When competing for Canada in track at the last Olympic Games in Tokyo, she was Crystal Emmanuel.
Now she’s officially Crystal Emmanuel-Ahye — and in a message to Outsports, the athlete says she married fellow sprinter Michelle-Lee Ahye of Trinidad and Tobago last year.
Both women are 32-years-old and are about to take part in their fourth Olympics. At Rio 2016, they raced directly against each other in the 200m semifinals, 100m heats and 4x100m relay final.
Three years ago, they were in the same 100m semifinal in Tokyo — and they could yet do battle once more in the 4x100m relay competition in Paris, only this time as a married couple.
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But for now, let’s celebrate the fact they are both four-time Olympians, as well as the happy news of their wedding.
Having noted Toronto-born Crystal’s surname change, and following a tip from LGBTQ historian Tony Scupham-Bilton, Outsports reached out to her to ask about her relationship with Ahye, who won 100m gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
“We got married a year ago in the US,” replied Emmanuel-Ahye.
She followed up with a message for the couple’s LGBTQ fans: “We really appreciate all the love and the support.”
Injury problems severely hampered Emmanuel-Ahye’s preparations for Paris. In a recent interview with Now Toronto, she said: “I had a lot of injuries and also mental setbacks where I wanted to give up because last season I didn’t compete.
“I was injured. I tore my quad in two places. And I was just like, ‘OK, I think this is it. Maybe it’s time to step back and see, am I still motivated to be in the sport or is it time to go see what else is in the world?’”
However, she kept fighting and at the World Athletics Relays in the Bahamas in May, she anchored the Canadian 4x100m women to a second-place finish in their heat, good enough to clinch an Olympic berth again after the team failed to qualify for Tokyo last time out.
Emmanuel-Ahye, who grew up in Barbados before moving to Canada, added to Now Toronto: “My excitement is the 4x100m women’s team — we know we’re going to do what we have to to make it, to be successful in this Olympics.”
Meanwhile, Ahye will compete in the individual 100m and 4x100m relay in Paris. She has also been given the honor of flagbearer for Trinidad and Tobago in the Opening Ceremony.
Resident in Texas, she had looked set to miss the Tokyo Olympics after being handed a two-year ban in January 2020 for “whereabouts failures” due to having missed three out-of-competition doping tests in a 12-month period.
Ahye strongly denied being at fault for the second missed test and the Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee filed an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), only to be told that the matter had been raised too late.
The suspension was backdated to begin on the date of her last missed test in April 2019 — but with the Olympics being delayed by a year until August 2021, Ahye was able to compete in the Games after all.
She ended up missing out on the 100m final in controversial circumstances, having been squeezed out by just one thousandth of a second.
Ahye’s residency in the U.S. is significant as same-sex marriage and civil unions are not legally recognized in Trinidad and Tobago.
Until 2018, the Caribbean country criminalized same-sex activity for both men and women, but then its High Court found the law unconstitutional following a landmark lawsuit by activist Jason Jones.
However, an appeal was filed which is still working its way through what is expected to be legal process taking several years.
