Paris Olympics: record 191 openly LGBTQ athletes competing at 2024 Games
- Organisers underscored diversity and inclusion as major themes, showcasing drag queens and refugee athletes in Friday’s opening ceremony
A record number of athletes openly identifying as LGBTQ are competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics, a massive leap during a competition that organisers have pushed to centre around inclusion and diversity.
There are 191 athletes publicly saying they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and nonbinary who are taking part in the Games, according to Outsports, an organisation that compiles a database of openly queer Olympians. The vast majority of the athletes are women.
That number beat the previous record of 186 out athletes counted at the Covid-19-delayed Tokyo Olympics held in 2021, and the count is only expected to grow at future Olympics.
“More and more people are coming out,” said Jim Buzinski, co-founder of Outsports. “They realise it’s important to be visible because there’s no other way to get representation.”
The number of people willing to take the spotlight as an LGBTQ Olympian has skyrocketed in past decades. Buzinski said that when they started tracking the numbers at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, they counted only around five people.
Organisers of the Paris Olympics have underscored diversity and inclusion as major themes, showcasing drag queens and refugee athletes in Friday’s opening ceremony. That has received some blowback from religious conservatives.
