In her former identity as Bruce, she was an acclaimed “All American Hero” of the sport. Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner is moving the world in a different way.
Olympic champion. Acclaimed “All-American Hero” of sports during the Cold War. Hollywood actor. Racer. Businessman. Kylie Jenner’s father. Kim Kardashian’s stepfather. A woman in a man’s body. Icon of the transgender movement. A person with many facets and contradictions.
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Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner, celebrates her 75th birthday on Monday – and can look back on a life like no other.
As Bruce Jenner, an American Olympic hero
Born on October 28, 1949 in the town of Mount Cisco in New York and retrained from a footballer to a decathlete at college due to an injury, Jenner experienced the first key moment of her sports career in Munich in 1972.
As a young athlete, Jenner took 10th place in the decathlon at the 1972 Olympics and found inspiration in the superior winner Mykola Awilow from the USSR (who fled to Germany in 2022 because of the Russian war against his Ukrainian homeland). “For the first time I knew what I wanted out of my life and this guy had it,” Jenner later said ESPN: “I started my training at midnight, running through the streets of Munich. From then until 1976 I trained in Montreal every day, six to eight hours a day, 365 days a year.”
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Anyone who knows Jenner’s story knows what the effort was worth: Jenner developed into a world record athlete, winning gold in Canada with 8,618 points ahead of his West German rival Guido Kratschmer and defending champion Awilow. It was a triumph that made Jenner an enormously popular folk hero – especially because he recaptured the supreme discipline of athletics from the Soviets.
Even before the Games, Jenner had decided to end his career after the Olympics. The second career in the entertainment industry began.
Second career in Hollywood
The telegenic model athlete received countless offers from the film, television and advertising industries, appeared as a motorcycle cop in “CHiPs” and a suspect in “Murder is her hobby”. Jenner was also in discussion for the role of “Superman” before Christopher Reeve got the nod. Jenner’s CV also includes a short career as a GT racing driver and various business ventures.
Since 2007, Jenner has been omnipresent in the reality series “Keeping up with the Kardashians” – Jenner was married for the third time to Kris Kardashian, the matriarch of the famous family clan.
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Jenner’s life off stage is eventful and sometimes tragically overshadowed: Shortly after winning the Olympics in 1976, little brother Burt died in a car accident, and at the beginning of 2015 Bruce was also involved in a tragic car accident in which a woman died. A few weeks later, Jenner came more than ever into the attention of the American and global public.
Caitlyn Jenner: A complex icon
In a major interview with ABC, Jenner revealed her transgender identity, saying that since she was a teenager she has struggled with gender incongruence, not identifying with her assigned identity as a man: “I am a woman in every way.” A few months later, Jenner gave her new name known: “Call me Caitlyn,” she greeted from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, photographed by star photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Jenner’s public transformation (surgical adjustment followed at the beginning of 2017) was and is a milestone for public awareness and understanding of the complex subject of transsexuality. Jenner became the world’s best-known trans person and activist – although her positions are also controversial within the community.
As much as Jenner is attacked by yesterday’s ghosts for who she is: she sees herself as conservative, votes for Donald Trump, and joins regularly Fox News on, is also against the participation of trans women born as men in women’s sports – and therefore also opposed trans swimmer Lia Thomas in a highly publicized controversy.
Caitlyn Jenner was and is not a woman who likes to fit into boxes.
