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SPOTLIGHT | SOCCER It's one of the most powerful images in women's sports history. Brandi Chastain, after converting the penalty kick that gave the U.S.

its second women's World Cup title, dropped to her knees and ripped off her jersey in celebration, exposing her black sports bra to a live crowd of 90,000 and a national television audience that peaked at 40 million. Twenty-five years later it's still celebrated as a moment of unbridled joy, but also one of liberation. Never before — or since — has a team of women athletes played before a crowd that large in the U.



S. And rarely had a woman athlete felt so unburdened by societal constraints that she started taking her clothes off in public. "That was an iconic moment but it transcended sport.

People saw the raw emotion in that photograph and it made people feel differently about women," said Chrissy Franklin, an executive vice president with the sports and entertainment marketing firm Octagon. "She opened the door for women to be unapologetic about their success." If Title IX, Billie Jean King and Florence Griffith Joyner changed the way we thought about women athletes, Chastain and her teammates began to change the way we watched, consumed and supported women's sports.

It has been a long, slow and painful evolution, one that is still far from finished even as Caitlin Clark draws record crowds to WNBA arenas and the NWSL nearly outdraws the Cubs at Wrigley Field. But Chastain's journey from the floor of the Rose Bowl to th.

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