Book review – Eureka Spring Times-Echo

By Michael Waters, ca. 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30.00, 368 pages

He’s going to win. It’s obvious: no matter how hard you try, how hard you run, how much your lungs burn, he’s two steps ahead. You had a good start, but he’s the better athlete. You know that now. He’s going to win this race and you’re going to lose. But, as the new book “The Other Olympians” by Michael Waters, there may be a different result.

The young Zdnek Koubek avoided sports as much as possible.

Born almost seven years before the founding of the Czechoslovak state, he always knew he was “different”: At school he had a reputation for being a combative person, but he could not get along with his rough male classmates and their games. The world of girls was also a mystery to him, although “to the world he was a girl…”

At age 8, Koubek took part in his first organized sporting event, a sprint he lost “by one second” and which he would never forget. As he grew older, he seethed from years of anger and “his disdain for the sport only grew,” but in the fall of 1927, he changed his mind: he had managed to get a ticket to a track and field event, where he discovered how “free” running must feel.

“In the months that followed,” says Waters, “Koubek couldn’t get enough of athletics.” He began to compete – and win – Women’s events, without knowing that he was “not alone” with his differences.

In fact, in the early 1930s, several world-class athletes quietly questioned their own gender; while coaches and second and third place finishers complained about losses to “masculine” women. Some athletes assigned female at birth “could not escape the gender anxieties of the time.” Others lost their chance to compete in the Olympics for political reasons, and some simply gave up.

For other athletes with Olympic dreams, the 1936 Games were drawing ever closer as they rose to fame, even though Adolf Hitler and his top followers had “launched a campaign to crush the German gay community.”

When a book begins with a long list of acronyms, pay attention. Take it as a sign that you are in for a deeper dive and some confusion.

Indeed, author Michael Waters seems to leave no stone unturned in this story, which at times drags on. Readers of The Other Olympians, for example, might wonder why there are sometimes long pages devoted to people who are never mentioned again in the narrative. Were these people essential to the story here? We may never know…

And yet there is depth. Waters takes his audience back to a time when heterosexuality was the absolute norm and LGBTQ people were considered unusual and fascinating. The reversal of this perception does not end well, and its causes feel particularly familiar here – in more ways than one.

This is probably not everyone’s true idea of ​​beach reading; instead, it is timely, relevant, serious and interesting – but only if you study it thoroughly. If you don’t, you’re lost. With a little patience, however, The Other Olympians is a win-win read.

— The bookworm says