It led to essentially the most excruciating method for Megan Rapinoe: a penalty kick skied over the crossbar, shock, disappointment, a rueful smile to herself.
“It’s identical to a sick joke to overlook a penalty,” Rapinoe mentioned after the US was eradicated, 5-4, on penalty kicks after a scoreless tie with Sweden on Sunday within the spherical of 16 on the Girls’s World Cup in Melbourne, Australia.
Rapinoe couldn’t bear in mind the final time she missed a penalty kick. She was despatched on as an alternative late in Sunday’s recreation as a result of she was so dependable. It was her penalty kick that supplied the decisive purpose within the closing of the 2019 World Cup. This time, accuracy betrayed her on an evening when age and damage confirmed in her legs.
There may be extra soccer to play for Rapinoe, a Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League championship to chase in Seattle with the OL Reign. However her retirement, introduced in July, will arrive this fall at age 38. The sunshine of Rapinoe’s famend and polarizing profession as a participant and activist has now gone into shadow on the World Cup stage, the place she performed her greatest and emphatically spoke her thoughts.
She was a defining athlete of her technology, one of many first publicly homosexual gamers on the ladies’s nationwide soccer crew; a ruthless and artistic ahead who delivered in essentially the most tense and revealing moments; a self-described “strolling protest” who jousted with a president, knelt for the nationwide anthem and fought for equal pay and equitable remedy on L.G.B.T.Q. points with what Julie Foudy, a former nationwide crew captain, has described as a willingness to “boldly disrupt.”
After Sunday’s recreation, Rapinoe joked with reporters however tears additionally got here into her eyes.
“Properly, now that I’m 38 and in remedy, I used to be like, ‘That is life,’” she mentioned. After all, she wished the US was nonetheless competing for a 3rd consecutive World Cup title. After all, she wished there was no less than yet another recreation to play. However, Rapinoe added, “I really feel prefer it doesn’t take away something from this expertise or my profession generally.”
Through the 2019 Girls’s World Cup, Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic, known as Rapinoe “her technology’s Muhammad Ali,” who just like the heavyweight boxing champion additionally grew to become a “hero of resistance” with “sly humor and irresistible swagger.”
Typically Rapinoe labored blue, each in her alternative of hair coloration and in her alternative of phrases. She was unfailingly and unguardedly open, by no means extra so than throughout that 2019 World Cup in France.
Earlier than the event, Rapinoe and her teammates sued the US Soccer Federation for gender discrimination. Then, within the days approaching an intense quarterfinal match towards France in Paris in June 2019, Rapinoe feuded publicly with President Donald J. Trump, who admonished her to win earlier than speaking.
As a substitute of wilting amid the scrutiny, she scored each objectives in a 2-1 American victory and ran towards the nook flag, spreading her arms in celebration and defiance.
Afterward, Rapinoe was quoted as saying with joyful seriousness about her efficiency, which got here throughout Satisfaction Month, “Go gays!” And: “You possibly can’t win a championship with out gays in your crew — it’s by no means been finished earlier than, ever. That’s science, proper there.”
Rachel Allison, an affiliate professor of sociology at Mississippi State College who research girls’s soccer, mentioned, “What I feel is de facto extraordinary about her, and can finally place her among the many greats, is how she led via activism, which generated huge ranges of public scrutiny, whereas on the identical time remaining in high athletic type and unapologetically herself via all of it.”
Profitable, Rapinoe acknowledged usually, was a mandatory platform on which to construct her activism. She’s going to retire with two World Cup titles and one Olympic gold medal. In 2019, she was honored because the World Cup’s greatest participant and main scorer.
“With out the profitable you don’t get the media, you don’t get the eyes, you don’t get the followers, you don’t get the flexibility to say what you need on a regular basis as a result of individuals wish to discuss to you it doesn’t matter what,” Rapinoe mentioned earlier on this event.
Within the 2011 Girls’s World Cup, Rapinoe helped to ship probably the most pressing and well-known victories for the ladies’s nationwide crew. Within the dying moments of a quarterfinal match towards Brazil, she delivered a feathery cross to Abby Wambach, whose header helped flip an obvious defeat into eventual victory in penalty kicks.
It was the newest purpose ever scored throughout a Girls’s World Cup match, a second through which, Rapinoe mentioned, “I introduced myself.”
The US misplaced the 2011 closing to Japan, however a brand new technology of gamers, Rapinoe amongst them, had “reignited the crew’s recognition,” halting its slide towards “cultural irrelevance” after the retirement of stars like Mia Hamm from the 1999 World Cup champion crew, mentioned Caitlin Murray, a soccer journalist and the writer of “The Nationwide Workforce: The Inside Story of the Girls Who Modified Soccer.”
“From 2005 to 2011, the crew had light into obscurity,” Murray mentioned in an e mail. The victory over Brazil “was a jolt that made individuals wish to concentrate once more.”
Rapinoe’s arrival additionally broadened and advanced the advocacy embraced by the U.S. girls’s groups earlier than her. The groundbreaking 1999 crew advocated equitable remedy on points largely associated to soccer itself. Rapinoe championed a few of the identical points, but additionally protested towards police brutality and vigorously campaigned for the rights of homosexual and transgender individuals.
“Her legacy is being a voice for some individuals who really feel like they don’t have one,” mentioned Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper on the 1999 crew. “She’s keen to stay her neck on the market and take the criticism that different individuals is probably not keen to do.”
In 2016, Rapinoe took a knee through the enjoying of the nationwide anthem earlier than a match in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick’s protest towards police brutality and social injustice. W.N.B.A. gamers have been additionally kneeling throughout that interval, however it was Rapinoe’s protest that made nationwide headlines.
Whereas Rapinoe has acknowledged her white privilege, mentioned Allison, the sociology professor, she acquired outsize consideration for her racial activism with out experiencing the tough penalties that Black athletes traditionally obtain for protests. Ali, as an example, was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to battle within the Vietnam Warfare and barred from boxing for 3 years.
“For lots of Black athletes, it has value them very dearly, typically their whole careers,” Allison mentioned, whereas Rapinoe “has largely misplaced nothing and even gained from her activism.”
It was clear throughout Sunday’s enjoying of the U.S. anthem that not all of Rapinoe’s teammates agreed together with her continued refusal to sing or place her hand over her coronary heart. On a podcast final yr, the previous American stars Carli Lloyd and Hope Solo expressed discomfort with what they described because the “tradition” of the nationwide crew extending its advocacy past a need to win soccer matches to enjoying “political and social video games.”
Many others have been extra embracing of Rapinoe’s athletic and activist achievements. 4 months after Lloyd and Solo criticized her, Rapinoe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. And the U.S. girls’s crew signed a collective bargaining settlement to obtain equal pay with the boys’s nationwide crew after a long time of negotiations and years of courtroom fights.
With out Rapinoe’s distinctive performances within the 2019 World Cup, Murray mentioned, “the U.S. in all probability doesn’t win that event, and the crew in all probability doesn’t have the momentum of their equal pay battle to immediate U.S. Soccer to make a deal.”
That’s the reason it feels the correct time to finish her profession, Rapinoe mentioned Sunday. And, she added, possibly there was even darkish humor in lacking a penalty kick. “I joke too usually, at all times within the fallacious locations and inappropriately,” she mentioned, “so possibly that is ha-ha on the finish.”