The Billie Jean King Cup Finals will open on the twenty-second in Shenzhen: eight nations, six days, the World Cup of women's tennis. Italy goes in as two-time defending champion, alongside Belgium, China, Czechia, Great Britain, Kazakhstan, Spain and Ukraine.

If tennis is not your sport, stay with me; the woman whose name is on that trophy is worth knowing.

Billie Jean King grew up in Long Beach, California. She learned the game on free public courts and bought her first racket with eight dollars she saved herself. She went on to win thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, twenty of them at Wimbledon.

Then she did the harder work. She testified on Capitol Hill in support of Title IX. In 1973 she founded the Women's Tennis Association and served as its first president; that same year, after making clear the women would walk if the purse stayed unequal, the US Open became the first Grand Slam to pay its women's and men's champions the same. That September she met Bobby Riggs in front of roughly ninety million viewers and beat him in straight sets. In 1974 she started the Women's Sports Foundation.

I have spent forty years inside the Olympic Movement arguing for women's equality. The ground she cleared is the ground the rest of us walked on.

Sport belongs to everyone. Billie Jean made that a good deal more true. 🎾

#BillieJeanKing #BJKCup #BillieJeanKingCup #WomensTennis #WorldCupOfTennis #Shenzhen #TitleIX #EqualPay #EqualPrizeMoney #WomenInSport #WomenInSports #TennisHistory #SportBelongsToEveryone #GenderEquality #WTA #AnitaDeFrantz

In a few weeks, and on the tenth of September, inside the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, the Youth Olympic flame will be lit. Two days later it lands in Dakar.

From there it begins a tour of roughly thirty stops across all fourteen regions of Senegal. Then, on the thirty-first of October, Senegal will open the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games: the first Olympic sporting event ever held on African soil.

I have been a member of the International Olympic Committee since 1986. A great deal of that work was outreach to nations that were barely visible at the Games; countries sending one athlete, or two, or none at all. So let me be plain about what this month means. Africa has waited a very long time for its turn, and the wait was never justified.

Roughly 2,700 athletes aged seventeen and under will compete across twenty-five sports. These Games will also field a Youth Refugee Olympic Team, a first for the Youth Olympic Games.

Sport belongs to everyone. A flame moving through Senegal this month is what that sentence looks like when it stops being a slogan. 🔥

#Dakar2026 #YouthOlympicGames #YOG2026 #OlympicFlame #TorchRelay #Senegal #Teranga #Africa #FirstInAfrica #IOC #OlympicMovement #Olympism #SportBelongsToEveryone #YouthSports #RefugeeOlympicTeam #AnitaDeFrantz

Labor Day arrives on the seventh of September, and I will be thinking about the people we usually look past.

When you watch a race, you see the athletes. You do not see the crew that sets the course at dawn; the official who drives two hours to be there; the custodian who unlocks the gym so a team can practice at six in the morning. You do not see the parent picking up a second shift to cover a registration fee.

I spent nearly three decades at the LA84 Foundation putting resources into youth sport across Southern California, and one lesson repeated itself every single year: a playing field is only as good as the people who keep it open. Coaches, groundskeepers, bus drivers, referees, volunteers. Most are paid little; many are paid nothing. All of them are the reason a child gets a turn.

Sport belongs to everyone. That sentence is only true when somebody unlocks the door.

So when the seventh comes around, rest if you can. And if there is a person who kept a field open for you, or for your children, find a way to tell them so. 🏅

#LaborDay #LaborDay2026 #SportBelongsToEveryone #YouthSports #CommunitySport #CoachesMatter #GrassrootsSports #VolunteersMakeItHappen #WorkingFamilies #SportsForAll #LA84 #YouthDevelopment #OlympicValues #SportsLeadership #AnitaDeFrantz

Later this month, on August 23, UNESCO will mark the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. The date honors the night in 1791 when enslaved people on Saint-Domingue rose up and set in motion the end of the transatlantic trade. It was first commemorated in Haiti and on Gorée Island in Senegal.

This day sits close to my heart. After my years at the LA84 Foundation, I founded the Tubman Truth Corporation, named for Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth: two women who risked everything to free others and to win the vote. The organization has since run its course, but its mission never ended:  it lives on as a movement I continue to carry forward, with a purpose that is plain: to help end modern slavery, which the International Labour Organization estimates still holds roughly 50 million people in forced labor or forced marriage today. 🕊️

This autumn the Olympic movement will hold its first Games on African soil, in Senegal, the very country that holds Gorée. Young athletes will gather on ground that knew both the depths of human cruelty and the courage to resist it.

Freedom and dignity are the birthright of every person. Sport belongs to everyone because dignity belongs to everyone. ✊🏽 Whose story of courage will you carry forward this month?

Later this month, from August 24 through 30, the fastest crews in the world will take to the Bosbaan in Amsterdam for the 2026 World Rowing Championships. Team USA arrives with real momentum: 23 medals across this season's World Cup circuit and, for the first time in the program's history, the Overall World Cup Points Trophy. 🚣

Rowing has a way of stripping everything down to what is true. You cannot bluff a boat. Eight rowers and a coxswain either find one rhythm or they do not; the water always knows the difference. I felt that in the women's eight at Montréal fifty years ago, and I feel it still whenever a crew catches the same beat and simply flies.

Every athlete who will line up in Amsterdam started somewhere small: a first lesson, a borrowed shell, a coach who believed. That is the whole point of what we build. Sport belongs to everyone, including the child who has never seen a racing shell up close and is about to fall in love with the pull of the oar.

To everyone racing at the end of this month: row your race. 💙 Who taught you to love being on the water?

Thirty years ago this month, the Olympic flame arrived in Atlanta for the Centennial Games; Muhammad Ali, his hands trembling, lit the cauldron on July 19, 1996, and the world held its breath. 🔥

What stays with me is what unfolded on the fields and courts over those sixteen days. The United States won the first Olympic gold medals ever awarded in women's soccer and women's softball; our women also took gold in basketball and in team gymnastics. The soccer final drew more than 76,000 fans. Reporters called it the year women's sport arrived. I saw it differently: it was the year the world finally watched.

None of it happened by accident. It grew from Title IX, and from generations who insisted that girls deserve a field, a coach, a chance. When I raced in the women's eight at Montréal in 1976, women's rowing was brand new to the Olympic program; every step forward since has kept a promise made to someone who was once told to wait.

Now we carry that promise toward Los Angeles. In two years, LA28 is set to become the first Olympic Games with more competition places for women than for men. Sport belongs to everyone; Atlanta showed us what that looks like when we truly mean it. 🥇

Who did you cheer for in 1996?

July is Disability Pride Month, and July 26 marks 36 years since the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. This year's theme, chosen by disabled self-advocates, says it plainly: "The World Works Better With Us." 

Access is not a courtesy; it is a right. I have spent my life arguing that sport belongs to everyone, and "everyone" has no asterisk. The Paralympic Games show us athletes at the very height of their craft, and they deserve the same lights, the same crowds, and the same respect we give every Olympian.

That is why it moves me that Los Angeles will host its first ever Paralympic Games in 2028. When a young person sees an athlete who moves through the world as they do, standing on a podium, something shifts; the boundary of what feels possible moves outward. 🌟💙

How will you mark Disability Pride Month? Tell me about a Paralympian or an adaptive sports program that has inspired you!

#DisabilityPrideMonth #ADA36 #Paralympics #SportBelongsToEveryone #TheWorldWorksBetterWithUs #LA28 #AdaptiveSports #Inclusion #DisabilityPride #ParaSport #AccessIsARight #TeamUSA #ParalympicMovement #EqualityInSport #Belonging

A year ago this month, the International Olympic Committee welcomed a new president, and an Olympian rose to lead the movement she has given her life to. I have watched this first year less for its symbolism than for its substance; the question I keep asking is what has actually changed for the athletes. The answer, I am glad to say, is real. 

Consider how the year opened. In February, the Olympic Winter Games arrived in Milano Cortina, the first Games of this presidency. To deliver a Games at all is to hold a thousand moving parts steady at once, under the eyes of the world; to deliver one well, in a first year, is the mark of someone who has learned how to perform when it counts. The athletes shone, the venues held, the world gathered. That is no small thing, and it set the tone for what followed.

Then, a clear sign came this June in Lausanne. For the first time in our history, every Olympian, not only the medalists, will be eligible for direct support: a grant to honor the years of work it takes simply to reach the Games. A fund of $140 million has been set aside for each Olympic cycle, beginning with the athletes of Milano Cortina. This is not prize money; it is recognition, and it reaches the athlete who finished last as surely as the champion who finished first. That is the point.

It sits inside a broader effort called "Fit for the Future," built by listening: to athletes, to smaller nations, to anyone who has felt the Games drifting out of reach. The work turns also to how host cities are chosen and how the Games are delivered, so the dream of hosting stays open to more of the world, not less. Sport belongs to everyone; leadership that keeps proving it is worth celebrating. 

Then, there is a commitment to principles.  Among this year's changes to the Olympic Charter is a renewed commitment to keep sport a neutral meeting ground: a place where nations who may agree on little else can still stand on the same field, under the same rules, and shake hands at the finish. I have believed my whole life that sport belongs to everyone; it is heartening to see that belief written more firmly into the documents that govern us.

None of this is the work of one person, and I suspect she would be the first to say so. A Games is delivered by tens of thousands of hands; a fund is filled by partners and stewarded by staff; a charter is amended by the whole membership. Leadership, at its best, is knowing where to point all of that effort and then having the steadiness to see it through. One year in, the direction looks sound, and the people it is meant to serve, the athletes, sit nearer the center than they did. 

All in all, a very satisfying and strong first year of leadership.  I, for one, couldn't be more pleased with our newest President.

- Anita

#IOC #KirstyCoventry #WomenInSport #WomenInLeadership #Olympics #SportBelongsToEveryone #OlympicMovement #FitForTheFuture #AthleteVoice #Leadership #Equity #FirstWoman #Olympism #WomenWhoLead #TeamUSA

This upcoming Fourth of July, the United States turns 250. Two and a half centuries is a long time to hold a promise; the honest truth is that we are still working to keep it. The words written in 1776 were a beginning, not a finish line, and every generation since has been asked to carry them a little further. 🇺🇸

I have spent my life believing that the things worth having are built by many hands. A nation is no different. Freedom is not a possession we inherit and set on a shelf; it is a practice, renewed by people who show up for one another, in their towns, their schools, their playing fields. 

Sport has always been one of the places where this country rehearses its best self: where a child learns fair play, where strangers become teammates, where "everyone gets a turn" is not a slogan but a rule. Sport belongs to everyone; so does the promise of this nation, when we choose to keep it. 🤝

On this upcoming Fourth of July - our cherished nation's 250th birthday - I wish you and your family joy, some time off, and appreciation for each other as people of this great country.

Blessings,
Anita

Two summers from now, Los Angeles will host the Olympic Games for a third time. If you have been thinking about being there, June is the month to act; Drop 2 registration closes July 22, with refreshed inventory across every Olympic sport when tickets release in August. 🌴

In My Olympic Life, I wrote about the first time this city claimed me: "In 1981, I moved to Los Angeles to join the organizing committee of the 1984 Games. It took me all of 10 minutes to figure out that the City of Angels would be my home."

That was forty-five years ago. I came for the Games and never left. The city hosted me, taught me, and then trusted me with its grandest civic dream more than once. The 1984 Games proved the Olympics could be staged through a public-private partnership; LA28 is poised to prove something different... that a Games can be the most inclusive in Olympic history, with women holding more competition spots than men for the first time ever, even!

Children who today are six or eight years old will walk into LA28 venues in 2028; some of them will decide on the spot to become Olympians. That is the part I keep thinking about as the registrations roll in!