The Other Olympians

Starred review from April 29, 2024
Sex testing of athletes has its roots in the Nazi influence on the 1936 Olympic games, according to this revelatory debut investigation. Journalist Waters recaps the early years of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), a subdivision of the International Olympic Committee established in 1913 to settle such “technical debates” as “how to... draw track lines.” When the Olympics sought to absorb the Women’s World Games in the 1920s, the IAAF got involved in its regulatory capacity; ostensibly concerned about women’s “health,” IAAF officials suggested shutting down the Women’s Games’ “masculine” sports like track and field. Other narrative strands trace the German Olympic Committee’s 1932 takeover by the Nazis and the early 1930s female-to-male medical transitions of several record-holding European athletes in women’s track and field. All this comes to a head with the 1936 Berlin games, when paranoia over men participating in women’s sports, promulgated by Nazi propagandists railing against the high-profile athletes’ gender transitions, prompted the IAAF to require female Olympians to “prove” their gender by being physically examined, a policy which continued until the 1990s and was succeeded by genetic and hormone testing. Waters’s propulsive storytelling is bursting with insight, especially into the lives of trans men during the interwar period. It’s an eye-opening look at how fascist philosophy undergirds gender regulatory regimes in sports.

May 1, 2024
Waters' first book is a history of sex testing in sports, with a focus, he writes, on ""queer possibilities."" It starts with the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin and the story of two athletes, Zdenek Koubek from Czechoslovakia and Mark Weston from Great Britain. Both declared female at birth, they grew up and competed brilliantly in women's competitions, still a relatively new phenomenon at the time. Increasingly uncomfortable as women and having largely retired from sports, both went on to have gender-affirming surgery, living the rest of their lives as men. Then Waters' discussion turns to testing. Koubek, Weston, and many others were deemed ""mannish"" and suspected of secretly competing as men in women's sports. These suspicions led the International Olympic Committee board to institute sex testing, though it was fraught with uncertainty, beginning with the very question of how one defines the word "woman." Waters takes a deep dive into the 1930s and the place of sports in society. Sports buffs and historians will enjoy his deeply researched book.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2024
How transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes changed the face of early-20th-century sports history. In his debut book, journalist Waters traces the histories of acclaimed European athletes who defied preset sexual boundaries and publicly transitioned their genders. Set against the backdrop of World War II, amid Hitler's rise to power and the excitement of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the distinguished Olympians the author profiles were all assigned female at birth but struggled with emerging gender dysphoria. Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech athlete, was born female, but "eventually he'd understand himself not to be," as he initially rejected and then developed a love of competitive sprinting. Waters focuses mostly on Koubek's journey toward gender self-expression, which coincided with other athletes--e.g., self-described "tomboy" Mark Weston, an English javelin, discus, and shot-putting champion, and eminent cyclist Willy de Bruyn. Waters seamlessly integrates several other celebrated athletes into his report and cites the many challenges facing trans competitors, including the Nazi takeover of the queer community in 1930s Germany, where "trans and intersex people were judged to be 'asocial' [and] people on the margins of gender and sexuality were arrested, imprisoned, and, at times, dispatched to their deaths." The bureaucratization of gender in sports manifested in the 1936 creation of Olympic sex-testing policies as a method to keep transgender athletes from participating in competitive sports. Waters further addresses these gender bias regulations in his conclusion, revisiting the life of a fully transitioned Koubek, who "dumped all the medals he'd won" in protest of verification testing. Densely factual, impeccably researched, and written with dramatic flair, this book intensively probes gender bias in the Olympics amid the rise of European midcentury fascism and the epic challenges to gender essentialism. A significant deep dive into the queer historical evolution and significance of transgender athletes in organized sports.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.