SALT LAKE CITY – FEBRUARY 21: Forward Caroline Ouellette #13 of Canada knocks down forward Julie Chu #13 of the USA as she tries to play the puck during the womens ice hockey gold medal game on February 21, 2002 at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic at the E Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images)
The steamy gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry on HBO Max has the internet abuzz, but have you heard of the real life hockey lesbians who went from rivals to wives?
American Olympian Julie Chu and Canadian Olympian Caroline Ouellette were rival team captains — who both happened to have the same jersey number — and faced off for the gold in the 2002 Winter Olympics. A few years later, they reconnected at a hockey camp and eventually became partners, going on to play against each other in more Olympic finals and world championships.
Amanda W. Timpson, the queer historian behind the Yesterqueers account, says that much like Shane and Ilya, the duo “couldn’t spend time together very often, they had to balance their focus on their careers and their teams with their relationship and they couldn’t be fully out.” Eventually they were indeed able to come out and now they are raising two kids together. A real life HEA!
They’re also not alone! There are at least two other examples of married rivals in the women’s hockey world, including Team USA’s Meghan Duggan and Canada’s Gillian Apps, and Canadian Olympian Jayna Hefford and her wife Kathleen Kauth of Team USA. Of course, this has nothing on women’s soccer, which, as far as I can tell from a non-sports-gay perspective, is as tangled a web as The L Word‘s chart on Alice’s wall, but it’s still more than we know about in the men’s side of the hockey world in real life.
Here’s hoping we get a sapphic version of Heated Rivalry someday. (And that the upcoming Cleat Cute project gets as much hype as that show is getting.)
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