Talk about a power couple! Sue Bird Megan RapinoeBoth Olympic gold medalists,, started dating in 2017.
They met their first time backstage at a photo shoot to promote the 2016 Rio Olympics. They shared details of their first encounter with NBC in 2021. “She was in her basketball uniform and she had her hair down,” Rapinoe said.
“We kinda crossed [paths] and she was like, ‘Oh, hey! Are you ready for your game?’” Bird added. “I was like, haha… funny.”
The soccer star revealed that she kicked herself at the time for making “such a bad impression.”
“So dorky,” Bird teased. “I walked away like, ‘I thought you were supposed to be cool?’ We joke about it now cause she was a total dork.”
Rapinoe publicly came out as gay in 2012. In 2020, she spoke out. The Sunday Magazine that coming out made her “a better, more full person.” The Olympian added, “I think that any time you hide even the smallest part of yourself, you’re not able to fully capture your potential just in life in general. So I feel like that was part of me … maturing and allowing myself to reach my full potential in all aspects of my life.”
Bird waited for Rapinoe to make her gay public until they began dating in 2017. “I’m gay. Megan’s my girlfriend … these aren’t secrets to people who know me,” she told ESPNW at the time. “I don’t feel like I’ve not lived my life. I think people have this assumption that if you’re not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it’s this secret. That was never the case for me.” The Seattle Storm player had already been out to her friends and family for years.
After three years of dating, the athletes got engaged in Oct 2020. Bird shared the news by posting a captionless Instagram photo that showed Rapinoe on one knee at the edge o an infinity pool.
Interview with Cathy in May 2022 The Seattle Times, the basketball star revealed why she and Rapinoe still haven’t tied the knot.
“It’s funny. It’s more Megan. We’re on Megan’s schedule,” she said. “My schedule is open in the offseason. I got time. WNBA is only available in the summer. I got time. We’re basically waiting to see what Megan’s soccer future holds and then we’ll go on that. It is a nightmare to manage their soccer schedule. They play every year. If I had to guess a year for them, it would be 2023. It’ll probably be after that. It’s purely based on schedule. It’s not even what we want. If it was up to us, we would have done it a year ago.”
Scroll down to see a timeline of their relationship.