Hope Solo, Former U.S. Soccer Star, Charged With Impaired Driving

Hope Solo, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and former star goalkeeper for the US soccer group, was arrested on Thursday in North Carolina and charged with impaired driving, resisting arrest and misdemeanor youngster abuse, the police mentioned.

Ms. Solo, 40, had her two youngsters within the automobile when she was arrested within the parking zone of a enterprise in Winston-Salem, the police mentioned. She was later launched from the Forsyth County Regulation Enforcement Detention Middle, the police mentioned, including that no additional info was accessible.

A passer-by had observed Ms. Solo handed out behind the steering wheel for greater than an hour with the automobile’s engine operating and her 2-year-old twins within the again seat, The Related Press reported, citing arrest studies.

“On the recommendation of counsel, Hope can’t talk about this example, however she needs everybody to know that her youngsters are her life, that she was launched instantly and is now at dwelling along with her household, that the story is extra sympathetic than the preliminary costs counsel, and that she appears ahead to her alternative to defend these costs,” Wealthy Nichols, Ms. Solo’s lawyer, mentioned in an announcement that was additionally shared by Ms. Solo on Twitter.

Ms. Solo is without doubt one of the most adorned gamers in U.S. Soccer historical past and was extensively thought-about top-of-the-line goalkeepers on the earth earlier than her contract was terminated in 2016 for what U.S. Soccer referred to as “conduct that’s counter to the group’s ideas.”

The termination — and a six-month suspension from the ladies’s nationwide group — got here after Ms. Solo derided the Swedish girls’s group that beat the US within the quarterfinals of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro as a “bunch of cowards” for his or her defensive fashion of play.

For greater than a decade, Ms. Solo had been a dominant power between the objective posts. She received gold medals on the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2012 Olympics in London, and he or she anchored the U.S. group throughout its 2015 FIFA Girls’s World Cup championship run. She received two Golden Glove awards as finest goalkeeper on the World Cup, in 2011 and 2015.

However her enjoying years have been shadowed by controversies that examined the persistence of U.S. Soccer. She clashed with coaches, criticized teammates and fought with former nationwide group stars on social media.

In 2014, she was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault in what the police in Kirkland, Wash., described as an alcohol-fueled confrontation along with her half sister and nephew. U.S. Soccer was criticized for not suspending Ms. Solo on the time. The case was dismissed in 2018.

In 2015, Ms. Solo was along with her husband, the previous N.F.L. participant Jerramy Stevens, in a borrowed group van when he was arrested on drunken-driving costs.

After studying via information studies that Ms. Solo had been with Mr. Stevens and that she was arguing with the police when he was arrested, U.S. Soccer suspended Ms. Solo for 30 days. The coach, Jill Ellis, mentioned Ms. Solo had made “a poor resolution” that “resulted in a unfavorable affect on U.S. Soccer and her teammates.” Ms. Solo apologized on the time for “disappointing my teammates, coaches and the federation, who’ve all the time supported me.”

After her contract was terminated in 2016, Ms. Solo ran unsuccessfully for president of U.S. Soccer. Subsequent month, she is to be inducted into the Nationwide Soccer Corridor of Fame in Frisco, Texas.