Tom Daley’s gold and Kimia Alizadeh’s victories are milestones for the Olympic spirit

13 years after he first stepped on to the diving board at the 2008 Games in Beijing, 27-year old diver Tom Daley has made Olympic history by winning gold for Team GB in the synchronised 10 meter diving event, together with his teammate Matty Lee. By edging ahead of China’s Cao Yuan and Chen Aisen by just one point (471.81 versus 470.58), Daley underscored just how far the Olympic Games have come in terms of acceptance towards LGBT competitors; whereas just 11 openly gay athletes competed alongside Daley at his first Olympics in 2008, 56 took part in the 2016 Rio games and nearly 170 are now in Tokyo.

The first few days of events at these Summer Olympics have produced several other dramatic milestones for marginalized communities. On Sunday, taekwondo competitor Kimia Alizadeh nearly won the Olympic Refugee Team’s first medal, losing a tough match to Turkey’s Hatice Kubra Ilgun in a bronze medal match in the -57 kg category.

On her way to competing for a second Olympic medal, however, Iranian-born Alizadeh - who won bronze while competing for Iran at the Rio games in 2016 - defeated not only Team GB’s two-time gold medalist Jade Jones but also her friend and former teammate, Iran’s Nahid Kiyani. In doing so, Alizadeh delivered an emphatic message to Iran’s theocratic government, whose systemic discrimination against women drove her decision to defect from her home country last year.

A landmark Olympic Games for marginalised communities

Given these Summer Olympics have welcomed by far the largest number of queer athletes in the history of the Games, Tom Daley’s gold medal will not be the last historic moment for the LGBT community in Tokyo. Already, the 2020 Games have become a milestone for transgender and non-binary Olympians: while most media attention has centered on Laurel Hubbard, a transgender athlete who has travelled to Tokyo as part of New Zealand’s women’s weightlifting team, midfielder Quinn of the Canadian women’s football team officially became the first transgender person to compete in the Olympic Games last week.

With public attitudes towards the queer community changing rapidly across much of the planet, Olympic milestones like Tom Daley’s gold medal feed into the Tokyo Olympics’ broader theme of inclusivity, gender equality, and “unity in diversity,” which was underscored by the joint male and female flagbearers who led each national team into the Olympic Stadium during last Friday’s opening ceremony, as well as the artists with disabilities who occupied a central role in the performances.

As Daley said after winning his first gold medal ahead of pairs from China and Russia (both countries where same-sex marriage is not legal): “I came out in 2013 and when I was younger I always felt like the one that was alone and different and didn’t fit... I hope that any young LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel right now, you are not alone. You can achieve anything.”

The achievements of Daley, Quinn, and other queer athletes at the Tokyo Games are rapidly replacing memories of the manifold controversies which faced organisers in the run up to the opening ceremony, including the removal of show director Kentaro Kobayashi after revelations of past comments about the Holocaust. They also offer new momentum to LGBT athletes and activists in Japan, who are using the Games as a platform to campaign for legal reforms around LGBT rights and who have worked closely with the national Olympic Committee to build upon the Olympic message of inclusion.

An Olympic-sized megaphone for refugees

Athletes outside of the queer community are also using the Tokyo Olympics as a platform to advocate for change, chief among them Kimia Alizadeh and her fellow members of the Olympic Refugee Team.

The Games’ refugee contingent first competed at Rio in 2016, with International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach saying at the time that “we want to send a message of hope for all refugees in our world... having no national team to belong to, having no flag to march behind, having no national anthem to be played, these refugee athletes will be welcomed to the Olympic Games with the Olympic flag and with the Olympic Anthem.”

As the media firestorm surrounding Alizadeh’s bout with her former teammate showed, however, the Germany-based taekwondo star still enjoys a considerable amount of support in her country of origin. When she defected from the Islamic Republic last year, Alizadeh called out a government which, in her words, “gave credit to compulsory hijab for my medals and praised their own management and wisdom.”

Being the only Iranian woman to ever win an Olympic medal, Alizadeh’s defection and her impressive performance at the Tokyo Games have re-energized the debate over women’s participation in sports in Iran. As one of the top female athletes from a country where women have been barred from entering football stadiums since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and where the government’s handling of women’s sports has been an intensely contested topic between women’s rights campaigners on the one hand and conservative ruling elites on the other, Alizadeh’s efforts this past weekend represented nothing less than a victory over adversity.

With a little under two weeks of events still to go, the Tokyo Olympics are sure to produce more stories like those of Tom Daley, Quinn, and Kimia Alizadeh, but for the young female, queer, and disabled athletes watching the competition and nursing their own Olympic dreams, the impact of these Games will be felt for years and decades to come.