'the other olympians' is a warning

an interview with michael waters

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Happy pub week to Michael Waters and The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports! The Other Olympians tells the story of the first sex-testing policies and the trans athletes who inspired it, literally against the backdrop of Nazi Germany. “Waters’s book is as relevant today as it would have been during the events it chronicles,” I wrote in the intro to my interview with Waters in Baffler Magazine. “In fact, it’s eerie how the debates Waters recounts mirror the ones we’re currently having. In showing us our history, Waters’s book seems to suggest, we will perhaps not be doomed to repeat it.”

I am proud to have blurbed this book, and that Baffler Magazine asked me to interview Waters about it.

FDLC: From a craft perspective, how did you decide what the scope of the story was going to be?

MW: I really wanted to narrativize what happened in the 1930s to show all of the different subjective forces and individual people, with their own host of biases and flaws, that came together to first create these sex-testing policies in 1936. It was important to me to show, on this almost tactile level, who these people were because sports bureaucracies are very good about hiding the people behind them. I think you can really only do that justice in a tight timeframe.

That was one big motivation. And the other is just that I had this incredible document that Koubek had left that chronicled his life from the late 1920s into the 1930s. That was the grounding structural force for the whole book. Those things converge—I can show Koubek’s story and then also show the very specific group of individuals who made sex-testing policies and show why, ever since, it’s been such a flawed policy.

You can head over to the site to read our full interview. You can also read an excerpt of the book in The New Yorker.

Below, pieces of our conversation that were left on the cutting room floor:

OOYL: The other thing that struck me—and I always think this, when I read about the Olympics—is how there's this idea from the members of the IOC that they are somehow not a political organization and they don't get involved in politics. But we can see how every decision that they make, particularly when it comes to countries that can participate or who can't or who we’re sanctioning or who we’re not, those are all political decisions. We're literally seeing this play out right now, as people call for sanctions against Israel and the IOC is refusing to take a stand.