Sport stars like Simone Biles , Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Katie Ledecky dazzled fans at the recent Paris Olympic Games with their performances. But off the pitch, many athletes also used the Olympics to draw attention to deeply entrenched inequities and challenges facing girls and women in sport, such as body confidence and support for athletes with small children . A new initiative, Sport Your Period , is making waves by paying athletes to discuss their menstruation experiences.
The effort aims to shatter the taboo of menstruation, a long overlooked problem in the sport world. This campaign is sponsored by the menstrual product company Knix and aims to normalize period talk, especially for adolescent athletes. Olympians like Canadian beach volleyball player Brandie Wilkerson and American rugby player Ilona Maher have been promoting Sport Your Period over the past year by wearing small red dots during competition.
Notably, U.S. women’s gold medal soccer player Megan Rapinoe is the lead spokesperson.
This initiative builds on the candidness of elite athletes who spoke out about menstruation publicly. New Zealand golfer Lydia Ko and Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui both made headlines for casually sharing their menstrual woes during competition, yet sports media still often reacts with surprise or discomfort about period talk , showing that it remains a taboo subject. Girls at risk of dropping sport Despite the Paris Olympics being billed as the “gender-equal Olympics ,” th.