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Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe Announce Break-Up After 10 Years
April 17, 2026
Posted 2 hours ago by
Joe Buglewicz / Getty ImagesTwo towering figures of American women’s sport are breaking up after a decade together. Megan Rapinoe, the famed U.S. soccer star, met Sue Bird, the legendary UConn and WNBA basketball player, at the Rio Olympics in 2016. The couple announced their relationship a year later, before getting engaged in 2020. “This hasn’t been an easy decision, but it’s one we’ve made together with so much love, respect, and care for each other.
We’ve shared a whole life over the last decade, through big moments and in quiet ones, and that is something we’ll always carry with us,” they wrote in an Instagram post on Friday. Rapinoe and Bird also hosted a podcast together, A Touch More, which they said will not continue. “While this chapter of doing the podcast together is ending, what we’ve built with you isn’t,” they said. In their time together, the two women broke barriers as perhaps the most visible lesbian couple in sport. In 2018, they became the first gay couple to appear on the cover of ESPN The Magazine Body Issue. They were also the first same-sex couple to host the ESPYs awards show. While both are retired, Rapinoe has stayed in the public eye as a political activist. Bird is a WNBA television analyst on NBC. Read it at The New York PostRead more at The Daily Beast.
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