This book had me captivated from its beginning pages. The stories it tells are so important, both historically and in our current age, where gender hysteria, fear/hatred of nonconformity and sports continue to intersect on world stages like the Olympics and in small towns - especially in the United States.

I can’t recommend the book enough. It’s for readers interested in sports, politics, gender identity, queerness, LGBTQ rights and how they all intersect.

Thanks to FSG and NetGalley for the ARC.

Looking for a pre-Olympics read? I recommend Michael Waters' The Other Olympians, which shows the Games have always been political & introduces characters who deserve larger places in our collective sports history.

And it moves at a sprinter's pace!

ARC provided by Netgalley, this was a hopeful and enlightening read! Perfect for pride month, and it was wonderful to gain some insight into a moment in history that I really didn't know that much about! While I do wish the structure had been a little tighter at times, with the transitions between more objective delivery of information and zooming into the more character based scene structure sometimes coming off as less than smooth, it's defintely a minor criticism compared to such a treat of a book. Overall totally worth the read if you're interested in queer history, and I've already recommended it to a couple of friends!

Journalist and freelance writer Michael Waters has written a fascinating history of transitioning athletes of the early twentieth century and how the Olympics organization of the time reacted to them. The book covers events that were new to me, and it shines a light on the background to an issue that today manages to provide fodder for political controversy.

Waters follows most closely the life of Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech track athlete. Koubek won five national titles and two medals at the 1934 Women’s World Games and was considered one of the best athletes in Czechoslovakia. Koubek was always shy around other athletes, and never changed or showered in communal locker rooms. This, along with some of Koubek’s physical characteristics (the athlete was said to have a need to regularly shave off facial hair) prompted rumors about whether Koubek was a woman or a man.

In 1935 Koubek withdrew from sports and after a period of time announced that he would live the rest of his life as a man. He consulted with physicians, underwent examinations, and was determined to have predominantly male sexual characteristics. He underwent some type of surgery (what exactly is not known today) and by 1936 was pronounced by his doctors to have “become” a man.

The press and public reaction to Koubek and his transition was curious but generally positive. Around the same time that he transitioned, another athlete who had previously competed in the Women’s World Games came out and transitioned as a man. The British athlete known as Mary Louise Edith Weston became Mark Weston. Again, public and press expressed curiosity but were generally positive.

Waters emphasizes that it is difficult to put the labels we use today on these athletes. Whether they were intersex (being born with biological traits that do not fit traditional classifications of male or female) or trans (a person whose gender identity doesn’t match that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth) isn’t really known, as those terms were not used in the 1930s. How reporters and the general public processed what was happening to these athletes would not take such distinctions into account.

Waters makes the case that leading theories of sex and gender at the time even contemplated the possibility that people could spontaneously experience a change in gender as a natural occurrence beyond their control. That’s quite a different understanding of sex and gender than we have today.

The other important person Waters follows in his book is Alice Milliat, the pioneering French female sports organizer who founded the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (International Women’s Sports Federation) and the Women’s World Games. She took these actions after the Olympics organizers refused to include women’s track and field events in the 1924 Olympics.

Milliat’s struggles with the Olympic organizers continued for several years after the 1924 games, up to and through the Berlin Olympics held in 1936. In general, as Waters’ research tells us, a powerful clique within the Olympic organizers (including the American Avery Brundage) did not want women competing in the Olympics track events, nor did they appreciate the competition that Milliat’s Federation and her Games represented. They worked hard to push Milliat to turn over her organization to them. She eventually gave in and did so after the 1936 games. As you might expect, women’s participation in the Olympics did not substantially increase until the 1970s.

Among the things that Brundage and his fellows did to push Milliat was to question how she could have allowed athletes to compete in her games when they did not display what they felt were “normal” female characteristics (referring to Koubek and Weston). Brundage proposed to the head of the Olympics that it begin instituting a policy of medical examination of women athletes before competing in the Olympics.

The policy became effective for women track and field athletes at the 1936 Olympics. Waters goes into detail about how many of the proponents of the testing instituted at the 1936 Games were the Nazi hosts, as it fit into their own notions of purity and “normative gender standards”. This included the Nazi sports doctor Wilhelm Knoll, who was one of the first to advocate for testing.

This notion that women athletes need to prove that they fit into what have never been well-defined criteria of femaleness persists to this day. Waters devotes several pages in this book to just how unworkable and unscientific such a pursuit actually is. The panic that some man will attempt to compete as a woman and ruin things for all the “real” women (or worse), is in the air these days, and is being exploited for political gain.

Interestingly, when Alice Milliat was questioned about whether Koubek’s medals should be revoked after he transitioned, she gave what I think was an insightful reply. “If it is proved that [Koubek] has become a man,” she said, “it is logical to consider that previously she was a woman.”

Happy to include this title in a recent round-up highlighting new LGBTQ+ reads for Pride Month, in the Books section of Canadian national culture and lifestyle magazine Zoomer. (see column and mini-review at link)

I had such a good time reading this book, and learning more about the heavy and intricate ties between sports and queerness. It was a great mix of history and cultural commentary while at the same time being very readable. The writing flowed, and the content is incredibly important to todays world in the weirdest and most valuable of ways. The research that was put together, and the in-depth descriptions that humanize the athletes, while at the same time establishing academic practices for identification and respect of the individuals preferences was so refreshing.

I think I yelled a little bit when I saw this cover a few months ago with its subtitle perfectly aligned with my interests. I thought I was dreaming. I took a screenshot to convince myself. Yep, the thing against queerness-and-sports is apparently fascist, I knew that, but exactly how, I could not have explained. I was so, so happy to get an advance copy of The Other Olympians. This book has given me some answers.

I've done research from this era, and I appreciate how much effort goes into finding sources to tell a story like this, all the more so given that it happened in multiple countries and languages. I read The Other Olympians slowly, dwelling on every sentence. Now, this story is seared into my brain and is irrevocably card-shuffled with everything else I know about the 1930s. I want to tell everyone to preorder this book — It is time! It will be out in a week! — so I've been blogging about it, and I don't know if I'm talking too much and should be quiet.

Side question: Who is this character Avery Brundage? How is he real? All the nonsense he pulled, on multiple levels, I can barely believe. When I come down from my incredulity, I have to admit, yes, intellectually I know there are men like him. I just try to avoid them.

Avery Brundage aside, this book is part of my identity now.

To everyone who has ever asked, "But are trans people valid? Because sports?" (unknowingly walking into Chris Rufo's right-wing messaging trap), I would like to quietly hand them a copy of this book, The Other Olympians by Michael Waters, and I hope they read all 368 pages and have a think. The book explains the history of the moral panic over playing sports while being intersex or trans. I didn't know how far back this history went and how extensive the story was.

I keep being amazed by the stories we can tell and how they make sense of our world today. I say "we," but I did not write this. I am just a huge fan. This is an achievement.

Anyone who appreciates historical deep-dives should pick this up. It's enjoyable to read, and it makes its points well, while leaving enough unsaid that readers can draw their own connections.

The Other Olympians is one of my anticipated Summer reads and I very much enjoyed it! This book covers events around the 1936 Berlin Olympics, trans and intersex athletes that recently transitioned, and the calls for sex testing in women's sports. The fear around trans and intersex people competing is nothing new but it was frustrating just how similar the rhetoric is to current day. Waters does a fantastic job weaving together everything in a way that is engrossing. I highly recommend this to anyone looking to learn about LGBT history and the release date (June 4th) is perfect for anyone looking for a Pride Month read!

THIS WAS SO FASCINATING! The Other Olympians details the stories of several athletes who publicly transitioned in the 1930s, calls for sex testing in women’s sports, and how that was tied into the Nazi Party and the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s always so interesting to go back and see true stories of queer/trans individuals in history, it just makes it so clear that this is something that has always been around no matter what certain people try to say. It’s also so frustrating to see how current ideas about needing to ban trans women from women’s sports can be traced back to misinformation, fascism, and the Nazi Party.

Seriously, this book is so eye opening. I had never heard of the stories of these athletes who transitioned on the world stage. The trans men featured in the book all transitioned after competing as female athletes. This caused a stir about keeping men out of women’s sports, but none of these men wanted to go back to competing against women.

The author covers all the different conversations people were having about wanting to start sex testing for women's sports. He details how there was actually a lot of public support for the men after they transitioned, and a lot of the detractors or the people who were the most adamant about implementing sex testing came from the Nazi Party or were sympathizers. There’s a lot of discussion in the book about how sex isn’t a binary category and how these men trying to set up the rules couldn’t even really describe who they were trying to keep out of women’s sports.

I definitely recommend this book for people who are interested in LGBTQ+ history. It makes so much sense to see how the history of sex testing in women’s sports was tied to fascism, especially when thinking about who is continuing that messed up cause in the present. I ended up listening to the whole book in one day because it was just so engrossing.

Waters’s book is meticulously researched and offers a clear, historical narrative at how sex identification and regulation in women’s sports has roots in fascism and sexism, the latter of which was brought up by women who in today’s terms I would describe as TERFs. It looks at the beginning of women’s sports, the Olympics, and queer athletes and how all of them intersected with each other in the early 1900s.

The text is perhaps more academic than some might prefer, with details about events occasionally being pretty dry. However, overall the balance between looking at politics, women’s sports, and the lived experiences of queer folx was done well enough for me. I appreciated most of all the lived experiences context and various primary sources examined, particularly as the attitudes/publications of the time show a more complex understanding of transitioning individuals than is usually presented.

Waters’s work holds historical importance in highlighting, preserving, and examining overlooked narratives, and his research is invaluable in understanding the ongoing, persistent issues facing queer folx, particularly trans and intersex individuals, in women’s sports. I think many will find this book useful and thought provoking.

The Other Olympians by Michael Waters is a look at an unknown and forgotten part of Olympic history: transitioned athletes and their impact on sports and history as a whole.

Thank you to the FSG Team and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

This was a deep, deep, well-researched dive into the 1930s and how the advancement of Nazi politics unraveled the political and sociological ideas about gender and sex in that era. The story follows IOC and women's sports leaders as they developed a modern Olympics along a gender binary, and how that base-level division of sports ultimately led to sex-testing of athletes in a problematic and dangerous way (even today).

The deepest of dives sometimes dragged a bit for me (there were full stories of a few athletes' lives that delved further than I expected, but I learned a lot about each person and got to see how their lives, countries, cultures, and access impacted the way they experienced sex testing in sports.

One thing I really loved was the emphasis on intersex athletes (as we might understand them today, but we didn't then). I've been passionate about how sex testing impacts intersex folks, and I was glad to see it so thoroughly discussed.

My favorite chapters were perhaps the last three, which zoomed out and reviewed the more modern developments as these polices rolled out and were studied.