Billie Jean King has been acknowledged but once more for her irreplaceable influence on girls’s sports activities.
The tennis legend was formally awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Friday, making her the primary particular person feminine athlete to obtain the consideration. The invoice behind her nomination particularly acknowledges “her brave and groundbreaking management in advancing equal rights for ladies in athletics, training, and society.”
That invoice was first launched on Sept. 20, 2023, the fiftieth anniversary of the “Battle of the Sexes,” during which King defeated former males’s No. 1 Bobby Riggs within the most-watched tennis match of all time.
Earlier than King, the one girls to win the award had been the feminine members of the 1980 U.S. Olympic workforce, who had been prevented from competing within the Video games as a result of American-led boycott of the Soviet Union host.
The total listing of athletes to win the Congressional Gold Medal are:
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Roberto Clemente (1973)
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1980 US Summer season Olympic Workforce (1980)
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Joe Louis (1982)
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Jesse Owens (1988)
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Jackie Robinson (2003)
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Byron Nelson (2006)
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Arnold Palmer (2009)
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Jack Nicklaus (2014)
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Larry Doby (2018)
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Steve Gleason (2019)
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Greg LeMond (2020)
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Willie O’Ree (2022)
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Billie Jean King (2024)
King was additionally awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009. She was the primary feminine athlete to win that award as effectively. Earlier than King, solely 5 different athletes had gained each the Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: Clemente, Owens, Robinson, Palmer and Nicklaus.
Billie Jean King fought for equal pay, and gained
It is arduous to consider a single one that has made a much bigger mark on girls’s sports activities than the 80-year-old King. Her legacy goes far past her excellence on the courtroom, which incorporates 39 Grand Slam titles (12 in singles, 16 in doubles and 11 in combined doubles).
The sphere of ladies’s sports activities can be unrecognizable right now had it not been for King’s founding of the Virginia Slims Circuit, and later the WTA. Annoyed with the pay disparity between women and men in tennis, King and eight different athletes shaped the breakaway tour and located monetary success with their very own sponsors and tv companions. King’s win within the “Battle of the Sexes” was additionally a landmark second for ladies’s sports activities.
Immediately, all main tennis tournaments award equal prize cash to women and men, an aberration from different sports activities.
King has additionally been well known as a pioneer for the LGBTQ group, confirming her id as a lesbian in 1981 and serving as an emblem for homosexual rights since.
