Soccer star Carli Lloyd said the kneeling by the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team had begun to pale as she approached her final Olympic match.
During the 2021 Tokyo Games, Lloyd was the only player on the team not to kneel. During an interview last week with CBS, she had to explain herself.
“In that moment, we were kneeling, it was right before kickoff,” she said in a clip posted to X. “So it wasn’t necessarily like a protest per se.”
“So we had done it every game and I knew that that was going to be my last world championship game so I wanted to stand. I’d kneeled all the other times,” she said.
She noted that was not during during the playing of the national anthem, but came just before kickoff.
“I just felt that we had done enough of the kneeling and I just wanted to stand for my last World Championship game.”
On tonight’s episode of Kickin’ It, @kate_abdo asks Carli Lloyd about her decision not to kneel in at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. pic.twitter.com/juefQnbviD
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) October 18, 2023
“I just felt like I had done it five other times and I just wanted to stand for this one. That was it. There was no other, like, thought or anything,” she said.
Lloyd was asked if she thought the decision had an impact on viewers.
Do you agree with Lloyd’s decision to stand for the anthem?
Yes: 93% (65 Votes)
No: 7% (5 Votes)
“I’m sure, because I was the only one standing and everybody else was kneeling. I just thought that we had done enough of the kneeling and I just wanted to stand in my last world championship game,” she said.
Lloyd said she did not disapprove of the anti-racism sentiment that many who knelt said they were expressing.
“Look, there is no perfect nation. There’s a lot of things that need to be different. More respect that people need to show,” she said.
“I think we’ve gotten to a point where if it’s not a certain opinion, then other people can’t have their other opinions. It’s kind of contradicting itself. In that moment, I just kind of had enough of kneeling right before the game because we had done it for a whole year or so leading up,” Lloyd said.
When asked about the impact of the gesture, Lloyd said she supports “actionable change.”
“If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.”
If there aren’t people taking the opposite side of your position, you likely don’t have a strong enough one.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 ✌🏼 ✌🏼✌🏼
— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) October 15, 2023
“And I just felt like it was just like a thing to do. Like it was just beginning to feel like a thing to do. It was an empty stadium. I don’t know how many people were watching the game. It was 10 seconds before, it wasn’t like our team was wearing coats, of doing … it was a global thing people were doing,” she said.
As the hosts kept quizzing her about the message she sent by doing as she saw fit, Lloyd pushed back.
“I think people maybe look into things too much,” she said. “You’re asking me, ‘What was your reason?’ I kneeled five other times and my last game, I was just honed in. I wanted a medal. I wanted to just focus on that.”
Life will never be fair and that’s ok. Long term success is dealing with the situations that come your way, good or bad, and powering through no matter what! Digging deep when the odds are stacked against you. Those that make excuses will never make it. https://t.co/71XnQkXsJE
— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) October 12, 2023
In other comments, she said that as the team’s captain, she had not been a fan of kneeling when the fad began in 2016, promoted by teammate Megan Rapinoe in emulation of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, according to CBS.
“At that time, obviously there wasn’t a lot of other people that were doing that besides Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe decided to do that and I had conversations with Megan,” she said.
“This isn’t a personal thing. What she’s doing, it was distracting to our team. It was distracting other players to play, and I was a captain at the time as well so I said to her, ‘It’s not to dampen what you’re trying to achieve with it.’ It became [that] everything was focused on Megan kneeling and nobody was talking about the reasoning why, is what I was trying to get at. … We were all just getting tired of, we’re all just talking about her kneeling on the sideline.”
