Oasis Sports News

It’s time for the Oasis Sports News.

The end of January marked another amazing achievement by the world famous Trans Woman, comedian and marathon runner Eddie Izzard. Eddie, who is now using the pronoun ‘She’ and sporting rather lovely long blond hair, ran a marathon everyday on a treadmill; yes, 31 consecutive marathons without going anywhere, incredible. Eddie raised £250K for her charity #makehumanitygreatagain. Eddie’s Twitter account contains many celebrity interviews, all carried out whilst she was plodding away on her treadmill, and is well worth visiting. One of the people Eddie chatted to was Trans women Philippa York, a former professional cyclist. York won the “King of the Mountains” competition in the 1984 Tour de France and finished fourth overall.

February is LGBT+ History Month. There is a interesting article ‘Six LGBT+ Sportspeople You Should Know More About‘ on the BBC Sport website. Included in the article is a piece about Roberta Cowell, who as well as being a racing driver and a Second World War fighter pilot, was the first known British trans woman to have gender confirmation surgery.

Charlie Martin is a modern day British racing driver who is on her way to becoming the first transgender driver to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Perhaps she could have an Oasis logo on her car!

The BBC News website features an article remembering Justin Fashanu. Justin who grew up in Attenborough, and started his football career at Norwich City, hit the headlines 30 years ago, as the first male professional footballer player to come out as gay, whilst still playing. Fabulously talented and deeply tournamented, Justin sadly took his own life 1998. Justin was a gifted footballer and a wonderfully gentle man, his death is a stain on men’s professional football that hasn’t been removed.

Also from Norwich is Drag Racer Bimini Bon-Boulash. In the first episode of season 2 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Bimini sported a Norwich City shirt in a rather inventive way, that left very little to the imagination. Bimini is non-binary Tommy Hibbitts, who is very open to discussing the challenges they have faced growing up in our little rural outpost. Season 2 of the Drag Race is currently on BBC iPlayer; is great fun but is not to everybody’s taste.

Coming up in February is the men’s 6 Nations Rugby Union championship. Sadly the women’s equivalent has been delayed by ‘the thing’. Rough tough Rugby has been very accepting of players and officials who have come out as gay. The wonderful former Welsh captain Gareth Thomas came out whilst still playing international rugby, and this fine man, has been a pioneering campaigner for LGBT+ equality and acceptance. Gareth publicly outed himself as being HIV positive and is a leading educator and fundraiser for HIV research.