American football star Megan Rapinoe, Olympic champion and double world champion, won her last match with the American selection on Sunday in Chicago, 2-0 against South Africa in a friendly. At 38, Rapinoe was even credited with an assist from a corner, before coming off in the 54th minute, to end a career in the selection lasting more than 17 years with 203 matches and 63 goals.
The emblematic striker, a world figurehead of women’s football, committed in particular to LGBT rights, will definitively end her career in November, at the end of the regular season of the United States championship, which she plays with his club OL Reign.
The 2019 Ballon d’Or, also voted best Fifa player that year, was eliminated in August with her team by Sweden in the round of 16 of the 2023 World Cup played in Australia and New Zealand. She won the Olympic tournament with the United States at the London Games in 2012 and then the World Cup in 2015 and 2019.
“I’m grateful to have been able to play this long with so many incredible players, and to have had success on and off the court,” she said Sunday. A feminist activist, on the front lines of the fight for LGBT rights since her coming out in 2012, Rapinoe had also denounced police violence against black people by kneeling on the ground during the American anthem in 2016, when the gesture had not yet become a global symbol.
She also successfully fought with several teammates to establish equal salary treatment between men and women within Team USA. “What we did off the field had a much greater impact” than her success in football, she commented before her last match. “I think we have played a role in highlighting within sport, and particularly women’s sport, issues like gay rights, racial justice or trans rights.”
Sunday, replaced in the 54th minute five minutes after her decisive pass from a corner for midfielder Emily Sonnett, she received a standing ovation, in addition to hugs from her teammates. “Pioneer. Icon. Inspiration,” posted his federation on its social networks after its release. “You made this sport, this country and this world a little better. THANKS.”
