On Sunday, it stormed former Spain national team goalkeeper Iker Casillas, after he posted post on Twitter.
“Please respect me: I am gay. #godsøndag,” he wrote.
His former teammate in the Spanish national team Carles Puyol commented the following on Casillas’ post.
“It’s time for us to tell our story, Iker,” Puyol wrote.
Casillas’ tweet was deleted after an hour and a half and the 41-year-old apologized and claimed his account had been hacked. Puyol also complained.
“Hacked account. Fortunately, everything was fine. Sorry to all my followers. And of course more apologies to the LGBT community,” Casillas wrote.
– Very satisfied
– A little thought
The head of the Raballder handball club, Kristian Stakset-Gundersen, thought the post looked ridiculous.
– In retrospect, it appears as a childish joke that is not well thought out, while there are so many challenges for LGBT people to stand out in sport in general, but football in particular, he told Dagbladet.
Spanish legend: Lays flat
Raballder is a sports team working to increase the inclusion of LGBT people in sports. Stakset-Gundersen believes such incidents have the potential to make it difficult for people to open up.
– There’s something about these kinds of jokes that can make it hard for people to get ahead. You’re kidding about it because it looks so unlikely to be true, that it’s something you can only joke about. And the fact that it’s a joke in that way means it’s hard for people to get ahead, he explains.
– Questions about time
Stakset-Gundersen still finds it important to emphasize that both players showed their support for gays in their apologies.
– The fact that they gave support to the LGBT community in their apology afterwards shows that they don’t mind if someone has come forward, he said.
In a Dagbladet survey did earlier this fall, not one player, among hundreds of respondents, answered that they were strange. The survey was sent to footballers in the elite men’s series, divisions 1 and 2.
Stakset-Gundersen believes that it will be a short time before we see the former take a step forward.
– I think it’s a matter of time before we get some athletes in Norway who dare to come forward. Because the athletes we have are part of another society, which is fortunately moving in the right direction. After all, the rest of the world is not as simple as Norway. Especially for athletes who dream of a professional career abroad, it can be very difficult.
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