A third of all out LGBTQ athletes at the Paris Olympics won a medal

A third of all out LGBTQ athletes at the Paris Olympics are going home with at least one medal as Team LGBTQ finished high up on the overall medal count.

After the two-plus weeks of competitions in Paris, across 32 sports, at least 64 publicly out athletes on Team LGBTQ won at least one medal.

That’s 33% of the 195 out athletes Outsports has identified competing at the 2024 Summer Olympics. It’s slightly higher than the percentage of out athletes who won medals at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago.

That is a huge percentage of athletes to win medals. While the exact percentage of overall athletes who won at least one medal in Paris hasn’t been published yet, at the Tokyo Olympics it was about 19%. The number will likely be about the same across Summer Olympic Games.

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All told there were 68 physical medals handed out to Team LGBTQ athletes: 22 gold, 22 silver and 24 bronze.

Four of the out athletes won multiple medals:

• Amandine Buchard, France, Judo: Gold & Bronze
• Maria Perez, Spain, track & field: Gold & Silver
• Sha’Carri Richardson, USA, track & field: Gold & Silver
• Lauren Scruggs, USA, fencing: Gold & Silver

Based on gender, the women, trans and nonbinary athletes fared better than the men. Of the 20 male athletes at the Paris Olympics, only three — 15% — won a medal, whereas about 35% of the women, trans and nonbinary athletes won.

Only one medal — Tom Daley’s silver in the 10-meter synchro diving — was won in the men’s category. The two medals by Carl Hester and Frederic Wandres were won in the non-gendered equestrian event of dressage, in which men and women compete against one another.

Collectively, Team LGBTQ was a huge hit. If the athletes competed together as a country, they would have finished with the seventh-most number of medals. In the traditional gold-silver-bronze model of ranking nations in the medal count, they would have finished tied with the home nation of France for fifth.

The 42 total medals won by Team LGBTQ is by far the most ever. Their medals are collectively counted as 42 because a team medal is just one, despite up to seven out athletes being on that team, like the USA women’s basketball team.

Speaking of the USA, the United States had the most out LGBTQ medal winners in Paris, with 18 different American athletes taking home a medal. That means over half of the out Americans — 55% — won a medal. Brazil had 15 medal winners, which was exactly half of the out athletes competing for the country.

The USA and Brazil had the two most number of medal winners, and they had the two highest number of out LGBTQ athletes.

Austria, which had just one athlete on Outsports’ Team LGBTQ, had a 100% medal rate, and it was gold by sailor Lara Vadlau. Denmark was also one-for-one, with Cathrine Laudrup-Dufour’s silver in equestrian. The only Team LGBTQ member on the Refugee Team — Cindy Ngamba — won a boxing bronze.

On the flip side, two countries with a good number of out athletes didn’t have high percentages of medal winners, namely Australia (13%) and Great Britain (18%), despite those two countries each finishing in the top five of the overall medal count.

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