Megan Rapinoe went full soccer mother on the sidelines of Workforce USA’s gold medal-winning soccer match in opposition to Brazil on the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Images taken on the match captured Rapinoe, 39, cheering on the US ladies’s soccer workforce from the stands, alongside her fellow USWNT alums Tobin Heath and Ali Krieger, on the Parc des Princes on Saturday, August 10. Sporting her signature pink pixie haircut and matching sizzling pink sun shades, Rapinoe snapped photographs each on her telephone and on a disposable digital camera from the stands of the ultimate soccer match between the 2 ladies’s groups.
Workforce USA had followers watching their victory at dwelling, as Olympian Abby Wambach watched them rating the profitable objective per footage shared by Glennon Doyle by way of X because the US ladies’s soccer workforce secured their victory over Brazil, 1-0. This marked the USWNT’s first Olympic gold medal since 2012 when Wambach and Rapinoe had been on Workforce USA.
Rapinoe has competed with Workforce USA in three Olympic Video games, taking dwelling the gold medal for her first Olympics in London in 2012. She returned to Rio 4 years later, the place Workforce USA positioned fifth in ladies’s soccer, although they secured the bronze in Tokyo’s 2020 Video games, which was Rapinoe’s last Olympics as a competitor.
In July final yr, the soccer legend introduced her retirement from enjoying professionally following the top of the 2023 NWSL season, which concluded with the FIFA Ladies’s World Cup.
Rapinoe spoke to Individuals on Thursday, August 8, about attending the Olympics as a spectator moderately than an athlete. “I’m dwelling my greatest life,” Rapinoe, joined by companion (and WNBA legend) Sue Hen, advised the outlet. “No life has ever been lived higher on this brief span. I’m simply strolling round through the day and taking within the Parisian sights after which going to all these wonderful occasions.”
She continued, “It’s clearly enjoyable if I’m competing and profitable and doing all of the issues, however that is an unimaginable expertise and Paris is simply the most effective cities on the planet for a purpose so I’m actually having fun with simply taking all of it in.”
Hen, who has competed in 5 Olympic Video games herself for basketball, added, “It’s nice. You actually do get to see a lot extra.” She famous that Olympic athletes are “completely depending on the schedule, the observe schedule, [the] recreation schedule,” so usually don’t get to do any sightseeing.
Main as much as the finals, Rapinoe shared that the “most particular factor” she witnessed was Trinity Rodman’s time beyond regulation objective that despatched the U.S. ladies’s workforce to the semifinals. “I used to be going nuts,” she gushed. “Me and Mia [Hamm] had been sitting subsequent to one another, and we had been within the FIFA part, I don’t even know for those who’re imagined to cheer. You’re imagined to be applicable in there and we’re like, ‘We’re by no means getting invited again to this part, however let’s go.’”