Chelsea Wolfe, a transgender BMX Freestyle rider, said in a since-deleted Facebook post that her goal was to “burn a US flag” at the Olympic podium.
“My goal is to win the Olympics so I can burn a US flag on the podium. This is what they focus on during a pandemic. Hurting trans children,” Wolfe wrote on Facebook on March 25, 2020, according to Fox News.
Wolfe explained herself in a statement to Fox News.
“Anyone who thinks that I don’t care about the United States is sorely mistaken,” Wolfe told Fox News. “One of the reasons why I work so hard to represent the United States in international competition is to show the world that this country has morals and values, that it’s not all of the bad things that we’re known for. I take a stand against fascism because I care about this country and I’m not going to let it fall into the hands of fascists after so many people have fought and sacrificed to prevent fascism from taking hold abroad. As a citizen who wants to be proud of my home country, I’m sure as hell not going to let it take hold here.”
Wolfe also reportedly joked about exploding former president Donald Trump’s head.
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“I would never say that someone should explode the head of the president. That would be illegal,” Wolfe wrote in Facebook comments according to a screenshot posted by Cheong. “But I will say ‘with dynamite.’ Because that’s just a sentence fragment and doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s not necessarily related to the sentence that came before it.”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) previously published a policy for transgender athletes that transitioned from male to female, allowing them to compete in female sports.
“The overriding sporting objective is and remains the guarantee of fair competition,” part of the IOC policy states.
Prior to her comments to Fox News, Wolfe published an Instagram post where she wrote, “I searched for so long trying to find out if there had ever been a professional trans BMX rider to show me that who I am would be okay and unfortunately I found no one.”
