The Other Rapinoe

The house was dark. Rachael Rapinoe walked into the kitchen and turned on the light. She sliced a banana in half, placed a pint of vanilla ice cream on the counter to thaw, and scooped a pat of butter into a saute pan. The pat morphed into a puddle and began to bubble. Rachael added cinnamon, brown sugar, and brandy, stirring the mixture slowly over low heat. As the sweet, nutty fragrance of bananas Foster filled the kitchen, Rachael’s loneliness began to melt away. Her nightly Vicodin was just kicking in.

She was at her parents’ home in Redding, California, recovering from yet another surgery. Her twin sister, Megan, had been drafted by the Chicago Red Stars, in the Women’s Professional Soccer league, and was living large more than 2,000 miles away. Rachael, meanwhile, spent her days in physical rehab, her nights in a fog of painkillers. With recurring injuries came recurring opioid prescriptions. Percocet at first, but it was too heavy. “I felt like a zombie,” she says. She preferred Vicodin.

It was 8:30 p.m., maybe 9. Rachael’s mother, Denise, was nearing the end of her shift at Jack’s Bar & Grill, the steakhouse in town where she’d waited tables for 22 years. Her father, Jim, was already asleep, to be up at 5 a.m. for his job as a general contractor. Her older brother, Brian, was at Pelican Bay State Prison, doing time for residential burglary and manufacturing weapons—crimes he committed, in part, to feed his heroin addiction.

Rachael took her dessert to the kitchen table, sat down, and began to eat. It was 2009, and doctors were doling out opioids with abandon—driving an epidemic that had already hit Redding especially hard. According to data gathered by The Washington Post, between 2006 and 2014 more oxycodone and hydrocodone were flowing into Shasta County, where Redding is located, than almost anywhere west of Kansas—a rate of 96 pills per resident annually. For Rachael, one pill at a time became two. Getting more was easy.

Just a few years prior, Rachael had been on the same path to soccer stardom as Megan, now one of the most accomplished players in American history. “I always remember Rachael being the best athlete that I knew, certainly the best in our household,” Megan says. When the twins were young, Denise says that Rachael was the “stronger, faster, better” athlete. She was taller, too, Megan slower to develop. Once Megan caught up, in high school, they both played club soccer with the elite Elk Grove Pride, in Sacramento, made the state and regional Olympic Development Program teams, and got recruited by numerous Division-I schools. 

Megan would go on to win Olympic gold and two World Cups, and become an LGBTQIA+ icon. Rachael would find herself back in Redding, making bananas Foster every night for over a year. “I didn’t want to just give myself a scoop of ice cream; that would take two seconds,” she says. “I wanted something that was more of a process.” The Vicodin added a warm layer of comfort. She got her first prescription at 21. By 24, she was addicted. 

At 37, Rachael is only now beginning to publicly reckon with the ways she’s struggled with her drug use and her mental health—an ordeal that she says even her immediate family and closest friends didn’t fully understand. “I have experienced a lot of pain and suffering, as we all have,” she says, “but I never wanted to show that.” 

She spent years wrestling with that pain, and contemplating better ways to treat it. In 2019, Rachael co-founded a CBD wellness brand, Mendi, for athletes seeking an alternative to opioids. Cannabis is hardly a panacea, but studies have indicated that in many cases it can be a viable replacement for pharmaceuticals like Vicodin and Percocet. She hopes her niche will set Mendi apart in a $5 billion industry where it can be tough to find a foothold. 

But Rachael’s intentions transcend the success or failure of yet another CBD company. Alongside her investors, who include Olympic gold medalists, several members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, and a co-owner of the Seattle Storm, she wants to usher in nothing less than a paradigm shift in how we deal with pain. They are responding to an urgent crisis—a sports culture that valorizes serious injuries, and normalizes the prescription of opioids. But as Rachael’s experience shows, physical injury often gives way to psychic anguish. And a few Vicodin can numb far more than broken bones or torn ligaments. 

Redding is a modest logging hub of 94,000 in California’s densely forested northern interior, two hours south of the Oregon state line. By the early 1980s, when the Rapinoes moved to the area, deforestation jobs were largely being replaced by machines and the poverty rate had begun to rise. The family settled on a rural property eight miles east and a world away from the hardscrabble city, in the town of Palo Cedro, where Rachael and Megan were born on July 5th, 1985. Growing up the twins liked to kick a ball around their four-acre yard. Rachael also loved spending time with their chickens, fishing for crawdads, and building forts out of branches and leaves. “I appreciated the quietness of what our yard provided,” she says. “What the trees provided.”

Home, by contrast, was chaos: a revolving door of half-siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. “My family unit is like, ‘If you’re blood, you’re family, and if you’re family, anyone can live in this house,’” Rachael says. Brian was in and out, too, between stints in juvenile detention facilities and drug rehabs across the country. He first got arrested at 16, for bringing meth to school. By 18 he was using heroin. “There was a lot of shuffling and substance abuse in the family,” Rachael says. “I could tell it was serious, and kind of scary, but we didn’t really talk about it.” 

Brian had a son who became Rachael and Megan’s de facto little brother, joining the household along with Denise’s two children from a previous marriage, and her youngest sister, who effectively became Rachael and Megan’s big sister. Their mother meant well, but her attention was fractured. She was “going to take care of anyone in our family that needed help,” Rachael says. “No questions asked, and definitely not checking in on, you know, how it was affecting us kids.” It was indeed affecting them: By the time Rachael was in high school, she began having panic attacks. Denise would find her in the middle of the night, wide awake, lying on the kitchen floor, and just tell her to go back to bed. “We didn’t have the tools to deal with anxiety,” Rachael says.

Denise Rapinoe, née Kimball, was born in Texas, the second oldest of eight children. When she was seven, the family moved to San Bernardino, California. She says that her father, a Korean War veteran, may have been bipolar, and was definitely an alcoholic. At 18, she left home to get married and moved to San Diego. By 23, when she met Jim, then a 29-year-old commercial fisherman, Denise was a divorced mother of two. “She sort of had to learn to roll up her sleeves and just keep moving forward,” Rachael says. 

Rachael and Megan inherited their mother’s tenacity; nowhere did it manifest more clearly than athletics. From an early age, they knew that sports would be their way out of Redding, which by the mid-2000s had become a conservative stronghold in the otherwise blue state, with militias and secessionists dotting the countryside. Rachael initially didn’t want to go to college with Megan, who got some big offers that Rachael didn’t. But Megan was still so shy that Rachael didn’t want to leave her. They started telling schools that if a program wasn’t recruiting both of them, they weren’t interested. 

And so, in 2004, the Rapinoe twins accepted offers from the University of Portland. That fall, Megan was invited to play in the FIFA U-19 World Championship, in Thailand, and deferred her entry to UP until spring. Rachael went alone to Portland, where intense practices, dining hall food, and a genetic predisposition to anemia sent her iron levels so low that she could barely run, let alone play soccer. When Megan arrived in January 2005, she came out and embraced the city’s thriving LGBTQIA+ scene. Rachael, struggling with far more than low iron, embraced the church. 

Rachael had begun secretly dating another woman on the UP soccer team, and it tortured her. “It was very confusing, because I was raised Christian and I didn’t really have a lot of language around gay and lesbianism and same-sex [relationships],” she says. When they were together, Rachael was happy; when they were apart, she “just had a lot of shame.” She began attending a charismatic church in Portland where congregants gathered to help her “pray the gay away.” The church became a refuge for Rachael during her “more intense bouts of sadness or confusion,” she says. “They thought they were praying the sadness away for me, protecting me from my demons.” 

Rachael told Megan about her girlfriend their sophomore year. Her efforts to alter her sexuality through prayer weren’t working and she didn’t know what to do. Denise, sensing something was wrong, went to Portland to check on her daughters. She arrived on a cold, wet night in January 2006. When Rachael arrived at Denise’s hotel, around 10:30 p.m., she felt like she’d walked into an ambush. Sitting on the bed, Megan had told their mother she was gay, and outed Rachael too. Denise says now that she wasn’t “that surprised” about Megan, but “with Rachael, I was kinda taken aback. I really didn’t see it.” Rachael felt blindsided and betrayed. “I had no idea that Megan was planning on talking to our mom about this,” she says. She felt angry, too. She wasn’t gay, she thought. She was lost, that’s all. 

In retrospect, Megan regrets outing her sister to their mom. “It was not my thing to say and irresponsible to do so, and a little bit reckless,” she says. But at the time, she says, she felt so confident in her own sexuality that she didn’t see why it was a big deal. “I knew that I’m gay and I knew there was nothing wrong with it,” she says, but “I kind of threw Rachael into that, and I don’t think she was ready.”

In the spring of 2006, Rachael received the last of 35 iron infusions—an amount so high that she was getting her treatment along with chemotherapy patients in the hematology and oncology wing of the hospital—and that fall, her junior year, she began playing the best soccer of her life. She resumed her position as a forward, was named team captain, and won All-West Coast Conference Second Team. “She was unbelievable,” says Lauren Hanson, then a UP women’s soccer assistant coach.

Then, midway through a game against Purdue in the fall of 2007, Rachael planted her left foot to strike the ball with her right and heard a pop. She’d blown out her left ACL, and would spend the next month fighting a bacterial infection, and the six weeks after that back in Redding, convalescing from surgery, high on Vicodin. She made a comeback for the 2008 season, only to blow out the same ACL again. Back to Redding for reconstructive surgery. More rehab, more Vicodin. “I was devastated,” she says. Rachael doesn’t recall anyone asking her about a history of drug abuse in her family, nor did her parents connect the dots. “I don’t even know if they understood what these pills were in relation to my brother’s heroin use,” she says. 

Around that time, Shasta County saw a 600-percent increase in heroin overdoses, largely a result of people getting hooked on opioids and then turning to the cheaper, more readily available street drug. Rachael never went down that road, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t at high risk of doing so. One study has shown that student athletes who are prescribed opioids for sports-related injuries are at increased risk for non-prescription abuse, while another suggests that unemployment, depression, and feelings of isolation further exacerbate that risk. Rachael was saddled with all three. “Part of the reason I was in so much pain is that it was the height of me coming to grips with my sexuality,” she says. “I was very sad and depressed and alone. I felt so alone.” 

Rachael started going to Bethel Church, a megachurch in Redding with reportedly more than 11,000 members that throws its weight behind conservative politicians and staunchly defends its gay conversion therapy practices. She told her mother what she’d been telling herself for years: Maybe she was bi, or just hadn’t found the right guy yet. Denise saw Rachael’s confusion as an opportunity to steer her back to dating men and gave her evangelical Christian books on how not to be gay. “I wish that I had handled it a little differently,” Denise says. “I could have been more open to her and encouraged her to talk freely about it.” To 24-year-old Rachael, though, “it was a constant reminder of her not really accepting me.” The Vicodin helped to numb that pain, too, a secret Rachael kept carefully guarded. “I didn’t know the sort of depth or level that mentally she was struggling,” Megan says. “What she was really going through.” 

Rachael began to wean herself off Vicodin in the winter of 2010. She started swimming laps at the local community college, cycling, and even running. By spring, she was competing in triathlons. She’d also reconnected with a couple of high school friends who recognized that Rachael was gay even if she continued to fight it, and with their support she felt emboldened to finally come out. “I had to be comfortable in my sexuality, because there was so much shame,” she says. She stopped going to Bethel and told her parents, unequivocally, that she was gay. 

She returned to soccer again, too, first coaching at a UCLA summer camp and training with the varsity team, and then playing with an Icelandic professional outfit. The following summer she was back in LA, preparing to join another professional team, in Sweden, when she got tackled in a co-ed match and fractured her ankle. She was just about to turn 26: Game over. She was tired of getting injured, of rehab, of the endless cycle of opioids. “I decided to hang up the cleats,” she says. She took a job as an executive assistant in Fredericksburg, Texas, in the heart of Hill Country. It reminded Rachael of home. “It’s a really pretty area, very remote,” she says. It gave her space to think. She began to imagine a career in business and working with athletes, but it would take her several years to realize her true mission: fighting the culture that had so limited and frustrated her as a young woman, and that prevented her from figuring out who she was and who she wanted to be.

Rachael and Megan were born in the midst of the Just Say No era, when anti-drug propaganda equated cannabis with heroin and crack cocaine. This messaging helped to normalize policies like California’s three-strikes law of 1994, which mandated stiff sentences for third offenses, however minor they might be, and overwhelmingly ensnared people for marijuana possession. More colloquially, the era cemented pot as the first step along a dangerous path. “I definitely believed cannabis was a gateway drug,” Rachael says. 

But by 2015, the year Oregon legalized recreational cannabis use for adults over 21, Rachael was back in Portland and working as a performance coach, and athletes started telling her they were using the drug to mitigate the everyday aches and pains of training at a high level. Scientific studies corroborate their experience: In 2017 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reported that adults with chronic pain who are treated with cannabis or cannabinoids experience a “significant reduction” in symptoms. 

Rachael did some research and started microdosing THC, the cannabinoid that gets you high—a single hit off a joint, a fraction of an edible—and experimenting with CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid known for aiding sleep and inflammation. She found that together they helped her manage her anxiety and ongoing knee and ankle pain without the downsides of Vicodin. “Not that it fully goes away,” she says, but cannabis “just took the edge off.”  

In 2018, Rachael teamed up with two cannabis entrepreneurs, Kendra Freeman and Britt Price, and a commercial designer named Brett Schwager to develop a business plan for a CBD brand for athletes. Most professional sports leagues in the U.S., as well as the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the World Anti-Doping Agency, still had bans on all cannabinoids at the time, but they were slowly coming around on products that used CBD without a trace of THC. Rachael and her team had a vision for a line of CBD-infused gummies, tinctures, balms, and bath salts to help athletes with everything from physical pain to insomnia. Pretty much every other CBD brand in the market was promising the same, but Rachael wanted to prioritize purity in a way that her competition wasn’t. She knew her target customers couldn’t take any chances. Even if a progressive league like the WNBA were to lift its ban on THC, a positive test could still lead to disqualification from an international event, like the Olympics.

Mendi, which launched in September 2019, hasn’t been without its setbacks. Freeman, Price, and Schwager have since left the company. Rachael, the only elite athlete among the four, says they simply didn’t agree on how to best grow the company. Some saw it as “a race to the finish,” she says, while she wanted to take a more measured approach. Freeman declined an interview request, stating that she could not legally discuss the terms of her departure from the company. The other co-founders could not be reached for comment.

Now Mendi is just Rachael, two full-time employees, and two part-timers. Despite its small size, the company has sponsored two women’s pro soccer teams, the North Carolina Courage and the Utah Royals, and enlisted dozens of investors, most of them women, and many from the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities. “Rachael could be opening a zoo and I probably would wanna invest in it,” says five-time Olympic gold medalist Sue Bird, who began dating Megan in 2016 and has become like another sister to Rachael. “I just believe in her as a person; she’s really intentional in how she approaches things.” 

Bird underwent more than 10 sports-related surgeries during her 20-year career in the WNBA, and says that most athletes she knows always “had an extra bottle” of opioids in the cupboard. Bird never abused the pills, but their abundance in the professional sports world has led to some tragic outcomes. In 2019, a 27-year-old pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels named Tyler Skaggs died of an overdose of fentanyl-laced painkillers given to him by the team’s communications director. This dependency doesn’t always stop when athletes retire, either. According to a 2011 study, former NFL players reportedly use opioids at a rate four times that of the general population, often to battle lifelong afflictions that began on the field. 

Consider the case of Ryan O’Callaghan, a former offensive tackle for the New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs—and, like Rachael, a product of ’80s Redding who was closeted well into his twenties. For years he secretly managed his pain with cannabis until a coach caught him smoking pot and he was forced to switch to opioids. He became addicted, fell into a severe depression, and planned to kill himself as soon as his NFL career was over. Were it not for his trainer noticing O’Callaghan’s downward spiral, as he writes in his 2019 memoir, he would have followed through with it. He’d even written a suicide note to his parents. 

Now that some professional leagues, like the NFL, are loosening their restrictions on THC, while others, like the NBA and MLB, are suspending random in-season testing or lifting their bans altogether, Bird sees the sports world at a turning point. “With weed being legal now in a bunch of states, people are able to use it more, and use it more effectively,” she says. 

In 2021, Rachael partnered with NFL Hall of Famer Calvin Johnson (aka Megatron) to sell Mendi products out of his Michigan dispensary, Primitiv. Johnson had been prescribed opioids throughout his career, and he never liked how they made him feel. “My whole sense of balance, of proprioception, is just awful when I take those things,” Johnson says. “It just never did well on me.” Instead, starting in college, Johnson secretly managed his pain with cannabis, and launched Primitiv in 2021 with his former Detroit Lions teammate Rob Sims to serve other retired football players. He met Rachael at a cannabis conference in San Francisco, and immediately felt their values were aligned. 

The same year, Kyle Harrison, a now-retired lacrosse star who played for the U.S. in two World Lacrosse Championships, became a Mendi ambassador. He was in his late 30s and not recovering as well as he used to, he says, and Mendi products helped him to bounce back faster. He decided to invest in the company. “She’s exactly who she says she is,” Harrison says of Rachael, and as a Black lacrosse player in a predominantly white sport, he says he’s inspired by her willingness to advocate for marginalized groups. “I’m not sure if she gets enough credit for that,” he says. “I know it’s not easy.”

As of February this year, Rachael says that Mendi had raised $2.3 million, mostly from friends and family. But growth comes slowly and is never guaranteed. Rachael says she’s been approached by every major sports league in the country about sponsorship opportunities, but since the pandemic, the cost of sponsoring a team has become prohibitive—$25,000 and up for a National Women’s Soccer League team, and often upwards of $10 million per year for a men’s major league team. “We don’t have deep enough pockets,” she says. For now, she’s focusing on “owning our backyard,” the Pacific Northwest, and pivoting from elite athletes only to the broader endurance sports community. Ex-linemen and pitchers might have the most intense ailments, but Rachael’s experience has taught her that all kinds of athletes—from weekend joggers and rock climbers to sub-elite marathoners—are no more immune to the tolls of testing their bodily limits. 

Denise Rapinoe, who turns 70 this year, still works at Jack’s Bar & Grill. After nearly five decades as a waitress, she suffers from knee aches and arthritis in her fingers. Pain in her back, from a fall when she was 40, has grown worse with age. For years, she accepted chronic discomfort as part of life. Now she’s using Rachael’s balm and bath salts, and it’s brought some relief. “I take a lot of soaking baths,” she says. “I love that. It feels so good for my joints.” 

A few months ago, on Christmas Eve, she invited close to 30 people to a big house in Redding that Rachael, Megan, and Sue Bird had rented to accommodate the whole Rapinoe clan, along with partners and friends. It was the first time the extended family had been together for the holiday in more than 20 years. “Some people would probably like it a little bit smaller, but that’s not how my mom rolls,” Megan says with a laugh. 

Brian was there, too. He’s nearly two-and-a-half years off heroin and meth, living back home with Denise and Jim, and working as a general contractor while taking classes in computer science. He was released from prison in January 2022, and after spending the majority of his adult life in correctional institutions, he says he’s ready to straighten out. Not that it’s been easy. “​​I have pain issues,” he says. “I have anxiety, I have, you know, eating, sleeping issues, all this stuff.” But spending the holidays with his “little sisters” again was restorative, even if their relationship had changed. “They looked up to me growing up,” he says, “and now I definitely look up to them.”

On Christmas day, the three Rapinoe siblings did a workout together and then drove to their parents’ house. Denise and Jim live in a suburb now, but they still have a huge yard. Rachael brought her dog and the family took a walk around the property. It felt a lot like those long childhood afternoons among the chickens, crawdads, and trees. Only this time Rachael wasn’t seeking escape. “I think in the past there was a lot of pain, and then a lot of resentment, and then frustration,” she says. “Now we’re grateful that we could just be together.” 

After five days in Redding, Rachael went back to Portland, where she lives with her pitbull-boxer-plott hound mix and sits on the advisory board of the University of Portland women’s soccer team. In the months since Christmas, she has continued to reflect on her path from elite athlete to addict to wellness entrepreneur. She’s told people parts of her story over the years—the painkillers, the megachurches, the emotional turmoil—but is just starting to see how it all fits together. “It’s taken me a long time to get here,” she says, adding, “There’s still so much struggle in unraveling things.” But for the first time in Rachael Rapinoe’s life, she feels strong enough to be fully herself. The pain is starting to go away.  

David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, Runner’s World, and GQ. His May 2021 GQ story “The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home” was named one of Longreads’ Best Features of the Year.