Basketball star Sue Bird has won multiple championships in the NCAA, WNBA, and EuroLeague, and holds four Olympic gold medals to her name. Famously private, Bird went public with her sexuality in a 2017 ESPNW feature, saying, "I don't feel like I've not lived my life. I think people have this assumption that if you're not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it's this secret. That was never the case for me . . . It's happening when it's happening because that's what feels right. So even though I understand there are people who think I should have done it sooner, it wasn't right for me at the time. I have to be true to that. It's my journey."
Bird has been dating Megan Rapinoe since 2016, and has said that Rapinoe showed her the importance of publicly sharing her sexuality. "Megan and I would have conversations about it, and she opened my eyes to another way of looking at it, which is that in today's time, in today's society, it's still important to kind of say it to make it the norm," she told the Seattle Times in 2018. That same year, Bird and Rapinoe became the first same-sex couple to appear in ESPN's Body Issue.
Image Source: Getty / Srdjan Stevanovic / Stringer