Images and Stories That Honor International Women’s Day

From Lisa Lane to Simone Biles, here are some of the stories behind the photos.

Full Frame is Sports Illustrated’s exclusive newsletter for subscribers. Coming to your inbox weekly, it highlights the stories and personalities behind some of SI’s photography.

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In honor of this week’s International Women’s Day, Sports Illustrated posted multiple galleries of iconic female athletes to the @sifullframe Instagram account, with photographs spanning decades.

One such photo from 1961 depicts Lisa Lane, who was the first chess player to be featured on the cover of SI.

John G. Zimmerman/Sports Illustrated

Lane and chess were also the subjects of a December 2018 piece in SI by Emma Baccellieri that detailed the disparities between male and female players in modern chess competition. Lane, Baccellieri wrote, “was the first to formally protest for women to be paid more, organizing a demonstration at the ’66 U.S women’s championship in New York.”

John G. Zimmerman/Sports Illustrated

Stories such as Lane’s may have helped lay the groundwork for that of Billie Jean King, the recipient of SI’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award in 2021. King detailed her stand against pay disparities in men’s and women’s tennis as well as her expanding focus on other issues she has championed in Jenny Vrentas’s December ’21 story.

Walter Iooss Jr./Sports Illustrated

It’s a tradition taken up by modern-day GOATs such as Simone Biles, who sat down for an interview and cover story with SI’s Stephanie Apstein. "I found my voice a little bit more,” Biles told Apstein before the Tokyo Olympics. “That’s also scary because people expect you to speak out, and sometimes it can be triggering, it can be hard, but I also know I’m helping other people."

Kate Powers/Sports Illustrated

The cover for last summer’s Olympic preview issue was shot by Kate Powers, who couldn’t believe she was given this assignment by SI’s director of photographer Marguerite Schropp Lucarelli. Powers told the Full Frame newsletter that she doesn’t typically shoot athletes, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with Biles.

Kate Powers/Sports Illustrated

“I think one of the things that’s most impressive about her is that confidence,” Powers says. “You get that from her from the minute she walks in the room. She doesn’t have a lot of handlers. She feels like she’s in control of her own image.”

Powers’s work with Biles made her part of a small group of woman photographers to shoot an SI cover, which also includes Taylor Ballantyne.

Ben Pickman spoke with Ballantyne for a previous edition of the Full Frame newsletter, focusing on a shoot she did during the 2018 WNBA draft.

Taylor Ballantyne/Sports Illustrated

The goal of the shoot, she says, was to focus on creating “dynamic portraits.”

“These women are so strong and powerful,” Ballantyne says. “There’s such beauty in that power, and it’s like what can we do to bring out their personalities.”

For more photos from Sports Illustrated, visit the SI Vault, SI.com/photos and the @sifullframe Instagram page.