See Caitlyn Jenner Shine on the Cover of ‘Sports Illustrated’
Caitlyn is clearly proud of her SI debut, tweeting about it on Tuesday morning:
So excited to relive my gold medal journey with @SINow! Can’t believe it’s been 40 years! https://t.co/6PfAhDh4pl
— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) June 28, 2016
In a revealing interview, Caitlyn talks about where she keeps her gold medal now (inside her nail drawer, naturally) and how her career as an Olympic athlete was “the perfect distraction” for her during her days as Bruce. “Sports. It’s not real life,” she says. “You go out there, you work hard, you train your ass off, win the Games. I’m very proud of that part of my life. And it’s not like I just want to throw it out. It’s part of who I am. What I’m dealing with now, this is about who you are as a human being. What did I do for the world in 1976, besides maybe getting a few people to exercise a little bit? I didn’t make a difference in the world.”
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After she won the decathlon, Caitlyn says she stood naked in front of the mirror at her hotel and didn’t like what she saw. “I said out loud, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’” she tells Sports Illustrated, noting that she hated her body and was always thinking about plastic surgery. “It disgusted me,” she says. “I was big and thick and masculine. The rest of the world thought it was this Greek god kind of body. I hated it. But it’s what I was given, so I just tried to do the best I could with it.”
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Caitlyn says she identified as being female for most of her life and thought she would transition before she turned 40, but she decided it just wasn’t the right time. “I was female inside, but I wasn’t an effeminate male,” she says. “So I could hide easily in the male world. My life was distraction after distraction after distraction. Being a macho male was a way for me to try to convince myself that the woman living inside of me really isn’t living inside me. Obviously, it didn’t work.”
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But, she points out, she doesn’t regret her past. “I loved Bruce,” she says in the interview. “I still love him today.”