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LGBTQ in women's sport: The view from the athlete and coach - GB rower Kyra Edwards and netball's Sara Bayman

Kyra Edwards and Sara Bayman discuss how women's sport has embraced the LGBT community - Nick Middleton
Kyra Edwards and Sara Bayman discuss how women's sport has embraced the LGBT community - Nick Middleton
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Women's Sport Social Embed

The athlete

British rower Kyra Edwards, who is targeting a place in Tokyo, on how her motivations are fuelled by representing others. 

 

Being in sight, being proud of who I am and not shying away from showing the world who I am is important to me and an important message for anyone who wants to come into rowing or high levels of the sport.

I am quite different in a lot of things I have done in my life so far and I do represent a few different diversity strands.

I’m mixed race so I feel like I’m a role model for the black community and also the LGBT community.

Often a lot of the choices I’ve made have been quite different to people who look like me and maybe have similarities to me.

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For example my degree in statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles was a real male-dominated degree. And then with rowing, unfortunately the sport is full of white people and also full of straight people - until I was a bit older.

When no one feels like, or looks like, you it can be difficult to try and identify a role model to look up to. But then it doesn't just have to be one person. For me, Serena Williams is an amazing athlete. She’s an inspiration to me but that doesn’t mean I want to be a professional tennis player. There are aspects that I find really inspiring. I want to take those aspects. Then there are different parts of other people I find inspiring and I take them and that's okay too.

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I’m quite lucky in that in the generation I’m in, I feel like everyone is quite liberal, everyone is open with different sexualities. I don’t know many people for who being gay is an issue.

I was 15 when I came out, although it was probably a couple of years before then that I started wondering about my sexuality.

I had this funny little conversation with my friends where they guessed what I was trying to say without me being able to say it. We were sat around the school canteen and I said ‘guys I’ve got something to say...erm….erm.’ And my best friend just blurted out 'you’re gay aren’t you?' I don’t think anyone was particularly shocked.

It’s also been my dream  of going to the Olympics since I was 12 years old. If I get there in Tokyo as part of the British rowing team I’m going to be so happy. And if both me and my partner Saskia get there on the same team that would be an amazing dream.

If anyone ever told me that I'd inspired them to be who they were and to follow their dreams, that would be the proudest moment of my career.

Women's Sport newsletter in-article
Women's Sport newsletter in-article

A lot of my motivations are fuelled by representing people, supporting people, being part of a team, being part of something bigger than myself.

Saskia and I have been together for four years but her experience has been different.  She actually went to university with a boyfriend and left with a girlfriend!

We raced together at junior level when we were 16 but it was platonic and then when we went to university we were best friends for the first three months and it just blossomed from there.

It was a shock to her as much as it was to me. She and her ex are good friends now and her friends and family are so supportive.

When I first joined the UCLA team I was on the only out person. But I think at one point 25 per cent of the team ended up being out. It kind of had a domino effect on the team.

It was such a supportive environment, as you can imagine in LA.  As we got older in the squad, having us as leaders was actually quite good. I think our love spread around the group.

We pulled everyone into our relationship and everyone was happy and like a family. I feel very proud to call Saskia my girlfriend.

There are lots of positives to being in a relationship with someone in the same sport as you and there are lots of things that are difficult too. We are both very open, we communicate a lot about how we are feeling, and are really supportive of each other.

In 2018 it was great when we both won a bronze medal in the same boat at the Under-23 World Championships, but a year later I got selected for the Worlds and Saskia was a spare. That was a bit difficult. But just as if we were a heterosexual couple where one person was selected and one person wasn’t, you just have to be conscious of the other person’s feelings.

We don’t dwell too much on the fact that the other person has any part in the reason we didn’t get selected. It feels quite independent. It wasn’t like ‘oh you took my seat, or my opportunity’. It’s more 'okay, I didn’t make it and you did.'  This is a sport where we can help each other do well. We could be sat in a boat together and helping one another get to the finish line first and get their Olympic seat.

I know that if I was sat watching Saskia competing at the Olympics and I wasn’t competing, then I’d still have a smile on my face. We both just want one another to do well.

The coach

Sara Bayman, Loughborough Lightning head coach and former England netballer, is engaged to current England international Stacey Francis.

I don’t think there was ever one actual moment where I came out as gay to my team-mates. I’ve always been pretty sure of my sexuality and had really close friends in the England team, so we’d have normal conversations about relationships and what’s going on in your private life. That meant there was never any need to sit the team down and announce anything because they already knew.

I always had more of an issue with telling the wider world because I wasn’t overly comfortable with everyone knowing at the time. There was also an element of not wanting to be known for being gay. I wanted to be known as a really good netballer and not the gay netballer. That was important to me.

The engagement announcement with Stacey at the end of 2018 was probably the first time a lot of people had heard first-hand that I was gay - even some members of my extended family. It was quite a big step for me in terms of being open about everything.

Sara Bayman is engaged to current England international Stacey Francis - Rex
Sara Bayman is engaged to current England international Stacey Francis - Rex

Stacey and I were kind of dating in the lead up to the 2015 World Cup, but I was adamant that we couldn’t start a relationship while we were in the same England team. The initial getting together phase was quite difficult because you feel such a responsibility not to cause any disruption to the team.

At that stage you don’t know you’re going to marry that person and everyone would have been pretty annoyed if two months down the line the relationship had ended and it caused rifts in the team. That was always in my mind.

So we held off until after the World Cup and after that decided we had to go for it. We were in the England squad together after without any issue at all.

Any worries I had seem a bit ridiculous now because the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I don’t think we’re high-profile enough to get much negativity and the only time we’ve had anything like it was around people speculating before it became public. I do understand people’s concerns with team-mates getting together, but we would never have put anything in jeopardy. When I was playing I did - and Stacey still does - take that incredibly seriously and no relationship was going to impact on it.

The positivity since it all became public has actually made me think maybe I should have made a bit more of a statement and acted as a role model for younger people in sport who might be gay. Part of the reason I perhaps wasn’t so public about it early in my career was because of a lack of role models when I was growing up. Being gay was always something that was hushed and no one talked about. So sometimes I do wish I had made a big announcement about it earlier.

Now that young girls can see me and Stacey together, it’s nice that it gets a little bit more exposure. Hopefully that means anyone out there can see having gay people in netball, in sport and in society is totally normal and feel a bit more comfortable in themselves. It would be great if we can play any part in that.