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Fresh from World Cup victory, the US football star on politics, pay and the power of calling out injustice
It is two weeks since the US women’s football team shut down midtown Manhattan on their World Cup victory parade and Megan Rapinoe, the team’s co-captain and most visible member, is still trying to come down from the high. We are in Los Angeles, where the US national team is due to play a friendly against Ireland. Rapinoe – slight, sharp-eyed, perennially amused – is considering the past fortnight. “How long can we be drunk for?” she says, laughing. “To go through such a high – there is obviously a comedown and nobody really has the time to decompress. I think everyone feels in this state of ‘Yes, this is awesome.’ But I’m also struggling to get back to normal.”
The sense of unreality is particularly acute for Rapinoe, whose profile over the course of the tournament shot from mid-level sporting celebrity to something much bigger, thanks to, as she puts it with some understatement, “one of those general cultural events that happen”. This is a reference not only to her public spat with Donald Trump – in a video recorded before the World Cup that went viral during the tournament, she said: “I’m not going to the fucking White House,” when asked whether she was looking forward to a victorious visit – but to her demeanour in general. Continue reading...