Lauren Scruggs of the United States reacts after her win over Eleanor Harvey of Canada during the women’s individual foil semifinal at the 2024 Summer Olympics at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, Sunday, July 28, 2024.
AP Photo/Andrew Medicini
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According to Outsports, at least 191 LGBTQ athletes will compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, which already surpasses the 186 LGBTQ athletes who competed in the most recent Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
This year’s LGBTQ athletes come from more than 24 countries around the world, with the United States having the most: the U.S. has 31 openly LGBTQ Olympians, while Brazil has 30. Australia has 22 LGBTQ Olympians, Germany has 13, Spain has 12, Great Britain and Canada each have 11, the Netherlands has 10, and France has nine.
While women vastly outnumber men among Olympic athletes, there are also non-binary athletes, including Canadian soccer player Quinn and US track and field athlete Nikki Hiltz.
LGBTQ representation is less strong in African and Asian countries, with only three out athletes from Asia (the Philippines and Thailand) and four from Africa (South Africa and Cameroon). However, Cameroonian athlete and boxer Cindy Ngamba lives in the UK.
For years, OutSports has led the way in tallying LGBTQ athletes in Olympic sports, often with a piecemeal approach in which athletes are added to “Team LGBTQ” incrementally, with the help of submissions from readers and others.
The number of LGBTQ athletes grows with each Olympic cycle. At the 2012 London Summer Olympics, there were 23 out athletes, at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, there were 53 out athletes, but at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, that number swelled to nearly 200, according to Outsports. The 2020 Summer Olympics were held in 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, there were 15 out athletes, and at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in China, there will be 35 out athletes, according to Outsports.
LGBTQ athletes have already started winning medals in the early days of the Olympics. French judoka Amandine Bouchard became the first openly LGBTQ Olympian to win a medal at this year’s Olympics, beating Hungary’s Leka Papp to win the bronze medal. Lauren Scruggs, an openly lesbian foil fencer from Queens, New York, won the silver medal, becoming the first Black American woman to win a medal in individual fencing, according to The Washington Post.
“From a young age, I had to prove myself to get respect,” Scruggs told The Washington Post. “The little things, like maybe no one’s going to root for me or anything like that.”
