Megan Rapinoe GQ Profile: The Righteous Arrival of an American Superhero – GQ
The way Megan Rapinoe tells it, France screwed up.
We’re sitting in the back of a sunny studio in uptown Seattle, and I’ve asked her to take me back to June, back to the pressure cooker that was the World Cup quarterfinal but was being billed as a final—against host country France in front of more than 45,000 rapturous fans in the historic Parc des Princes. It also happened to take place less than 48 hours after the president of the United States repeatedly attacked Rapinoe on Twitter for indelicately refusing to go to the White House in an old viral video. (Her exact wording: “I’m not going to the fucking White House.”)
It all started with a lightning-quick throw-in far from France’s goal back in the U.S.’s half. Rapinoe, doing what she often does, whipped it hard, fast, and looooong to Alex Morgan, who hoofed it toward the goal while the defense was disorganized and offsides was suspended. Beaten on the run, the French defender almost had no choice but to foul her, tugging two-handed at her arms until Morgan stumbled and fell and the defender saw the flash of a yellow card. The ref called for a direct kick just outside the box.
Jeers from the crowd echoed through the stadium as Rapinoe spun the ball between the pads of her fingertips. She set it down on the foam-painted line and eyed France’s wall. They had set it up “really bad,” she says—too far to the left and perhaps a player too short. Rapinoe thought she would drive it low and hard, hoping defenders might fumble it out for a U.S. corner kick. She let out a deep breath and SMASHED it into the mix. As the ball cruised toward the goal, players and limbs miraculously moved out of its path. Her teammate Julie Ertz hurdled up over the ball, knees bent like a Cossack dancer, and it tunneled between the legs of France’s typically all-seeing captain, while the keeper was already shifting in the wrong direction. The ball sailed into the back of the net, untouched.
U.S. 1, France 0.
“Oh, my God, I can’t believe that actually went through,” Rapinoe thought, followed immediately by “Fuck yeah! I just scored. Scored in Paris at Parc des Princes against France.”
And then she was there on the sideline: arms spread at full wingspan, on a tilt. Legs planted wide. Faded pink-lavender locks, swooped back around her ears. Chest puffed, back arched, chin up. Superman-style.
She would hit “the Rapinoe”—as the pose would later become known—again in the second half after scoring, putting France away for good, and again in the World Cup final against the Netherlands. The pose became a symbol of swaggering American excellence and righteousness, in a political era with precious little of either. By some cosmic symmetry of the universe, after more than two years of the U.S. getting humiliated by its cartoon-villain president, this petite lesbian soccer player with punk-rock hair and a talent for rejoinders had suddenly become America’s redeemer.
It was in that moment when Megan Rapinoe, star women’s-soccer player, became Megan Rapinoe, American superhero, on the side of truth, justice, and extremely accurate free kicks.
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The more you learn about Rapinoe, the more her story seems fantastical. For one thing, when most Mia Hamm aspirants were playing year-round, she barely practiced.
Back in Seattle, where Rapinoe plays for the Reign FC, she is tucked into the corner of a tufted gray sofa, wearing black Celine loafers and a new gold Rolex she bought for herself as a post-Cup gift. It’s some two months after she hoisted up the World Cup trophy and took home both the Golden Boot (awarded to the top scorer) and the Golden Ball (awarded to the best player of the tournament)—after the cheers of USA! USA! EQUAL PAY! EQUAL PAY! died down. Lounging two feet away from me and not terrorizing the world’s top players, she looks her actual size—five feet seven, 133 pounds—but more David Bowie than the suburban-manicured girls next door who made up the ranks of soccer stars during my youth.
For a professional player—let alone a superstar—Megan Rapinoe’s soccer biography is unusual. The FIFA Player of the Year, she now has two World Cup wins and one runners-up placement, plus an Olympic gold medal, under her belt. But growing up in rural Redding, California, Rapinoe didn’t play high school soccer (in California the winter season was basketball, which she also played). Just club in the fall. On Tuesdays her mother, Denise, would use her one day off from waitressing to drive Megan and her twin sister, Rachael, to club practice near Sacramento. It was a five-hour round trip on a good day, and when that became too much, the twins would just show up for games, getting up at 4 a.m. on weekends so their father, Jim, could drive them to the Bay Area. “Parents,” she says to me, “are fucking nuts.”
In the hierarchy of American sports, women’s soccer holds a uniquely niche spot. Since the dawn of modern soccer in late-19th-century Britain, men have tried to keep women out: Almost every major soccer country—France, Britain, Spain, Brazil—stamped out flourishing women’s leagues with strict bans. But in the United States, which poured its communal machismo (and gender restrictions) into football and baseball, women were allowed to play. Soccer, like the metric system, the Paris Agreement, and salad after dinner, was viewed as a foppish European thing.
With the traditional fútbol superpowers hobbled by sexism, and the enforcement of Title IX slowly pushing American women’s sports forward, the U.S. emerged as the greatest team in the world. In 1999, when golden girl Mia Hamm and crew went streaking across the country to win the third Women’s World Cup (a 13-year-old Rapinoe was there in the Stanford stands when the ’99ers beat Brazil), soccer was only the fifth-most popular girls’ sport in the U.S. Among high school sports, basketball, track, volleyball, and softball all ranked higher. But none of those have one billion dedicated international fans or a quadrennial tournament with anywhere close to the same level of cultural import—a manic mixture of profound national identity and pride—so, funnily enough, the international stage of soccer set up the U.S. women’s soccer team with a high-profile public relations vehicle for this year’s debates about gender equity.
But success often conveys different kinds of inequities. And the dirty little secret of American youth soccer is that it is mostly cloistered in the upper and upper-middle classes—a professionalized system of expensive fees, hours of drills, and long-distance drives all year long. Young Rapinoe? Didn’t really buy into all of that. “If I was in a system where I had to train all the time, there was a likely chance I would have been left behind,” she says, “because I was pretty small and a little bit of a late bloomer. I just can’t see that fitting my style.”
She adds: “I learned how to play the game in a game. My understanding of space and the way that I play was all developed because of that.”
One of her former coaches, Mark Krikorian, remembers her as a very rare, multidimensional player. “She’s a game changer,” he told me over the phone. A heck of a talent. But practice? “At one point, I had a very direct conversation with her. From that moment on, she was the best player.”
Since the inaugural Women’s World Cup tournament in 1991, the U.S. has won four out of eight titles. The 1999 squad, in particular, captured the public’s imagination and were billed as America’s sweethearts. Less reported: that they went on strike in a contract dispute just a few months after a ripped Brandi Chastain tore off her shirt. Fighting for fair pay in American women’s soccer is nearly as routine as strapping on shin guards. But that was all before #MeToo, Women’s Marches, and the election of the 45th president. This year commentators dubbed the Americans arrogant, the “bad girls” of the tournament—not for fouling any of the usual spoiled sports misbehavior that barely raises an eyebrow for male players, but for excellence and their refrain of pay equity. A bigger movement for women’s equality was rippling through all the teams—an unspoken feeling that they were all, as Rapinoe put it, “done just taking bullshit.’’ The Americans were at the forefront.
After her first goal in the 13-0 opening rout against Thailand, in classic unbridled free-as-a-bird Rapinoe fashion, she slid, kicking her feet together in “an explosion of joy.” When the team later caught flak from certain male commentators for celebrating too much, she flipped the script and redirected the conversation towards investment inequity in different countries—they were there to win, sure, but let’s be clear: the teams whose federations who invest more in their women’s programs, “are, shocker, doing better.” And all those federations could do better.
That Rapinoe became a world-famous athlete-activist is its own kind of revelation. She came out as gay her first year of college, and while an awkward period before that gave her an “empathetic view of people in general,” she wasn’t exactly political. (Though now she listens to Pod Saves America “religiously.”) Her first memory of activism was when one of her Chicago Red Stars teammates, nine years ago, insisted that they all braid their hair in solidarity with Afghani women. “I didn’t really know exactly what she was talking about,” Rapinoe says, laughing. Her sister, Rachael, who also played pro soccer, says that impulse was always there: “There’s a number of ex-coaches that we had growing up that would say things to players teetering the line of verbal and mental abuse, and we always said something if we felt like what they were doing wasn’t right.”
But if you had to pinpoint a political awakening, it would perhaps be 2016. After making a splash as a super sub in the 2011 World Cup and rising to key midfielder in 2015, Rapinoe hit a rough patch. She was recovering from her third ACL injury and finding that healing was different on the other side of 30. The U.S. team had “just totally bonked out of the Olympics,” and things weren’t looking good. Then, in September, Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem at a preseason game in San Diego, and three days later, at a game against the Chicago Red Stars, Rapinoe became the first white athlete to kneel in solidarity with him. “The whole point was talking about racism,” she says. “People don’t want to talk about racism.”
The backlash was swift and cruel. Rapinoe felt like she was getting “blackballed” from national team rosters. Her business inbox was bombarded with vicious emails. On a more personal level, at Jack’s Grill, where her mother worked for 30 years, the owner took down the mementos of Redding’s most famous sports star, prompting a town debate. “We’re cool with the gay thing,” says Rapinoe, paraphrasing some of her hometown’s reaction. “But Jesus Christ, you’re kneeling now? Oh, my God, this is too much.”
In the surrounding Shasta County, 63.9 percent of voters pulled the lever for Trump, including Rapinoe’s own father, who, like her grandfather and uncle, is a veteran. In that way, the Rapinoe household was like so many tense Thanksgivings across America—now they were having conversations, a “bajillion” of them, they hadn’t had before. For Rapinoe, opening that up was “kind of amazing” and hearing all the sides within her family helped sharpen her viewpoint.
Rapinoe also found another bright light in 2016: At the Rio Summer Olympics, she met Sue Bird, the WNBA superstar point guard and now Rapinoe’s girlfriend. They both happened to live and play in Seattle. “To be 100 percent real,” she says, “without Sue in the mix, for a litany of different reasons we’re not sitting here and having this conversation.” Here, Rapinoe breaks eye contact for the first time since we started talking and looks up at the ceiling in prayer fashion. “She changed my life in so many ways.” The pair, easily sports’ most glamorous power couple, started dating back in town, doing what many do during their honeymoon period: eating out a lot.
“After a week [Sue] was like, ‘Okay listen, I can’t eat like this,’ ” says Rapinoe. “Obviously being smitten and seeing the results in her career, I was just kind of like, ‘You know, I’ll just do whatever you’re doing.’ ” Once she started following Sue’s diet—fueling up for daytime workouts; protein and veggies; avoid simple starches, especially at night—she was able to train much harder and longer, making her way back onto the national team’s roster.
By the time this year’s World Cup rolled around, Rapinoe, pushing 34 years old but now healthy and reinvigorated, was ready to have her best year yet. (And she did, scoring six goals overall, including a remarkable five goals in all three of the knockout rounds she played in, securing her legacy as a big game player.) She was also more than prepared for controversy. “I feel like anything can happen in my life post-kneeling and like nothing will ever be…” She trails off. She could only take it in stride when the president threw a fit. Rapinoe shrugs off discomfort as part of the process in changing the status quo: “I feel like my town, you work hard, you do the right thing, you stand up for people,” she says. “It’s not really a Republican-Democrat thing. I’m exactly who I was raised to be in this small conservative town. I just happen to be a flaming liberal. So it’s kind of funny.”
A few nights later, I stepped out of my rented hybrid into the parking lot at Tacoma’s Cheney Stadium, now the home base for the Reign FC—a slightly more modest venue than the Parc des Princes. As I walked through the stands, two nine-year-old boys were bouncing up and down in their seats like pistons. Rapinoe was not on the ball, but they were shouting her name, over and over—Megan Rapinoe! Megan Rapinoe! Megan Rapinoe!—energized by the repetition, each a sugar-shock hit of candy.
There was a father-son duo who’ve been season ticket holders for five years, the elder imparting play-by-play wisdom on his eight-year-old (“Been spoiled to death watching Pinoe,” says Dad). There was a full high school girls soccer team wearing their warm-ups in two rows, and a middle-aged woman with cropped hair who told me that she’d never played soccer but was there to support women’s sports (and she was sure Sue was up there watching in one of those boxes). And there were a few dads, many of them new to soccer, who were roped into seeing a game for the first time because their sons wanted to see Megan Rapinoe, live and in person.
Not everyone, even in liberal Seattle, was down with Rapinoe’s politics. But everyone liked something about her. They liked all the goals she scored. That she said what needed to be said. Her stylish play. Her sunglasses. One dad told me that he wanted his sons to understand the Megan Rapinoe phenomenon like this: “It’s not about your physical presence or how big you are but how you can make a big impact just by your aura.”
For whatever her own internet-breaking impact, Rapinoe sees it as part of something greater. “People saw themselves in us, in our fight,” she says, “and in the victory that we had as a team. I don’t think you really feel like that often, where sports can capture something that wide. We won the World Cup as a movement.” And every movement needs a leader, all the better if she has electric-purple hair.
Mari Uyehara is the culture editor of GQ.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2020 issue with the title “Superhero.”
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan Pfluger
Styled by Rebecca Ramsey
Hair by Brian Fisher using R+Co.
Makeup by Joanna Simkin