Brittney Griner prisoner swap AP 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 two-time 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. Julian-Varnon, 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.”
The deal drew criticism from some prominent Republicans, who lamented that the U.S. had not gotten Whelan home and who complained that the administration had given up a convicted felon as notorious as Bout. Administration officials, for their part, conceded that such prisoner swaps can carry a heavy price but also said it was unacceptable for Griner to remain locked up and that the deal that they reached was the only one that could secure her release.