Trans Athletes, Trump, and the Right to Play Sports
Some of us might think that the fight for trans people’s right to play sports is new. But a recent book, “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports” delves into the history of this debate that has lasted the better part of a century at least.
Now the Trump administration is threatening states with funding cuts and other sanctions if they allow trans people to play sports on teams that align with their gender identity. It’s just one element of Trump’s full-scale war on trans people’s existence. But as we’ll hear, these types of campaigns have a deep-rooted history with ties to the Nazis.
In an interview that we recorded before Trump took office, we talk with the book’s author, Michael Waters about this history and what it tells us about our current efforts to secure trans people’s rights in athletics and beyond.
Please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.
Resources:
Trump’s attack on trans athletes
Transcript:
[00:00:00]
Simon: Some of us might think that the fight for trans people’s right to play sports is new.
But a recent book, ”The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports” delves into the history of this debate that has lasted the better part of a century, at least. Now, the Trump administration is threatening states with funding cuts and other sanctions if they allow trans people to play sports on teams that align with their gender identity.
President Trump: Under The Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes and we will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls. From now on women sports will be only for women. So when the Olympics comes to Los Angeles in 2028, my administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes. And, uh, we’re just not gonna let it happen. And it’s going to end and it’s ending right now, and nobody’s gonna be able to do a [00:01:00] damn thing about it because when I speak, we speak with authority.
Simon: It’s just one element of Trump’s full scale war on trans people’s existence. But as we’ll hear, these types of campaigns have a deep rooted history with ties to the Nazis. In an interview that was recorded before Trump took office. We talk with the book’s author Michael Waters, about this history and what it tells us about our current efforts to secure trans people’s rights in athletics and beyond.
We’ll get started in just a moment, but first I’d like to ask you to please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.
Welcome to Rights This Way, a podcast from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the A CLU of New York State. I’m Simon McCormick, senior staff writer at the NYCLU, and your host for this podcast, which is focused on the civil rights and liberties issues and impact New Yorkers [00:02:00] Most.
And now I’m joined by Michael Waters. Michael is a journalist who writes for The Atlantic and the New Yorker, and he’s the author of “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports”. The book was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New Yorker, NPR and BookPage.
Before we get started, just a quick note that outside guests on this show do not represent the NYCLU and their views are their own.
Michael, welcome to Rights This Way.
Michael: Thank you so much for having me.
Simon: Of course. We’re very happy to have you. I just wanna start with a broad question, can you give us a quick summary of your book, the other Olympians, and then can you talk about how it provides lessons or historic parallels to what’s happening today in terms of trans people in sports in America.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Big question, but I’ll take a stop at it and then you can let me know how it goes. But for the first [00:03:00] part of that, so my book, the Other Olympians, it’s a history book focused mostly around the 1930s. And you know, it falls a lot of different storylines, but at the center is this athlete named Zdeněk Koubek, who was a Czech track and field athlete,
assigned female at birth who played in women’s sports for most of his career. And in 1934 and 1935, he kind of stepped away from sports and decided to confront these feelings that he had about his own identity in his own gender. And in December, 1935, he announced that he was going to be transitioning gender and living as a man going forward.
And Koubek was a high profile athlete in Europe, maybe not quite world famous. And essentially what this new story did was it catapulted him into a global celebrity. And newspapers around the world were writing about Koubek. He was invited to New York to perform on Broadway. You saw [00:04:00] sports magazines like in the US and in Europe, sort of using this as a moment through which to talk about what it means to move between these categories of male and female and perhaps this idea that like these categories themselves are imperfect.
And this is 1935 and then into 1936 that we’re talking about. And so the book is really centered on Koubek’s story in his own life and journey. And then a separate part of the book is that weirdly in response to Koubek and then some other things you see in 1936, so right after Koubek transitions gender, you see, these first policies to regulate who gets to play in women’s sports at the Olympics are passed. And they’re passed, as I’m sure we’ll get to sort of in part because of, the efforts of different Nazi sports officials. The 1936 Olympics were host in Berlin and Nazi Germany. And so the influence of the Nazis was very much present. So in 1936, you see this first [00:05:00] policy focus on track and field sports that limited essentially like which women could compete in women’s sports.
And created this like protest rule where an athlete who had any like suspicions about another woman who is competing could force her to be medically examined and potentially disqualified. And that was the origin, this one small policy in 1936 that would eventually balloon into sex testing that occurred across the Olympics by the Cold War.
And really this decades-long battle to regulate and in many cases just keep out certain women from women’s sports. We obviously see that in many ways happening today at the Olympics. But to get back to the second part of your question, I mean, there are different kinds of connections that you can make between the book and the present.
I think one thing that’s always on my mind is, having written about Koubek’s transition, about this sort of early reaction to him from the public, which was actually quite positive and [00:06:00] curious. You know, the journalist who wrote about Koubek in 1935 and 1936, they didn’t use the language that we would maybe use to describe him today, like they got his pronouns confused. They kinda used every different pronoun for him. They didn’t really seem to know what they were doing. But there was this real sense of curiosity and this desire to understand and this openness to the possibility that like these categories of male and female maybe weren’t so perfect or they weren’t quite as stable as people had previously thought.
On one hand you see in the history, like this alternate possibility where perhaps we didn’t go down this decades long path of regulating sports or trying to surveil women’s sports and keep out certain people from sports and really just we didn’t have to go down this like long obsession.
I also think when we talk about today specifically, there’s parts of what’s happening today that’s just so beyond the scope of what I even wrote about in this book. Really now what we’re seeing in the US is [00:07:00] that these same ideas about banning certain women from sports or being so decontextualized taken from elite sports like the Olympics, and then applied to just all school sports to like trans girls as young as kindergarten.
The ways in which, like by normalizing this idea that we can cleave people into binary categories and say that certain women are not allowed to compete in sports at the Olympics. My perspective is it has nothing to do with sports and it really is just about justifying taking away people’s rights, trans girls’ rights in particular. You see this 80 year history of sex testing at the Olympics and this debate over sex testing. And now that same system is being weaponized against kids. And to me that is quite horrifying.
Simon: Yes. And so you mentioned something that I think is true, that on one level, this isn’t about sports. And that as you said, it’s about [00:08:00] taking away people’s rights. But why do you think sports has been such fertile terrain for the anti-trans movement? In other words, it seems like sports are an entry point for convincing people to back anti-trans policies and as you said to take away people’s rights.
Why do you think that is?
Michael: Yeah, I mean, I’m always wrestling with that question. I’m not sure I fully resolved it myself. I do think there’s an element here of, somehow we have clung to this idea of sports as being meritocratic. And by that I mean there are all kinds of hidden advantages in sports. If you think about people’s body types, you know, like you don’t have very many short basketball players.
If you look at many elite athletes like Michael Phelps, he has a wingspan that’s far out of proportion with his body, and that’s also perfect for, being like a fantastic swimmer. So when you think about elite athletes, just even in terms of their body types, like there are certain body types that make you better for certain kinds of sports.
And then you also have these advantages like class. A great way to [00:09:00] ensure that you’re going to be a good athlete is if you have a parent who can afford to pay for private lessons for you and to get you into different sorts of private clubs.
And I think that’s all sort of like a baked in part of how sports and school sports functions that we don’t really talk about. And there still really is this fundamental idea that like will sports are a pure meritocracy. And so I do think part of what’s happening here is that there are so many different kinds of advantage and disadvantage at play.
And the fact that there is this fixation on trans athletes in particular, is just intentionally misleading, but I think if you are someone who comes into watching sports, assuming that it’s a meritocracy, perhaps that argument is more effective in convincing you. But ultimately I just do think that the right has identified this is an issue that makes it effective as a way to justify just like wholesale stripping rights from trans people and especially trans women and girls. [00:10:00] This really is not about sports at all, as we’ve been saying.
You see these sports bans used as the lead in to then strip away healthcare access from trans kids. And then also to create these laws that create this weird conservative definition of what it means to be male or female. Part of the reason it is sports is because people are not really thinking about sports in a complex way of who succeeds in sports?
There’s so many different factors at play. This is not a level playing field and it’s really easy for someone who is already inclined towards transphobia, to just fixate on trans athletes which is silly and again, unproven that there’s any kind of advantage in the first place. But it really could have been anything.
What we need to be doing is defending this issue and really just not giving it up because I think that this is really the first step to take away rights and mass. You know, the conversation is always is it fair for a trans woman to compete in women’s [00:11:00] sports? And it’s never, is it fair to tell them they can’t compete? And I think that like we have to do some rhetorical framing of, it’s not fair to discriminate against people in sports like this and shift the lens of the conversation that’s happening.
Simon: Yeah. And you mentioned that, you know, this is, broadly part of a right wing attack. And nothing says right wing, quite like Nazis. And much of the story in the book takes place during the reign of the Nazis, as you mentioned. And you write that quote, some estimates suggest the Nazis arrested as many as 100,000 quote unquote homosexuals.
Many LGBTQ people were put in concentration camps. Can you talk about the way LGBTQ people were treated in Nazi Germany?
Michael: Yeah. You saw the Nazis really quickly targeted any kind of social minority. And so obviously targeted the Jewish population, the Armenian population, disabled people, black people, other people of color, [00:12:00] anyone who fit on the queer spectrum became part of that effort to keep out and to ultimately persecute and murder anyone who didn’t fit their definition of who they wanted to be German. And when it comes to queer people specifically, like you see some interesting links to concerns about reproduction in this sort of natalist society that the Nazis were trying to build.
And queer people across the spectrum were seen as incapable of producing children. And therefore were a threat to the society that they were trying to build. And ultimately, gay people, trans people across the gender spectrum were arrested and killed during the reign of the Nazis.
And you really see just like this violent pushback against them across the whole country.
Simon: So you mentioned Koubek. I just wanna circle back to him for a second. Can you give us some quick background on who he was and how his [00:13:00] experience connects to transphobia and sports today?
Michael: Yeah, so Koubek is from Czechoslovakia. He was actually born before it was incorporated as a country before World War I. He was this working class kid. He worked at a clothing store for a period of time and kind of stumbled into the world of sports. You know, he was initially skeptical, he didn’t really see the point in playing sports, he thought it was silly to, watch people run around the track. Like a wonderful queer tradition, he was kind of a hater. Based a lot of what I wrote about him on this series of personal essays that he wrote in 1936 about his life. So a lot of the book is based on his own voice and this really incredible document in which he narrated his own life. Throughout the book, you see, yeah, he was kind of a hater.
He was kind of dishy. Eventually decides that he wants to try it and then becomes obsessed. And his main event becomes the 800 meter dash. And he rises through the ranks of like local [00:14:00] clubs in Czechoslovakia.
And then eventually at the height of his career, he participates in this event called the Women’s World Games in 1934, which for a brief context, the Women’s World Games was the highest level for women’s sports at the time because the Olympics had incredibly few sports available to women.
Especially track and field, which was regarded as like being too dangerous for women to participate in. The Women’s World Games was the apex of that field. And so Koubek, who was assigned female at birth, he was playing in women’s sports at the time. In 1934, he wins gold in the 800 meter dash at the Women’s World Games, which is really the highest level that he could have achieved.
To people who care about sports in Europe, makes him somewhat of a celebrity. Afterwards he steps away from sports. He transitions gender. He begins living as a man. And he starts traveling around the world briefly. He goes to Paris and he starts dancing with Josephine Baker.
Newspapers across the [00:15:00] world are writing about him and they’re taking pictures of him just out on the street wearing men’s clothes. He starts going on dates with women and that really titillates the press. And the New York Daily News is always running photos of him.
And so that’s one end of the public reaction to Koubek is there’s a sense of real curiosity about him and what it means to move between these categories and then what you see on the flip side is that there’s this really small group of sports officials who see Koubek’s transition as some kind of threat.
And so there’s this one doctor in particular, Wilhelm Knoll who is himself a Nazi. He’s also very high up as a sports doctor. He’s head of this group of international sports doctors that advise the Olympics and other major sports bodies. And he takes issue with the fact that
Koubek had ever played women’s sports at all. He seems to assume that Koubek fits on some kind of intersex spectrum, which is possible that Koubek would. We don’t really know that. But certainly this [00:16:00] doctor did not either. And so Wilhelm Knoll writes this op-ed accusing Koubek of being a cheat and a fraud and really uses Koubek’s brief moment of celebrity to push for medical exams in women’s sports. And Knoll again, he’s a Nazi. He has stated in many other places his desire to weed out, Jewish athletes of color, all sorts of other athletes from sports. And I think he sees the idea of an intersex woman playing sports as part of a threat to sports itself.
And you know, it’s very much influenced by this like eugenics, fascist ideology. And so you see two threads in response to Koubek, where the general public is really fascinated by him. And I think, it’s hard to find glimmers of queer community in the 1930s. So magazines where you saw people talking about how like they were inspired by Koubek’s own story and asking editors about like how they too could undergo surgery the way that Koubek had, you know, like essentially people who probably would fit on a [00:17:00] trans spectrum today in 1936 reading about Koubek and seeing themselves in him and wanting to get that same healthcare access that he had.
So that’s on one hand and then on the other, these medical exams in women’s sports, part of the reason why they start is because this one doctor took issue with Koubek, having played in women’s sports at all, didn’t really seem to understand who Koubek was, what his story was.
Also for context, Koubek, after he transitioned and began living as a man, only wanted to play in men’s sports. He said that many times. But really you see this kind of panic created by this small group of sports officials that, eventually culminated in normalizing this idea of testing certain athletes.
Simon: Yeah. And to bring us up to close to the present. I wanted to ask you to try to compare the experiences of Koubek and Imane Khelif, the Olympic Gold medal boxer in [00:18:00] 2024 who is subject to vicious, false and bigoted attacks after she dominated her competition. Both, for example, faced, you know, scrutiny over their genders, but there are also differences between their experiences and identities.
Can you compare these figures?
Michael: Yeah, I mean, I honestly think when it comes to what happened with Imane Khelif who is this woman boxer who, J. K. Rowling and the other classic transphobes were trying to fear monger about. To me, what that most reminded me of is this other athlete that I wrote about in 1936 named Helen Stephens.
And so Helen Stephens was this really high-profile American athlete in the 1930s. After Jesse Owens, you know, she was probably like our most famous athlete to go to the Berlin Olympics. And she was a cis woman, but she was always regarded as being kind of masculine.
By that, I mean, you know, she had a deep voice. She [00:19:00] had big biceps and shoulders. I mean, she was literally an athlete. So of course she did. And so there was always whispers and fear-mongering about her. And in 1936, at the Olympics, she won the gold in the 200 meters.
And then immediately after, a Polish newspaper wrote this article accusing her of being a man in disguise, essentially. It’s not really clear what they were trying to say, like what all the mechanics of that would’ve involved, but it started this whole news cycle that week about Helen Stephens’ body and interrogating her perceived masculinity and whether or not she should have been eligible. And then there was this rumor that honestly, I was not able to substantiate either way, that perhaps she actually was medically examined by some sports officials, like that was reported in one newspaper and then a later newspaper refuted it.
It’s not really clear what happened, but at the very least, you had this whole week in 1936, where this woman athlete who just had won gold and just [00:20:00] looked masculine to the eyes of some observers, like mostly male observers was put under this really heavy gendered misogynistic scrutiny. And to me, that was what I was thinking of during what happened with Imane Khelif, which is you really see this shocking parallel in their stories and in how we hyper fixate on women athletes and whether or not they are sort of performing femininity up to the standards of whatever viewer. I think it’s really striking how similar those two stories played out.
Both ultimately won the gold as well. And there’s something there of a woman who doesn’t meet the expectations of white femininity that, whichever observer has and still wins gold at the Olympics really has been subject to the sort of extreme amount of scrutiny and fear mongering and accusations of being a man.
It’s really wild to me how that still has resonance and that [00:21:00] still happening after all these years. You see, honestly, just like how circular many of these conversations are.
Simon: Yeah, totally. And going back to the Nazi doctor Wilhelm Knoll. You know that just before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, he requests that all female participants should have their gender “checked”, beforehand by a “specifically commissioned doctor”. But as you also note that the difficulties of such checks.
Does he want to check for muscle mass? Is being too tall, disqualifying? Is facial hair disqualifying or is it just about you know, genitalia? Can you talk about, and you’ve touched on this, but can you talk about all of this and how it relates to similar concerns today?
Michael: Yeah. So, Wilhelm Knoll really is responsible in a lot of ways for the first sex testing policy, which was passed by the federation that governs track and field sports as like a tiny bit of context, you know. The Olympics is this [00:22:00] overarching organization and then below it, you have different sports federations that govern different sports. So there’s one for track and field, there’s one for swimming, et cetera, et cetera. And so in 1936, the full Olympics did not pass a sex testing policy, but the Track and Field Federation did. And that’s because Wilhelm Knoll, after reading about Koubek’s story, began to agitate for the different sports federations to require medical exams of women athletes. And he wrote letters to every single federation, he said. And actually all of them ignored him except for one, the Track and Field Federation. What is really striking to me when you read Knoll’s writing, first of all, it’s so steeped in eugenics and there is this paranoia and illogic to it that I think can really only come from someone who is so steeped in eugenics like that.
But he has this idea of instituting medical exams, which were literally just strip tests of women [00:23:00] athletes in order to weed out certain people he did not think fit the definition of women, but he refused to actually outline what that meant, who was a woman to him and who was not a woman to him.
As listeners may or may not know, even when we’re just talking about biological sex, there’s no single trait that is determinative of sex. You know, like what we call sex is the result of this multiplicity of factors that are kind of in conversation with each other.
And so there’s no way to cleave people into a binary of male or female, even just based on their body. The human body’s a spectrum. Knoll as a doctor, certainly should have known that. But he made no effort to actually explain or articulate who was a woman in his eyes and who was not.
And I think this is really important actually, because I think it really sets up understanding what the sex testing policy at the Olympics would be for the coming decades, which was, you know, it often changed the metrics they use to decide, who gets to be a woman and who doesn’t changed [00:24:00] a lot.
So at first they would do these strip tests. Seemingly looking to inspect genitalia eventually because that was so degrading and again, inaccurate and just really not clear what they’re looking for. They switched to these chromosome based tests, which also were quite discriminatory and didn’t take into account the fact that lots of women who might identify as cis for instance, have just like a multiplicity of chromosomes or don’t just have XX chromosomes. The human body, again, it’s a spectrum. Things are really complicated. And later they switched to these more hormone-based tests. And now today we have this mixture of tests depending on the Sports Federation.
Simon: Yeah I think my next question is, just that like what do you think it is about the worldview of Nazis and European fascists that make them so obsessed with these sorts of gender checks? And they’re rigid, but as you’ve described, still poorly defined definition of who is a woman, who is a girl.
Michael: Yeah, I mean I think [00:25:00] the fact that so many of these policies, especially in the 1930s when they were first passed, are so vaguely worded. I mean, it allows for sports officials to have a lot of control over who they actually decide to disqualify. You know, if you don’t actually outline what the definition of woman to you is, if you don’t actually outline who gets to compete and who doesn’t, and then you leave it up to this policy of, well, we’ll know it when we see it. That gives these sports officials a lot of leeway to disqualify whoever they felt like disqualifying. And I do think that was really part of the point.
And I think some really important context that we haven’t talked about yet is that throughout the early 20th century, there were very few sports for women that were available at the Olympics, and there was tons and tons of fear mongering about women’s ability to compete. Tons of fear mongering about, well, like would running track endanger the reproductive system, endanger their health?
These fears were also often racialized because a lot of [00:26:00] sources of this anxiety were women of color or were sports where women of color and poor women could compete versus a sport like tennis, which at the time, you know, you had to be a member of a club.
And so it was often like white, upper middle class women who were competing. But anyway, there was lots of fearmongering about women’s sports and the Olympics was really entirely run by male sports officials, many of whom had no respect for women athletes and didn’t want them to compete at all. If you read the writing of the founder of the Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, or really any of these sports officials, they’re often complaining about how women athletes look when they are competing, they don’t like the look of certain athletes, they think women athletes are too masculine, et cetera, et cetera. By creating such vague policies, they are giving themselves the power to dismiss whoever they feel like it.
It really gave them a lot of power to control, just like who got to compete in the first place.
Simon: Yeah. And as we kind of [00:27:00] start to wrap up, I’m curious what you think about, as we talked about the book covers a lot of the period under the Nazis, but it wraps up roughly in the 1980s. And I’m curious how far you think we’ve come through the 1930s to the 1980s and until now.
What sort of progress have we made and, what setbacks have we had? Obviously I really am not asking for you to go through however many 40 years of history there, but just very broadly speaking, where do you think we are now and how far have we come? What’s left to do?
Michael: Yeah, I mean, I think in the last 40 years, we’ve gone through multiple ups and downs, I would say. I don’t even think it’s a clean narrative. You had this moment in the early two thousands when it comes to trans women’s participation at the Olympics, for instance, trans women could compete in theory, in a lot of different sports. So if you were to ask me, in the early two thousands, you actually really did see this real movement towards inclusion and there wasn’t the [00:28:00] same extent of fear-mongering about trans women athletes at the Olympics at least. And I think what we’ve seen in the last 10 years, and especially the last couple years is just a really gradual rollback of all of that.
And I think we’re in a moment, once again where we are seeing um, fewer and fewer pathways for women who fit on the intersex spectrum and then almost no pathway for trans women to compete in a lot of different Olympic sports. And when it comes to the elite level of sports, we are seeing this conservative backlash to what was once an era of slightly more inclusive policies.
When you’re looking outside of elite sports at school sports, you are seeing a really intense backlash. I think that’s really the thing about queer history is that it’s really easy to tell it as a linear story of progress. And I think the reality, as we’re probably seeing today is much messier. And I think when you even look through the past, like I would not have expected the [00:29:00] 1930s for there to be sports magazines that were writing about how male and female are complicated categories and how there are sometimes people who don’t really fit either.
And so you see glimmers of real queer potential in the archives. And we are unfortunately just in a really big backlash moment, and I think sports has become an area of fixation to really lead that backlash.
But I think it’s really about much more, and it’s really about just more fundamentally stripping away healthcare rights, other rights. It often is not as much about sports as people who are focused on talking about women’s sports and it is just about justifying and isolating the trans community from everyone else.
And that’s not to say that we haven’t made any progress. I think there are many hopeful signs and I am ultimately a hopeful person. And I think it’s very possible to get back there. But it is not quite a linear story either way.
Simon: Absolutely. And, Michael, just as my last question to try to end on a hopeful note.
One thing I [00:30:00] would say is like, New York, for example, is in a better place than many other places. We do have the Gender Identity and Expression Act that does explicitly protect people who are- trans people are allowed to compete on sports teams that reflect their identity. Obviously that is challenge, right? In Nassau County, there’s this whole, there’s an order barring trans women and girls from competing in women’s and girls sports but I do think that there are certain parts of, the country, including New York, that are further along in this and that can stand as like a bulwark as even as we hit this tide. And that’s not to say that there isn’t a tide in New York as well. I certainly would say that there are, but that there is a backlash against trans people in New York. We’re not immune to that for sure. But there are places that can kind of hopefully are better positioned to hold the line and then from there, then we can go on offense. Can you talk about some of those helpful signs or things you think that could point us towards getting out of this [00:31:00] backlash and towards progress?
Michael: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I’m a big proponent of collective action and showing up for things. And I don’t know, I think I’ve drawn hope in recent weeks just from showing up to some of the protests that have been happening.
Especially, I went to one last night focused on protecting trans kids’ access to healthcare. And I do think that, we live in such a difficult moment. I think you are seeing, this real collective organizing around these topics, around healthcare access, around access to sports.
There is a groundswell that is happening and you are seeing at local levels. You do see like in states like New York, protections enshrined for trans kids, for people’s access to sports. And I think those are really hopeful signs. And I mean, ultimately I do think it comes out of collective action and we can’t give in on any of these issues.
I think it’s really easy to say, well, there aren’t that many trans [00:32:00] kids playing in sports in the first place. Which maybe is true, but I think it doesn’t matter. And I think that you sort of have to fight every battle.
And I’ve been really heartened seeing people take to the streets and show up for trans kids and take these issues really seriously, and these attacks really seriously because they are very serious and because they are at the beginning of much more. I personally draw the most hope from being in community with people like that. It did feel like a collective really was showing up.
Simon: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thank you Michael. I think that is a great place to leave it. The book is The Other Olympians and we’ve been talking with Michael Waters. Michael, thank you so much for coming on Rights This Way.
Michael: Yeah. Thank you for having me.
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