Wonder Woman of the Week: Emma Green
- Nov 24, 2021
- 1 min read
Our Wonder Woman this week is one of the top high jumpers in the world belonging to an elite club of high-flying athletes, but also a staunch advocate for LGBT rights. Emma Green was born in Sweden in 1984 and spent her youth dreaming of becoming a European athletics champion. In 2005, Green earned a bronze medal in the World Championships in Athletics setting a personal record for her high jump. Setting a personal best wasn't enough for this super human though. Over the next five years, Green worked hard to improve her athletic abilities, and that hard work paid off. The high jumper set a new personal best in 2010 by setting a standard for herself at 2.1 meters- earning a spot in an unofficial club for women capable of jumping over 2 meters in the high jump event in track & field.
At the 2013 World Championships in Moscow, Emma Green and other members of Sweden's athletics coalition wore rainbow fingernail polish in solidarity with Russia's oppressed LGBT community and received massive backlash from former Russian track & field athlete and Olympic board member Yelena Isinbayeva whose anti-LGBT rhetoric has long been known. In response, Sweden's Olympic committee was pressured to censor their athletes from repeating the act at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, but Green and her fellow athletes had by that point already become stalwarts for civil rights. Green would eventually retire from competition in 2017, but not before inspiring young women and girls back in Sweden to not only become athletes themselves but to become activists for social justice as well.
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