LGBT Olympians

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) athletes have competed in the Olympic Games, either openly, or having come out some time afterward. Relatively few LGBT athletes have competed openly during the Olympics, and there has never been a gay man who has publicly come out before or during the Winter Olympics. Out of the 104 openly gay and lesbian participants in the Summer Olympics as of 2012, 53% have won a medal. Cyd Zeigler, Jr., founder of the LGBT athletics website Outsports, reasoned that this could be the result of the relieved focus and lack of "burden" an athlete would have after coming out, that "high-level athletes" are more likely to feel secure in coming out as their careers have been established, or their performance was mere coincidence and had no correlation with their sexual orientation at all.

Marc Naimark of the Federation of Gay Games called the lack of openly gay athletes a symptom, not the problem, of the Olympic Games. He said the International Olympic Committee should pressure countries to repeal anti-gay laws the same way it once excluded South Africa for its apartheid system of racial segregation, and "more recently, succeeded in getting all competing nations to include female athletes on their teams in London".

Alongside the Olympics, international multi-sport events have also been organized specifically for LGBT athletes, including the Gay Games and World OutGames

In the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, only 12 athletes out of the 10,708 participants were openly gay, lesbian or bisexual, including:

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