Watch Billie Jean King becomes first solo female athlete to win Congressional Gold Medal Gold News

Billie Jean King has been identified all over again for her irreplaceable affect on girls’s sports activities.

The tennis legend was once formally awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Friday, making her the first particular person female athlete to obtain the respect. The invoice in the back of her nomination in particular acknowledges “her courageous and groundbreaking leadership in advancing equal rights for women in athletics, education, and society.”

That invoice was once first offered on Sept. 20, 2023, the fiftieth anniversary of the “Battle of the Sexes,” wherein King defeated former males’s No. 1 Bobby Riggs within the most-watched tennis fit of all time.

Before King, the one girls to win the award have been the female individuals of the 1980 U.S. Olympic crew, who have been avoided from competing within the Games due to the American-led boycott of the Soviet Union host.

The complete listing of athletes to win the Congressional Gold Medal are:

1. Roberto Clemente (1973)

2. 1980 US Summer Olympic Team (1980)

3. Joe Louis (1982)

4. Jesse Owens (1988)

5. Jackie Robinson (2003)

6. Byron Nelson (2006)

7. Arnold Palmer (2009)

8. Jack Nicklaus (2014)

9. Larry Doby (2018)

10. Steve Gleason (2019)

11. Greg LeMond (2020)

12. Willie O’Ree (2022)

13. Billie Jean King (2024)

King was once additionally awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom through Barack Obama in 2009. She was once the first female athlete to win that award as smartly. Before King, best 5 different athletes had gained each the Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal: Clemente, Owens, Robinson, Palmer and Nicklaus.

Billie Jean King fought for equivalent pay, and gained

It’s arduous to recall to mind a unmarried one who has made a larger mark on girls’s sports activities than the 80-year-old King. Her legacy is going a ways past her excellence at the court docket, which contains 39 Grand Slam titles (12 in singles, 16 in doubles and 11 in blended doubles).

The box of ladies’s sports activities can be unrecognizable as of late had it now not been for King’s founding of the Virginia Slims Circuit, and later the WTA. Frustrated with the pay disparity between women and men in tennis, King and 8 different athletes shaped the breakaway excursion and located monetary luck with their very own sponsors and tv companions. King’s win within the “Battle of the Sexes” was once additionally a landmark second for ladies’s sports activities.

Today, all primary tennis tournaments award equivalent prize cash to women and men, an aberration from different sports activities.

King has additionally been widely known as a pioneer for the LGBTQ neighborhood, confirming her identification as a lesbian in 1981 and serving as an emblem for homosexual rights since.