Brittney Griner prisoner swap is Associated Press Sports Story of the Year

The return of Brittney Griner to the United States in a dramatic prisoner swap with Russia marked the culmination of a 10-month ordeal that captivated world attention, a saga that landed at the intersection of sports, politics, race and gender identity — and wartime diplomacy.

Griner had for years been known to fans of women’s basketball — college player of the year, a twotime Olympic gold medalist and WNBA all-star who dominated her sport. But her arrest on drug-related charges at a Moscow airport in February elevated her profile in ways neither she nor her supporters would have ever hoped for, making her by far the most high-profile American to be jailed abroad — and her saga the AP Sports Story of the Year.

Her case not only brought unprecedented public attention to the dozens of Americans wrongfully detained by foreign governments, but it also emerged as a major inflection point in U.S.-Russia diplomacy at a time of deteriorating relations prompted by Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

“I think her celebrity and the coinciding with the time of the invasion of Ukraine, those two points together is what made her case national news, international news, but also I think it made it made it feel much more fraught than a lot of the earlier cases of Americans being detained in Russia,” Kimberly St. JulianVarnon, a Russian historian and doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview days before Griner was freed.

After months of strained negotiations, and an extraordinarily rare public revelation by the Biden administration that it had made a “substantial proposal” to get home Griner and another detained American, Paul Whelan, the case resolved last week with a prisoner swap in which the WNBA star was exchanged in the United Arab Emirates for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

“It feels so good to be home! The last 10 months have been a battle at every turn,” Griner posted on Instagram. “I dug deep to keep my faith and it was the love from so many of you that helped keep me going. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone for your help.”

For weeks after Griner’s arrest at a Moscow airport in February, where Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges containing cannabis oil, her supporters kept a relatively low profile in hopes her case would be quickly resolved.

In May, though, the State Department announced she’d been designated as a wrongful detainee, giving the U.S. government’s top hostage negotiator the authority to try to secure her release outside the legal system.

She pleaded guilty over the summer, admitting that she had the canisters in her luggage but that she packed them inadvertently in her haste to make her flight and had no criminal intent.

From there, attention turned to the possibility of a prisoner swap, especially after Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s announcement of a “substantial proposal.”

All the while, Griner’s saga sparked discussions about pay equity for WNBA players that leads women to play overseas to supplement their salaries.

She was in Russia to supplement her WNBA income where she earned roughly $230,000 in base salary. She earned five times that while playing overseas in the winter in Russia.