Coming out as gay was a giant step for the seven-foot-tall American basketball player Jason Collins. But it was an even bigger step for sport. No active player in major-league American male team sports, or in top-division male soccer anywhere on earth, had previously done it. Other athletes may now follow Collins’s lead, but only if sporting authorities help.

Male sport is the last secular bastion of homophobia. It fears homosexuality, probably in part because many of its rituals look homosexual: shared showers, veneration of same-sex bodies, hugs after scoring and fans singing of their love for players. To admit the possibility of homosexuality would strip this world of its innocence. And so changing rooms traditionally echo with accounts of heterosexual sex and taunts of “faggot”. In this environment, wife beaters probably felt more accepted than gays.

Many athletic gay teenagers have ended up choosing other pursuits. Athletes must feel comfortable performing before crowds. They cannot if they are worried about homophobia. “You have to be 100 per cent in the moment ... I played many years of 90 per cent in the moment and 10 per cent listening to the crowd,” said Gareth Thomas, the Welsh rugby player who finally came out in 2009.