More queer athletes at the Winter Games than ever before – but hardly any men

The presence of openly queer athletes has recently come into public focus again thanks to the Canadian hit series Heated Rivalry, which tells the fictional love story of two male ice hockey professionals.

Most of the openly queer participants come from the USA, including Amber Glenn, who is considered one of the biggest medal hopes in figure skating. She opened up about being bisexual and pansexual in 2019. “It really freed me,” she told NBC News. “I felt like I was no longer under pressure to follow in someone else’s footsteps.”

With the term “pansexual” she wants to make it clear that it is not so much the gender but the personality of a person that attracts her. Just like many other queer athletes, Glenn reported that coming out also helped her in sports. She now appears more relaxed on the ice and can perform better. This was quickly reflected in sporting success: Last year she won the US championship with a record-breaking score of 83.05, and she had already won the Grand Prix Final title the previous year.

After coming out, she was afraid of being judged worse, she said in an interview. “I was afraid that I would be seen as less feminine, less graceful.” But she realized that she had to overcome this fear. “Someone has to break that norm and that stereotype so that the next person who comes out isn’t afraid of it.” Overall, she describes her sport as comparatively tolerant and open. Timothy LeDuc was the first non-binary person to compete at the Winter Games in Beijing.

Open approach in ice hockey for women

One thing is particularly striking when looking at the games in Milan: a majority of the queer athletes – 22 in total – play ice hockey. This underlines how wide the gap between men and women is in the sport. While there are currently no openly queer players in the North American professional league, the NHL, the German premier league and even at the Olympics, and the topic continues to be taboo in many places, it has long been a matter of course in women’s ice hockey. Many of the openly lesbian or bisexual players come from Finland, where ice hockey is the national sport.

Nina Jobst-Smith, a German athlete, is also there – the only openly queer German participant at the Winter Games. The 24-year-old defender grew up in Great Britain and Canada, but also played as a teenager in Germany, for the Bundesliga club ECDC Memmingen, with whom she even won the championship in 2019.

She then went back to Canada, where she was drafted by Vancouver in the North American League. Her partner Ashton Bell also plays there, who said in an interview that the two have been a couple since 2022 – that is, they were together before they played on the same team. They now live together, and Jobst-Smith describes Bell on Instagram as “the girl who makes her smile every single day.”

The German ice hockey players will start the day before the opening ceremony; on Thursday, national coach Jeff MacLeod’s team will face Sweden. This is the fourth Olympic participation for the German ice hockey players; they last took part in Sochi in 2012.

There is even a pair of lovers at the Olympics: the Swede Anna Kjellbin and the Finnish Ronja Savolainen. The two once played in the Swedish league for the same club, but today they are both under contract in the North American Professional League (PWHL): Kjellbin plays for the Toronto Sceptres, Savolainen for the Ottawa Charge. They will be competitors in Milan and could meet in the knockout round. “She is my opponent on the ice,” Savolainen told Sportschau. Romance doesn’t play a role then. “You don’t really think about who’s there.” The two got engaged two years ago.

Someone who has long been considered a real icon because he has been campaigning for LGBTIQ* rights for years is Gus Kenworthy. He competes in freestyle skiing, formerly for the USA and now for Great Britain, and will also compete in Milan. Among other things, he made history when he won the silver medal in Sochi in 2016 and made it public that he was gay. He had actually officially ended his career, but announced his return at the beginning of last year and qualified for the Olympics. “All the hard work and sacrifices have paid off. I’m overwhelmed,” he said.