On his journey to Tokyo, Shelby McEwen leapt from his native Mississippi to the University of Alabama to train in Louisville and, after the pandemic shut down his training facility, back home. McEwen, an Abbeville, Miss., native, was bummed about the Olympics' plan to skip opening ceremonies, but kept his [...]
Kelley O’Hara, 32, is heading into her third Olympic Games as a seasoned star of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, she played every minute of every game, and USA took home the gold. After an upset at the 2016 Games, the U.S. [...]
This global slowdown gave me the opportunity to explore the way I see myself and others in a way I don’t think I previously could have had I not been forced.
27Nashvillian and 2020 Harpeth Hall graduate Alex Walsh, 20, will compete as a first time Olympian in Tokyo. Walsh dominated local and state swimming competitions throughout high school, taking home the individual state championship twice and will now take the world stage as an Olympic athlete. Her younger sister, Gretchen [...]
Erica Bougard didn’t make the cut for the 2016 USA Track and Field team. The failure, she said, “set off a fire in me.” This year, on her birthday, Bougard will be boarding a plane headed for the Tokyo Olympics. Bougard will compete in the heptathlon, which consists of 100-meter [...]
Back in 2004, a blind teenager from North Carolina sprinted down the 130-foot runway inside the Athens Olympic stadium in Greece, the birthplace of the ancient Olympic games and where the first modern games was hosted in 1896. The magnitude of the moment didn’t overcome the 19-year-old who was competing [...]
Cheta Emba, 28, says she didn’t start playing rugby until she was 20. Initially, rugby was a good way to cross-train for her role as goalkeeper on Harvard’s women’s soccer team. But it was rugby, not soccer, that is bringing the Richmond, Va., native to her first Olympics this summer [...]
Kendra Gayle Lee remembers the first time she read a book with an LGBTQ character who got to live “happily ever after.” “It was the first book that I read where the lesbian didn't have to die at the end,” Lee said, referring to Rita Mae Brown's 1970s lesbian coming-of-age [...]
Mountain music has a long history of Black artists who often go unnoticed, their stories untold. But Tray Wellington, a Black three-finger-style banjo player born and bred in mountain culture has created his own authentic sound in bluegrass music. Bluegrass music is traditionally depicted as overwhelmingly white, but is now [...]
“My dad has gotten sicker and sicker from heart issues…It’s hard for me to say, ‘Well I don’t come to your house because you don’t accept me and you don’t accept my relationship with my husband.’" Sam continued explaining the complexities of their family dynamic in an even, conversational tone [...]
