Paris 2024 Olympic Athletes Will Be Allowed to Openly Declare LGBTQ+ Support
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With the 2024 Summer Olympic Games held in Paris, the country’s committee has publicly announced its partnership with LGBTQ+ sports movement Pride House. On top of this collaboration, they have also expressed a commitment to advancing LGBTQ+ inclusivity in the Games.
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Essentially, this allows the athletes competing in the 2024 Games to be given the opportunity to speak out about the injustices LGBTQ+ face, including unequal treatment in sports, anti-trans attitudes, and queerphobic narratives in general. This partnership comes after many years of the International Olympic Committee denying athletes the opportunity to express ‘political’ beliefs during the Games.
The Paris 2024 Committee President, Tony Estanguet, spoke about the benefits of providing athletes with such opportunities.
“There are plenty of opportunities for athletes, for associations, to use the platform of the Games to demonstrate that some situations are not acceptable, that we have to evolve,” said Estanguet.
He went onto express his joy at the partnership in a statement from the Paris 2024 Committee. “We are very happy to participate in the Pride House project, which will be a place of exchange and celebration for LGBTI+ people and their allies in 2024,".
Since 2010, Pride House has provided support for the LGBTQ+ community in areas of sport and athletics. It has been involved with most Olympic Games since its inception and has also offered opportunities for LGBTQ+ inclusion at the Commonwealth Games. Owing to the success of the movement, Pride House is already being planned for heavy involvement in the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
The Summer Olympic Games are seeing a consistent increase in athletes who are openly LGBTQ+, with the Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2020 breaking the record for publicly queer participants. With each event seeing an increase of almost double the LGBTQ+ athletes every four years, as well as the confident partnership with Pride House, it is looking likely that the Paris 2024 Games will feature the highest number of openly LGBTQ+ athletes since the creation of the Games.
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