US Soccer Star Carli Lloyd Breaks Silence on Her Teammates Kneeling During National Anthem

Soccer star Carli Lloyd said the kneeling by the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team had begun to pale as she approached her final Olympic match. During the 2021 Tokyo Games, Lloyd was the only player on the team not to…

IJR SyndicatedOct 22, 20234 min read

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“I’m sure, because I was the only one standing and everybody else was kneeling. I just thought that we had done enough of the kneeling and I just wanted to stand in my last world championship game,” she said.

Lloyd said she did not disapprove of the anti-racism sentiment that many who knelt said they were expressing.

“Look, there is no perfect nation. There’s a lot of things that need to be different. More respect that people need to show,” she said.

“I think we’ve gotten to a point where if it’s not a certain opinion, then other people can’t have their other opinions. It’s kind of contradicting itself. In that moment, I just kind of had enough of kneeling right before the game because we had done it for a whole year or so leading up,” Lloyd said.

When asked about the impact of the gesture, Lloyd said she supports “actionable change.”

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“And I just felt like it was just like a thing to do. Like it was just beginning to feel like a thing to do. It was an empty stadium. I don’t know how many people were watching the game. It was 10 seconds before, it wasn’t like our team was wearing coats, of doing … it was a global thing people were doing,” she said.

As the hosts kept quizzing her about the message she sent by doing as she saw fit, Lloyd pushed back.

“I think people maybe look into things too much,” she said. “You’re asking me, ‘What was your reason?’ I kneeled five other times and my last game, I was just honed in. I wanted a medal. I wanted to just focus on that.”

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In other comments, she said that as the team’s captain, she had not been a fan of kneeling when the fad began in 2016, promoted by teammate Megan Rapinoe in emulation of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, according to CBS.

“At that time, obviously there wasn’t a lot of other people that were doing that besides Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe decided to do that and I had conversations with Megan,” she said.

“This isn’t a personal thing. What she’s doing, it was distracting to our team. It was distracting other players to play, and I was a captain at the time as well so I said to her, ‘It’s not to dampen what you’re trying to achieve with it.’ It became everything was focused on Megan kneeling and nobody was talking about the reasoning why, is what I was trying to get at. … We were all just getting tired of, we’re all just talking about her kneeling on the sideline.”

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.