in February 2005, he was on the other end of the phone, telling me he was the interim national-team coach. And that I was on his roster for the upcoming Algarve Cup in Portugal. I felt bad for April. She had always been my supporter—all the way back to when I was first in the Olympic Development Program as a kid in Richland. She gave me my first break on the national team and was always straightforward and honest about what I needed to do to improve. Her departure was officially portrayed as a resignation, but there were reports that she had been forced out by the veteran players. I’d heard their grumblings—I believed they had been lobbying to get rid of her for years, unhappy with her soccer tactics, her communication skills, and her leadership style. I think the veterans felt they knew what was best for the team, and when they failed to win the 2000 Olympics and the 2003 World Cup, the players probably tried to use that as leverage against April. There were published reports that Brandi Chastain asked U.S. Soccer president Robert Contiguglia to fire April eight months before the Athens Olympics, but he refused.
Even winning the gold medal in Athens didn’t save April’s job. After Brazil had thoroughly outplayed us, it was reported that the veterans—even those who were retiring—sent a letter to April expressing their displeasure and asking her to resign. It seemed to me that now U.S. Soccer was no longer supportive of her, since the World Cup and Olympic cycle was over and a new four-year cycle was about to start. Rather than serve out the final ten months of her contract, April quit. The reported power struggle seemed to be indicative of the control the veteran players felt they had over the team. But they didn’t control who would replace her. And now Greg Ryan was the head coach.
I wasn’t the only person in Lyon getting a phone call from Greg. That winter, Lyon was a popular destination for Americans—Danielle Slaton, Aly Wagner, Lorrie Fair, and Christie Welsh had all signed to play with Olympique Lyonnais, an up-and-coming team run by the strong French men’s club of the same name. We all lived together in residential housing and took weekend trips to Paris and the Alps to go skiing. I didn’t like being with so many Americans. It made France seem less special than Sweden had been. Instead of meeting new people and rising to new challenges, I felt I was in an extension of U.S. training camp, with all the same issues, jealousies, and gossip reaching across the Atlantic to the base of the French Alps. I was also distraught over my breakup with Adrian.
In early March, Aly, Lorrie, Christie, and I flew to Lisbon for the Algarve Cup, joining a national team with a decidedly different look. Mia, Julie, and Joy had retired. Brandi wasn’t on the roster. Bri was taking time off. Christie (Pearce) Rampone—now married, though she was always Pearcie to us—was pregnant. Only Kristine Lilly and Kate Markgraf remained from the ’99ers, though Abby Wambach was so tight with them you would have thought she had stripped off her own jersey along with them in the Rose Bowl in July 1999.
Greg worked to win us over. April never seemed to have much fun, never had a drink, and was always super-serious. Greg was trying to be the exact opposite. He wore sandals and played his guitar for us. He told jokes. He had drinks in the hotel bar. He seemed to be trying hard to cultivate an image as a fun-loving, laid-back dude who would be an awesome guy to have around. During one of our first team dinners in Portugal, Greg cruised into the room with his guitar. “Hey, who’s got a request?” he said, strumming the strings.
Awkward. We all just wanted to finish our meal and go Skype with our boyfriends. We didn’t really want to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” with Greg. This wasn’t summer camp. Some of my teammates rolled their eyes. Others applauded, seeing a way to get close to the new coach. I watched, fascinated but horrified.
Still, Portugal was fun that March. We didn’t have a lot of expectations—we were starting a new four-year cycle and a new era. I didn’t play the first game—our new goalkeeper coach, Bill Irwin, had worked with Nicole Barnhardt when she was a youth player and gave her the start, her first ever in international competition. We won 1–0. I got the next game, against Finland on March 11, 2005, my first national-team appearance since September 8, 2002, against Scotland in Columbus, Ohio, when I was a senior in college. That seemed like a long time ago. I knew that, thanks to two years as a professional player, I was a much better goalkeeper now.
Finland was surprisingly tough for us, but I didn’t give up a goal, making four saves. Two days later, I started against Denmark, recording another clean sheet and helping our team to the tournament final against Germany. We won that game 1–0. Our defense was solid in front of me, but I made a few memorable saves, and reports termed it a “coming-out” party for me.
It was definitely a coming-out party for Greg as well, though U.S. Soccer officials said they were conducting a search for a full-time head coach. I heard rumors about some of the candidates: some had worked in the WUSA, including Pia Sundhage, who had coached in Boston. Others were successful college coaches, such as Jerry Smith, who had built a powerhouse at Santa Clara. Pearcie, back home and pregnant, was supposed to be interviewing some of the candidates and passing information along to the rest of us. It seemed that the veterans favored Pia, who had been a great player. Of all the candidates, the one who seemed the least qualified was Greg Ryan. Before coming to the national team, he had coached at Colorado College, never earning an NCAA berth there before becoming April’s vanilla assistant. The consensus on the team was that we needed a fresh start, and Greg was a leftover from the past. But it seemed to me that Greg was a pawn in a power struggle. The players were in negotiations for a new contract. According to reports, U.S. Soccer officials—many of whom were portrayed as not having cared at all about women’s soccer until the 1999 team forced them to—wanted to gain more control over the women’s team. The big personalities from the past had built the team from nothing and consequently felt entitled to ownership of that. U.S. Soccer wanted a coach who would do its bidding, including clearing out the entitled veterans. That probably meant Jerry Smith, who was married to Brandi Chastain, wasn’t ever going to get a legitimate shot at the job. Greg didn’t seem to have the players’ backing, but by hiring him, the federation could send a clear message about who was boss.
We had unwittingly helped his cause. The four shutouts in Portugal were viewed as evidence that Ryan was the right man for the job and that the U.S. team hadn’t missed a beat despite the changeover.
Three weeks after we won the Algarve Cup, when I was back in Lyon, Ryan was named the permanent head coach. “Oh well,” I thought with a shrug.
II.
The needle pierced the middle of my back. “Ah!” I inhaled sharply. But I’d felt worse pain.
“Oui?” grunted the tattoo artist. “C’est bon?”
I was in a tattoo parlor in a funky neighborhood of Lyon. My French teammate Claire was with me—her friend had helped design the tattoo I was getting on my back:
Persecuted but not forsaken
Cast down but not destroyed
Here in a tattoo parlor off a French alley, I was trying to inject inspiration into my skin. Second Corinthians was a favorite of Gran
dma Alice’s and the passage resonated with me. Claire’s friend had sketched out a cool-looking inscription—a shadowy, edgy font for the tattoo artist to replicate. I was in an edgy period of my life.
After the Algarve Cup, Grandma Alice and Grandpa Pete came to visit me in Lyon. My adventurous grandparents flew to Portugal to support me in my starts for the national team, and now they wanted to see my new life in France. They rode the team bus to games with us and stayed in the residential housing I shared with the other Americans. We made meals in the kitchen and stayed up late playing cribbage. Grandma and Grandpa explored Lyon, even walking up the steep hill to the basilica that towers over the city. They found spiritual meaning and education in their travel.
When they left, I did my own exploring, including in tattoo parlors. I was in a post-Adrian mania. I got to know Claire’s non-soccer-playing French friends. We drank red wine and ate Nutella crêpes and regularly ran off to Marseilles or Paris. I dated a lot of men. One French girl flirted with me for months, asking, “How do you know you don’t like kissing girls if you’ve never tried it?”
“Trust me,” I said. “I know I like men.”
One night I got drunk and let her kiss me. I’d had gay teammates throughout my career—I thought maybe I should see their side of things. So we made out. Interesting but not life-changing. I was straight.
The soccer in France was frustrating. In Sweden, most of my teammates spoke some English, but it was difficult communicating with my French back line. I tried to learn the right French words, but in the pressure of a game I would resort to English. If I said “away,” they thought I was saying “J’ai”—I have it. So my defense thought I was calling for the ball. At times it felt as though I was trapped in a Monty Python skit.