On Saturday, the International Olympic Committee said it would back a biological man, transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard’s entry into the Tokyo Games. But what about the biological woman who lost her place to him?
Tracey Lambrechs is the woman who lost her place to a man.
Before lifting for New Zealand at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, Tracey Lambrechs won bronze at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and silver at the 2015 Pacific Games. Then in her sporting prime, she had the rug pulled from underneath her. In 2017, as she was preparing for the 2018 Commonwealth Games, she received a phone call from her coach telling her that all of her national records had just been broken.
Lambrechs was flabbergasted. “I was like ‘What do you mean? There’s no one else close to me.’” Meanwhile, for one Laurel Hubbard, 2017 marked a year of transition; from male weightlifter to female weightlifter.
Robbed of Olympic Glory
Lambrechs should have been celebrating and preparing for a return to the Olympic stage. Instead, she is now a retired weightlifter-turned-advocate for women in sport. […]
On Saturday, the IOC green-lighted Hubbard’s opportunity to compete against the opposite sex at the Tokyo Games which get underway this coming Friday. But Lambrechs won’t soon forget the moment her Olympic dreams were stripped away.
[…] “I was told Laurel has started weightlifting and she competed on the weekend, so as of now, you’re number two.”
Stay Silent, or Pay the Price
[…] For Lambrechs, […] that was only the beginning of the psychological onslaught.
At first, she was told to be “resilient”. But as the buzz began to rise among other female athletes, “be resilient” morphed into “be quiet”. “We were told not to talk to the media and were warned that if we did we could bring the sport into disrepute and then could miss out on being selected or could be dropped from national teams”, said Lambrechs.
ifamnews.com/en/former-female-weightlifter-now-bearing-a-different-burden-outspoken-advocate-for-women-in-sport
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