The Audacity of Hope Solo (2024)

It’s midmorning at the farmers’ market in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Hope Solo, the former goalkeeper of the U.S Women’s National Soccer Team, stands by a table full of pansies. Over the course of her career, she’s been called the most controversial female athlete alive, won gold in two Olympics and one World Cup, and spoken out frequently about women’s equality. Today, though, her concerns are more prosaic. She wants flowers to plant under the flagpole on the 50-acre property where she lives with her husband, former NFL player Jerramy Stevens. “We need way more than this,” she says, moving on. “Jerramy’s going to be so disappointed.”

The market is spread across a few large open-air enclosures. There are booths filled with fruits and funnel cakes, older couples holding hands, and lots of women wearing T-shirts printed with empowering messages. And then there is Solo, a lithe, wide-shouldered figure dressed casually in maroon Converse and gold Ray-Bans. Walking through the garden shop, she spots a stone ornament that reads “Welcome” with a cow, sheep, and pig perched cutely on top. “I need that,” she says. “Oh yeah, I need that.”

“That is one of the things that surprised me most about Hope,” says Roger Pielke, who directs the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder and met Solo last year when she gave a lecture at his class. “The difference between who she is in person and the spin that’s been generated about her for a long time.”

During Solo’s 17 years playing with the national team, she became the most dominant female goalkeeper in the game. Her supporters would argue she remains, today, the best goalkeeper in the world, full stop, the one with the most international appearances (202) and shutouts (102). Her detractors would counter that she is known as much for her off-the-field candor and her legal entanglements as for her on-field excellence. The truism is that everyone has an opinion. “She inspires love and hate in extremes,” ESPN wrote in 2017, upon her inclusion in a list of the world’s 100 most famous athletes (she was number 75). “I think I’m pretty polarizing,” she tells me at the market, though even that term can seem like an oversimplification. In the time we spend together, she’s equal parts guarded and honest, defensive and emotionally generous. She seems to have a black-and-white view of the world at one moment, and a constitutional resistance to offering easy conclusions at another. “Hope Solo is not tied up in a nice, neat package with a bow, at all,” says Lesle Gallimore, her college coach. “Don’t ever be surprised by anything she says. That’s rule number one.”

Among the things Solo says that do surprise me: She hasn’t played soccer—has hardly touched the ball—since her career came to an abrupt halt at the 2016 Rio Olympics, during which she declared that the Swedish team, to whom the Americans lost in the quarterfinals, had played like “a bunch of cowards.” She’d gone on to elaborate that she was referring to the Swedish team having played defensively, a widely acknowledged observation, but after a reporter tweeted out the most incendiary bits, it prompted a social media firestorm. Twelve days later, the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) suspended Solo for six months and terminated her contract.

Within three months, she and Stevens uprooted themselves from the suburbs of Seattle, where Solo had lived for years while playing in the National Women’s Soccer League for the Seattle Reign, and started off across the country in an enormous RV, complete with a king-size bed, a necessity for Stevens, who is 6'7". In January, they made a final detour to attend the Women’s March in DC, then arrived in North Carolina, an area they’d chosen for no reason other than it fit their specifications, which involved proximity to a major airport, mountains, and a coast, so Stevens could fish. They spent the next year living in their RV while building a compound that will eventually include two houses, a pool, a vegetable garden, an octagonal dojo, chickens, pigs, a turkey named Zeus, and five Dobermans.

But now, with the work well under way, Solo is beginning to step back into the public eye. She has a TV show in development with Eric Wynalda, another outspoken former soccer player. Last April, it was announced that the film financing and production company Argent Pictures had acquired the rights to her life story and would be turning it into a biopic. “It’s scary,” she says. “You know, I look at the, bless her heart, Tonya Harding movie, I, Tonya. At the end of the day, you don’t get editing rights.” And this week as the women’s team heads to France for the World Cup, she’ll be there, too, as a commentator for the BBC. She's already made headlines for criticizing Coach Jill Ellis saying that she "cracks under pressure."

In the lead-up to the games, a larger drama has also been unfolding, one in which Solo has played a pivotal role. In 2016, she was one of five players to file a gender discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the U.S. Soccer Federation, claiming the pay and working conditions of the women’s team were inferior to those of the men’s, despite the latter’s lack of success— the men’s team hasn’t medaled at the World Cup since 1930 and didn’t qualify for the 2018 tournament, whereas the women’s record is such that anything other than gold is considered a failure. In August 2018, with the EEOC complaint at a standstill, Solo filed a federal lawsuit against the USSF. The 28 women currently on the national team followed suit seven months later.

Solo isn’t limited by the same constraints as her former teammates, for whom filing means taking time out from preparing for the World Cup and suing their current employer. Solo’s relationship with some of the players remains fraught enough, though, that her presence is not always welcome. Still, argues Rich Nichols, one of two lawyers representing Solo, “If I’m in a foxhole, I want Hope with me, because I’ve got a great chance of getting out of there alive.”

This perspective is easy to understand. When I’d arrived at the market, I’d spotted Solo on a grassy hill at the edge of a parking lot, her white Dodge idling nearby. She was a solitary figure, like she often was on the soccer field—she has to be one of the most aptly named athletes of all time—as two Dobermans, both female, one in heat, wove around her with taut grace.

Solo and Stevens began keeping the breed because Stevens thought they reminded him of her. “They’re loyal, regal, and people are scared of them,” Solo told People in 2015. “But they wouldn’t hurt a fly.” As I get closer to her, though, they snap to attention and rush in my direction. It’s only when she calls to them that they slow, then stop a few feet away, growling softly.

Solo decided she would be a professional soccer player in the early ‘90s when she was in middle school—as a child, when asked about her favorite character, she’d answer “a ball”—though at the time there wasn’t any reason to believe this was possible. FIFA organized its first women’s world championship in 1991 (it wasn’t called a World Cup because FIFA thought it might not deserve the name), and the American players, when they won, received $500 each.

For years, women on the national team carried their own equipment and stayed at hotels that sometimes didn’t have electricity. “We’d joke in the beginning, Oh, it builds character,” U.S. midfielder Julie Foudy says in Caitlin Murray’s book The National Team. “But by the end, it was like, Okay, I am up to my f*cking eyeballs in character.” The uphill battle made it all the more momentous when they captured the nation’s attention at the 1999 World Cup, held in the U.S., winning during penalty kicks in front of 90,185 screaming fans.

The tournament turned the players, dubbed “the ponytail posse,” into celebrities. An image of Brandi Chastain kneeling with her fists raised, her face an expression of such elation that her neck veins pop out, proved iconic. Mia Hamm was featured on a Wheaties box and even referenced on Friends (as “that annoying girl soccer player,” but still). They became a social cause as much as a sports team, one consisting of ready-made role models who were perceived as deeply loyal to one another, and for the most part, they were.

When Solo began playing with them in 2000, though, she quickly proved out of sync with the existing culture. “From other players, I’d hear two things,” says Wynalda, who met Solo in the mid-aughts while working at ESPN. “They did not appreciate her candor, and they deemed her selfish. They were like, Wow, we need to get her media training now.” (“I didn’t think I needed to be best friends with everyone,” Solo says about her teammates. “You had to want to win and to go shopping.”) But Solo was never a player for whom media training was going to take. As she wrote in her 2012 memoir, Solo, “I don’t like anyone telling me how I’m supposed to feel or think or what I’m supposed to say. If I had meekly accepted what others told me, my life would be radically different.... I would have viewed myself as a failure.”

Conceived during a conjugal visit while her father, a Vietnam veteran and sometime con artist, was in prison, Solo grew up in Richland, Washington, the site of the nuclear reactor responsible for the plutonium in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 (one of her high school’s cheers was “Nuke ’em, nuke ’em, nuke ’em till they glow!”). She was raised largely by her mother and stepfather, and her closest family relationships involved a tight coil of love, loyalty, and dysfunction. “War was waged on physical and emotional levels,” she writes in Solo about her relationship with her older brother, Marcus. “[But] he was not only my tormentor; he was my closest family member and my protector.” Solo had a profound connection with her father, who was her first soccer coach, despite the fact that when she was seven, he kidnapped her and Marcus, an episode that ended with police surrounding the group, guns drawn. Her mother was an inspiringly independent figure, an environmental scientist with a black belt in karate, but once she began drinking heavily, she and Solo fought often. Solo herself, in fourth grade, stood up to a bully taunting another child, but in high school at the county fair, punched a girl she’d heard had slept with her boyfriend. (Solo’s mom’s response to the girl’s parents: “Did she tell you why?”)

Soccer, a sport in which Solo showed early promise, was something she fought for, too. When her mom and stepdad told her they couldn’t afford to keep paying the club and program fees associated with the sport, “I lost my sh*t,” she says in the 2016 documentary series Keeping Score. “I don’t think they really knew how much playing soccer and being successful at it burned inside of me.” To keep playing, Solo relied on donations from neighbors, family friends, and coaches.

Solo attended the University of Washington in Seattle, where a sometimes disheveled man often showed up at her games: her father, who had become homeless. Over the next few years, as Solo established herself as the starting goalkeeper for the national team, his life stabilized, and their relationship deepened. Then in the summer of 2007, he suddenly passed away. This was the backdrop, for Solo, of the 2007 World Cup in China, which took place three months later.

In the first four games, Solo performed well (before matches, she sprinkled her father’s ashes between the goalposts). But then, in what remains a baffling call, the coach benched her in favor of veteran goalkeeper Briana Scurry, who’d played in the ’99 World Cup. The Americans lost the semifinal 4-0. “It was the wrong decision,” Solo told the press afterward, in a shaky voice. “And I think anybody who knows anything about the game knows that. There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves.”

It says something about Solo’s single-mindedness that even today, she doesn’t second-guess her comments. “I didn’t throw anybody under the bus,” she says. “I believed in myself.” But her remarks were seen as so beyond the pale by her teammates that even her father’s death didn’t serve as a mitigating factor. Solo had to fly home on a separate flight and wasn’t allowed to eat with the group for weeks. At one point, she walked onto an elevator only to have her teammates step off. More broadly, she found herself amid a swirl of public support and condemnation that she’s since encountered again and again (her gifts to the think-piece economy have been considerable). Would a man have prompted the same censure? Was the team’s response fair? Was a certain level of swagger essential to being a world-class goalkeeper?

The position, after all, requires not just athleticism and rapid reflexes, but hard-headed fortitude. “The mentality of a goalkeeper is very different from that of a field player,” Scurry says. “Partly because the ratio of responsibility to praise is flipped on its head.” While tending goal, Solo threw herself around with an abandon that suggested she was made of a material less destructible than flesh and bone. She had ferocious focus. She also projected a combination of fearlessness and defiance that had the power to change the tenor of a game. “Just her presence on the field elevates the rest of the team’s play,” wrote the New Yorker’s Caitlin Kelly in 2015. “They seem to attack more aggressively, more confidently, knowing that she’s protecting the net.” Kelly’s article, by the way, was also a think piece. “But is it worth it?” she added.

After the 2007 World Cup, Solo worked her way back into her team’s (semi) good graces. And in the fickle way these things can go, by the next one, in 2011, when the U.S. took silver, she was a marketable media darling, with endorsem*nts rumored to be in the seven figures. “Now look at her,” read a 2011 ESPN piece about Solo published a week after her season of Dancing With the Stars launched, and a month before she posed nude on the cover of ESPN’s “The Body” issue. “America can’t get enough.” Which is how things might have continued if, on the eve of her wedding, Stevens hadn’t been arrested for domestic violence.

They’d met in college, but got to know each other in their midtwenties, while Stevens played for the Seattle Seahawks, followed by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Then in the fall of 2011, Stevens, no longer in the NFL, grabbed Solo’s hands over sushi in L.A. and told her he loved her. “I didn’t know what to say,” Solo says. “So I said, ‘f*ck you,’ and we didn’t talk for a year.” The next time they did, “everything just fell to the side,” she says. They decided to get married two months later.

What Solo says happened the night before her wedding is that a small group came over to her home, a graceful spread with sprawling views. “We thought everyone could just be happy for us,” she says. “It was dumb.” Instead, around 4 a.m., “our two asshole brothers, basically, get into this argument.” When cops arrived, they discovered that Solo had a bloody elbow and arrested Stevens. (This story is echoed in a subsequent statement Marcus gave a year after the incident, in 2013.) Stevens was released without charges, and he and Solo married hours later—“It was the most triumphant day,” she says—but it forever changed how Solo was perceived.

It also meant that when Solo was arrested two years later, for domestic violence, people were less likely to give her the benefit of the doubt. This time, the fight was between Solo, her half sister, and her 17-year-old nephew—police reports depict an argument that escalated into a physical altercation in which everyone considered themselves the victim. Solo pleaded not guilty, and charges were dropped on procedural grounds in January 2015. A week later, Stevens bought Solo a Gucci dress and they went out to celebrate; on their way home, Stevens, driving a USSF van, was charged with a DUI.

The World Cup was held in Canada that summer, and during the first week, the TV show Outside the Lines aired an episode dedicated to the incident. (The case was later reopened, then eventually dropped again.) But whatever pressure Solo was under didn’t impact her goalkeeping. One of her most impressive saves took place during the semifinal against Germany. After a German player was granted a penalty kick, Solo stalled. Germany is known for never missing PKs, but Solo sauntered to her water bottle. She took a sip. She looked out at the stadium, where the crowd was making so much noise it was as much a physical vibration as a sound. Finally she stepped back to the net and the whistle blew. The player kicked left and Solo threw her body to the right, but it didn’t matter. The ball was wide. “We knew right then we were going to win the World Cup,” defender Ali Krieger says in The National Team. “That was it. That’s when we knew: This is ours.”

The final was watched by a reported 25 million Americans and remains the country’s most-viewed soccer match, male or female. But the tournament also highlighted long-standing discrepancies between the women’s team and the men’s. It was played on artificial turf, an undisputedly more difficult terrain than natural grass, whereas the men’s World Cup has always been on grass. When the women won, the team’s bonus was $2 million. In 2014, when the men lost in the sixteenth round, theirs was $9 million.

The women’s team had long chafed against the sport’s culture of chauvinism, epitomized by now former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who in the mid-aughts suggested that to increase the popularity of the women’s game, “They could, for example, have tighter shorts.” And they had pushed for better treatment and pay. All the way back in 1995, after captain Julie Foudy conferred with Billie Jean King, top players threatened to boycott the Olympics if the USSF didn’t pay them bonuses equal to the men. (The federation responded by locking them out of a training camp.) But Solo believed the team never fought back forcefully enough. “Everybody else just kind of went along with everything,” says U.S. forward Carli Lloyd, a close friend of Solo’s. “But Hope was okay with confrontation. I think she really jump-started the conversation.”

In 2013, Solo argued for a strike but was overruled. Then in 2014, at Solo’s urging, the team replaced the lawyer who’d long represented the players’ union with Nichols, known for his pugnacious approach. Nichols then hired Jeffrey Kessler and his colleagues at Winston & Strawn as outside counsel. (Kessler handled Tom Brady’s Deflategate, among other high-profile cases.) One of their opening moves was filing the EEOC suit.

It represented “an almost classic example of gender discrimination,” Kessler told ELLE at the time. In 2016, if the women won every one of their required 20 annual exhibition games, they could make $99,000. If the men lost everyone, they’d be paid $100,000. And while top female players earned a salary similar to that of top men—in 2015, Solo made about $366,000—lower-tier male players could make 10 times as much as comparable women. The claim also referenced the federation’s own financial reports, which stated that in 2015 the women generated $24 million in event revenue, $2 million more than the men.

Whatever cohesion existed between Solo and her teammates when the EEOC case was filed, though, was interrupted when the team was again engulfed in Solo-related controversy after her comments at the Rio Olympics and subsequent termination. Many suggested that it reflected a double standard. Some saw a nefarious intent: “I think there’s probably some legal strategy going on with it all,” U.S. forward Megan Rapinoe said in Keeping Score (which is what Solo believes). Others saw it as inevitable. “[It] was a lifetime achievement award,” quipped Solo’s former teammate Abby Wambach.

The legal strategies of the team and Solo have since unfolded on separate, if similar, paths. But as clear-cut as their current cases against USSF can sound, the story is not simple. (Nichols now represents Solo; Kessler represents the team.) Unlike, say, the NBA and WNBA, two separate for-profit sports leagues, USSF is a nonprofit that oversees both the men’s and women’s teams. “And it’s illegal [for a single employer] to pay women less than men for doing the same job,” Nichols says. But as USSF stated in its response to the team’s lawsuit, filed in May, the women receive guaranteed salaries, while the men do not. (Unlike the women, the men tend to have substantial professional club contracts to fall back on.) The response also declares that differences in pay “are based on differences in the aggregate revenue,” meaning the men’s team makes more money, not necessarily through events but via sponsorship and TV rights. Which is likely true for broadcast rights—the men’s games, on average, have more viewers—but harder to ascertain with sponsorship.

Things only get more complicated from there. FIFA, for example, owns broadcast rights to World Cup games and chooses their allocations—not USSF. (Kessler argues this is irrelevant, since the money flows through USSF, which “has to comply with U.S. legal standards.”) And some of the women’s initial complaints have been rectified, such as their per diem totaling $60, compared to the men’s $75. What USSF’s critics often point out is that it has over $160 million in reserves. “The equal pay issue in soccer is not about a lack of money,” Pielke says. “Basically, U.S. Soccer does what it wants and no one tells them no.”

Relations between Solo and the team remain strained. When a reunion for former players was held in L.A. last spring, Solo was invited but didn’t attend. “This isn’t a new fight for her,” says Gallimore, when asked about the disconnect. “But Hope Solo gives everyone else a reason to take their eyes off the problem. That’s the reality.”

Either way, Solo continues to agitate for change. Last fall, she published a Guardian op-ed about the lack of diversity in U.S. Soccer titled “Something Is Broken When USA Women Are Dominated by the White Girls Next Door.” Seven months earlier, she ran for president of USSF, an unpaid position. She didn’t expect to win, she says. “But I knew my voice was important.”

At the election, in a hotel ballroom near SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, Solo was unsparing when she addressed the room. “A vote for [the establishment candidates] is a vote for the status quo: disunity, discord, and more failure,” she said. (“Okay, thank you, Hope,” said the outgoing president, Sunil Gulati, the hint of condescension in his voice a clear indication of how she’s perceived within the federation.)

What almost no one knew was that after a long period of trying, Solo had recently become pregnant, then miscarried. A week passed before Solo, still in a lot of pain, learned she’d actually been pregnant with twins, and one was ectopic. “The doctor said I was hours from dying,” she says. “They ended up having to remove my fallopian tube.” Days later, she was in Orlando. “That speech took a lot,” she says. “Even before all that, it would have taken courage.”

Since then, she’s begun IVF, and has also worked to become more familiar with the area in which she’s settled, where Confederate flags are ubiquitous and some of the only friends she and Stevens have made hang a photo of Trump in their dining room. “I can’t always be quiet,” she says, a fact so obvious I briefly think she’s joking. She’s also designed “No Littering” signs for her property—“It’s a pet peeve of mine,” she says—but at the farmers’ market, one is in the back of her truck. “I think they were using it for target practice,” she says. And this past May, with the Women’s World Cup about to begin, she broadcast some good news: an arbitration panel had ruled the U.S. Olympic Committee had to hear a complaint she’d filed while running for federation president, accusing the USSF of illegally favoring men’s soccer.

In 2015, on Good Morning America, she sounded remorseful. “I’m a work in progress,” she said. That same year, ESPN reported she’d been working with a spiritual counselor and that Stevens had gone into rehab. But she told me that she’s never had a spiritual counselor and that while Stevens went into rehab, it was only to challenge himself and help her save her job. She also says she has few regrets, though she wishes she’d cut people out of her life sooner. (She refers to her half sister as being like Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones.) “But in the grand scheme of things, the struggles that I’ve had are really not that big of a deal,” she says. “My mom [drank] a lot, but she became sober, too, which is pretty incredible.” Her dad made some mistakes, “but at least I had a father who I knew loved me.”

At the market, I ask a few times if she misses the intensity of goalkeeping. “I think I needed this sense of peace,” she says. But later she texts, worried she’s painted an overly idyllic image of her life. She describes having to put animals down when they get hurt and dealing with wildfires and coyotes. “I guess I wanted to tell you because we just had a semi-out- of-control burn day, and it scared me half to death,” she writes, referring to a controlled burn on her property. “We see life and death very often. So much of what we do can be catastrophic if we make mistakes. It's not for the faint of heart.”

Hair by Ashley Watts; Makeup by Pi Leonard at the Powder Group; On-set production by Robert Liberatore at Moledro Media; Location: BB&T Soccer Complex at Bryan Park, North Carolina.

This article originally appeared in the July 2019 issue of ELLE.

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